Photo: JOJO WHILDEN
Lucy’s ordeal with the Ghoul would be enough to test anyone’s resolve, but this episode was the first where he really sought to put her through the ringer. Her descent into the dark heart of the Super Duper Mart is a crucible that strips away what was left of her innocence. That’s not to say that she loses her optimism, or her desire to believe in the good of the world; if anything, she leaves only more determined that helping others, even to her own detriment, is the right thing to do. Take her experience with poor Martha, in one of the series’ most poignant scenes so far, when Lucy wills Martha — a ghoul going feral — to sanity right up until the moment she’s forced to put a bullet in her head.
And then there’s the role reversal with the Ghoul, who has tormented her for God knows how long, left at her mercy after she recovers the vials he needs to prevent himself from going feral. But, as the show makes clear, Lucy hasn’t lost sight of who she is. Earlier in the episode, he suggested that ghoulification was Lucy’s fate, too. She would change, just as he did — literally, and, by his implication, metaphorically. She, too, would fall to the savage demands of the wasteland. So, even if it isn’t an entirely logical decision to give the Ghoul the vials which will prolong his ghoulified life, it is the one that gives her deserved moral satisfaction. “I may end up looking like you, but I’ll never be like you,” she tells him. “Golden Rule, motherfucker.”
It’s especially impressive when you consider what more of the Ghoul she has seen throughout the episode — and what he has done to her.
As he drags her through the ruins of L.A., they come across the remains of a medical center, in which another ghoul is muttering to himself in terror: “My name is Roger. My name is Roger.” He snarls and coughs like a dying street dog. He’s slowly going feral — losing his mind to the effects of ghoulification — a process at least delayed by the vials that the Ghoul so desperately craves. This is why the Ghoul dragged Lucy away from their predicament with Wilzig’s head: He’s already coughing and sputtering himself, so seemingly hours away from his own zombification.
Anyway, the Ghoul knows “Rog,” and they catch up. “You’ve outlasted us all,” Roger tells the Ghoul. “How long since you first started wastelanding?” Maybe, then, not all ghouls are from before the war. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Roger starts thinking about his mom’s apple pie, and that thought is the last thing to enter his mind before the Ghoul’s bullet. He starts carving away at dead Roger’s rump like he’s a plump hog roast: “Sometimes a fella’s gotta eat a fella,” he tells a horrified Lucy as he sucks down a sliver of fellow-ghoul meat. Hundreds of years of suffering just to end up in the belly of a rotting cowboy.
Then, another Goggins line read for the ages. “Now, come on, Vaultie. Ass jerky don’t make itself.”
The more shit he puts her through, the more her good nature is tested. The next point comes at a trough full of radiated water, which the Ghoul uses to refill his flask (so when he refused to give her water before … it wasn’t even clean). She falls to her knees and desperately scoops it into her mouth, a humiliation — and danger — that the Ghoul revels in. He loves seeing this naïve little vault dweller debase herself. Such is the theme of the episode: He’s willing her to become him. Remember that once upon a time, this man himself had a daughter.
In his mind, he breaks through — at least somewhat — when she bites his finger off in a moment of pure, animalistic rage. “There you are, you little killer,” he says. You can almost see a proud smile on his face. And then he cuts her finger off: “Now, that right there is the closest thing we’ve had to an honest exchange so far.”
As we approach the series’ midpoint, I’d like to take this moment to celebrate one of Fallout’s greatest assets. From top to bottom, the casting department has done a terrific job, but not least across the central trio — and not least Goggins and Purnell. They’re electric to watch together. The enthusiasm they each have for their respective roles really shines through. Goggins is absolutely, unshakingly committed to the Ghoul’s grizzly bit; Purnell just exudes the undeterred force of will that makes Lucy who she is. Some of the season’s best scenes so far have been the ones they’ve shared. The finger exchange is right up there.
Down in Vault 33, the vault dwellers are preparing to elect a new overseer. The lead candidates, it seems, are bumbling optimists Woody (Zach Cherry) and Reg (Rodrigo Luzzi), who have a delightfully funny, cheery, awkward rapport. Woody has spent the morning trying to interrogate one of the raiders, who they still look down on with cloying, back-slapping condescension. (I think I’ll often come back to the words of Ma June: “Fucking vault dwellers.”)
Meanwhile, Norm is starting to smell a rat, and it’s not because the vault’s air-filtration system is broken. He saw the state of Vault 32 in the first episode, after all; the feeling that something has been off for longer than anyone has realized hasn’t left him. A raider in the vault’s jail puts him over the edge. “I don’t know what the people of Vault 32 were up to, but it was anything but innocent,” he growls at Norm.
He starts digging, but a search of the Vault records on Vault 32 pulls up a big, fat, flashing “ACCESS DENIED,” TV shorthand for “there’s a conspiracy afoot.” So, he and Chet go to Vault 32 to look into what happened themselves. The atmosphere conjured by the direction and production, undergirded by Ramin Djawadi’s killer score, is hair-raising. They’ve perfectly captured exactly how it feels when you’re descending into the bowels of one of the failed vaults in Fallout 3, New Vegas, or 4, with whatever hideous experiments await. (The score evokes composer Mark Morgan’s haunting work on Fallout 1 and 2, like the ghosts of the dead dwellers are wailing at us from the walls.)
The scenes they find are grizzly, to say the least. Never mind the raiders: The dwellers seemingly went insane and murdered each other years before anyone arrived from the surface. Other dwellers killed themselves by jabbing forks into toasters or hanging themselves. (There’s a wisp of humor to some of these images, namely the toaster corpse, but this is certainly the darkest episode of the lot.) Next to a rotting corpse, a message is left in blood: “We know the truth.” Man, what the fuck happened here?
A very strange couple of clues are to be found in the long-dead overseer’s office. First, another message in blood reads “Death to management.” Second, and more importantly, according to the overseer’s terminal, the raiders got into the vault using Rose MacLean’s Pip-Boy. That’s Lucy and Norm’s mom. What seems to be emerging is that ol’ Fallout 3 trick: Maybe Lucy and Norm weren’t born in Vault 33 at all.
The Ghoul, having snowballed as many vials as he can in one sitting, comes into the Super Duper Mart and devours all of the chems left behind by the guys who used to own it (whose corpses still lay under the bodies of feral ghouls). Even for all of the Ghoul’s sheer evil, he brings incredibly enjoyable chaos; he’s like your drunk uncle at Christmas if your drunk uncle was ever liable to blow your fucking head off and eat your ass jerky.
But there’s a reason he so regularly dopes himself up with enough powders and liquids to render Seabiscuit comatose. He’s in pain. He was once, after all, Cooper Howard. A glimmer of which comes through when he finds a tape of The Man From Deadhorse, the B-movie western we saw him shoot in the cold open to episode three. As the Ghoul watches, he raises his pistol finger to the screen, like muscle memory still takes over. He looks … sad.
Onscreen, Cooper Howard puts a bullet in the bandit’s head: “I hope you like the taste of lead, you commie son of a bitch,” he says, as the western score rings out triumphantly. It seems he gave into the director’s demand for violence. It’s a new America, after all.
• I didn’t even mention … Matt Berry! Of course, he’s the voice of Mr. Handy in the TV show. This model, Chop-Chop, is the perfect embodiment of Fallout’s dark humor. I keep on saying things to this effect, I’m sure, but it’s because they keep nailing it. Long may that continue.
• “MacLean? Huh.” Why is Lucy’s surname of interest to the Ghoul? Does he know who her dad is?
• The Super Duper Mart is another set with tremendous attention to detail. Notice the Halloween decorations that have been up for 219 years.
• Abraxo cleaner can also be weaponized in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, where it’s a component of the ultraexplosive Nuka grenade.
• Stephanie sure misses Bert!
