Photo: Jojo Whilden/Prime Video
Man, isn’t it crazy what 200 years does to a motherfucker? Each glimpse we’ve been offered of Cooper Howard before the Great War shows him as a completely different entity to the (literal) ghoul he’ll become. I mean, he’s a virtuous family man who can’t even stomach the idea of playing a good-guy sheriff who kills a bandit onscreen. But such is the moral decay of the apocalypse: Filling in the blanks, you can only imagine the heinous shit he has witnessed, and partaken in, since the nuclear firestorm. Still. To get to this level of brutality and barbarism? That’s 200 years of real depravity right there.
The end of the episode might offer a clue or two about how he got here. For now, we reunite with Lucy, who is all alone — well, she has Wilzig’s head for company — in the wasteland. One of the best establishing shots of the show so far, early in the episode, is accompanied by another Ink Spots needle drop, “Maybe,” a tribute to Fallout 1, where it appeared in the game’s intro. Lucy gazes over the ruins of L.A., framed as a tiny speck against this vast landscape; she’s utterly insignificant.
After an evening’s fine-dining on a box of Yum Yum Deviled Eggs (+5 rads), Lucy inspects Wilzig’s head. She’s zapped by the chip concealed in his neck, which dissuades her from further inspection. Just in case something happens to him, though, she sticks a tracker from her Pip Boy inside his nose.
Meanwhile, Maximus has trashed his power armor following his powwow with the Ghoul in episode two and ventures into town to have a component repaired at a workshop. He’s a bottle cap short, so he has to make up the difference with a tooth. No freebies in Filly, baby!
When he returns to the suit — sorry, my guy, but why the fuck would you think it wise to leave a set of T-60 power armor just … standing around? — he finds it being prodded over by a group of rough ’n’ ready locals. His first attempt to take them on, valiant though it is, ends with him with a rocked jaw and a concussion to boot. His second go, this time armed with a wrench and a toilet seat, bears more fruit. They finally leave him alone when he, uh, manages to get his hand inside the glove of the suit and subsequently crush the ringleader’s head with it. (Can’t do that in the games.)
So Maximus gets this cool scene, which allows him to show off a hero’s grit, endurance, and determination. He’s also now pretending to be Knight Titus, and the Brotherhood — who think that Maximus is dead — have airdropped a new Squire in the form of Thaddeus, one of the guys who used to beat him up back on base. Once again, his dark streak reveals itself: For a second, it looks like Maximus is going to crush Thaddeus’ head, too, before he seemingly comes to his senses. Still, he torments Thaddeus in other ways. Thaddeus brings with him an update from the Elder Cleric: “Whoever gets the target will control the wasteland,” and they’re to “kill anyone who stands in their way.” Sounds very, very Brotherhood.
Much of the episode then centers around one space, where each of our three characters encounters an aquatic monstrosity of the post-nuclear age, a Gulper. In the games, they are mutated salamanders; this version looks to be a giant, radioactive axolotl. The creature design, a combination of practical and digital effects, is terrifically slimy and gross. After attacking Lucy and nabbing a fawn (RIP, Bambi), the Gulper swims off with Wilzig’s head.
Lucy isn’t left to face the Gulper alone for too long — though she’d wish that she was. The Ghoul soon catches up to her and strings her up as bait. Again, more brusque cruelty: He radiates this terrifying darkness, probably because he has ceased to care about humanity in the wake of the war. He concedes that torture is pointless, but he still enjoys dishing out pain. The duo are on completely different moral polarities — but you would see the good in people if the only people you’ve ever met were born in the safety of a subterranean democracy. Whether he’s playing up the good nature of Cooper Howard or the violent cynicism of the Ghoul, Goggins keeps on killing it.
Alas, in her scrap with the Gulper, Lucy manages to smash a bag full of vials that the Ghoul has been huffing. He throws a fit, leashes up Lucy, and they’re waylaid to find a new source.
Soon after they leave, Maximus and Thaddeus arrive, following the radiation signal of the Ghoul … which turns out to actually be the Gulper. Thaddeus is almost swallowed whole, but Maximus saves him from what would’ve no doubt been an uncomfortably slow death, ripping out the Gulper’s finger-lined throat and stomach tract in the process. Oh, and they get Wilzig’s head.
In the penultimate scene of the episode, we return to Lucy and the Ghoul, who torments her with a flask of water. They’ve come across the ruins of the movie studio where the Ghoul worked many lifetimes ago. They see a billboard with Vault-Tec mascot Vault Boy in his iconic thumb-up pose; the Ghoul, to Lucy’s shock, blows his head off. But it’s not the veiled threat vault-dweller Lucy might take it to be so much as an instinctive reaction to a trauma it provokes from his past.
Flashback to the movie studio hundreds of years ago, before the world burned. Cooper Howard emerges from his trailer not in cowboy garb but … in a vault suit. His wife, Barb (Frances Turner), wolf whistles. She’s somehow connected to Vault-Tec and has used her influence to get him to pose for Vault-Tec’s first big advert for the vaults.
“You all are doing God’s work here,” he says to the assembled Vault-Tec publicists and reps. “And, uh, on behalf of every decent American, I just want to say thank you.”
The only question left is the pose he’ll take on camera.
“What if I were to do, like, a thumbs-up?”
Maybe the Ghoul has plenty to feel guilty about.
• Three episodes in, I have reservations about the design of the wasteland. Maybe it’s a product of budget, but there’s a lot of “here’s a generic desert evoking The Road Warrior,” and the city is barely recognizable. Yes, it has been roundly nuked — but compare it to Fallout 3’s Washington, D.C., or Fallout 4’s Boston, which would’ve been hit just as hard. You know, in 2277, the Washington monument is still up. Here, landmarks are few and far between. But maybe the California climate is especially erosive.
• Also, it seems strange that we’re three episodes into a Fallout series set on the West Coast and we’ve not had a single reference to the New California Republic yet. An NCR flag was spotted in the trailer, so we know they’re in it somewhere. But when are they going to show up?
• We check in with Vault 33 during this episode, too, where they’re keeping the raiders prisoner and are to decide as a collective what to do with them. The majority want to rehabilitate them; such is the naïveté of the vault that execution is apparently off the cards. Instead, as one guy says: “I can teach the raiders Shakespeare. And when they’re up to it, Marlowe.” How have they survived this long?
• Another plot point borrowed from the games: Vault 33’s water chip is destroyed, which is in the inciting incident of Fallout 1, leading the player character to venture out into the wastes to find a new one and save his vault.
• It seems to be implied that the signature yellow-blue of the vault-suit design was inspired, in universe, by Cooper Howard’s cowboy threads.
• Johnny Pemberton is doing a lot to make an unlikeable character likable. Not least in the carefree way he delivers his lines as Thaddeus reminisces over growing up working as a “shitter” on a fly farm. “And they’d feed us, then they’d feed our shit to the flies. Mulch ’em up and sell ’em as protein. Anyway, that’s why I’m so fat.”
• Another great line read for Ghoulgins: “The wasteland has its own golden rule. Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time.” Someone doesn’t like doing side quests.
