The second episode of Fallout opens with a prologue soundtracked, appropriately, by an Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald banger first heard on the radio in Fallout 3: “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall.†It’s a joyous little ditty that accompanies a sweet little montage of Michael Emerson’s Wilzig, the Enclave scientist everyone is so interested in, raising a Lab dog he’d rescued from being incinerated as a (barely) underdeveloped pup. We also see him painfully inject himself with a glowing blue chip, which we can only presume to be the thing that is actually drawing so much attention. Another scientist catches him, but thankfully, Wilzig’s dog — given the designation CX404 — is on hand to rip his throat out. Good boy! And so, off they run, dodging a hail of bullets from a sentry’s Gatling gun en route.
A central question of postapocalyptic media — be it Fallout, The Last of Us, the Mad Max series, The Road, The Book of Eli, whatever you like — will always center on how we deal with the threat of other human beings after civilization has rotted away. With resources stretched so thin and the lion’s share of those left around relying on their basal survival instincts to get by, everyone becomes a potential risk. As postapocalyptic fiction traditionally posits, you’re never not under threat. Which is what makes Lucy, high on the naïve, all-American optimism with which she has been conditioned growing up in the vault, such a prime candidate for death on the surface. She’s used to rules, to something approximating law and democracy. She is not used to hulking radroaches that prey upon human-size meals.
Hence, she should be glad that after she’s stupid enough to announce herself to the wasteland by starting a fire in the middle of the night, the first person to find her is friendly Wilzig. Our take on him at this point: Well, on the one hand, he’s giving Operation Paperclip, and we’re waiting for his arm to spasmodically launch into the air with a “Heil Hitler!†like Dr. Strangelove. On the other hand, he clearly loves dogs. And what threatening bad guy ever loved dogs? (Don’t answer that.)
On the other-other hand, he describes radroaches in such a reverent way that it screams “mad scientist who didn’t get out enough as a child.†All in all, eh. Seems nice enough. “Vault dwellers are an endangered species here,†he warns Lucy. No kidding.
But it’s that ridiculously buoyant spirit, completely at odds with the lived experience of surface dwellers who have grown up outside of the security of a gear-shaped blast door, that ultimately drives her. She lives for the mission statement of the vault project: After all, as we learned in the first episode, her kids will be the generation to recolonize the planet. Sure, such zealotry is about as cultish as anything espoused by a Brotherhood of Steel cleric, but her selfless desire to save the world makes you really want to root for her. If it weren’t already clear, Ella Purnell is great in the part. Optimism beams from her eyes.
Elsewhere in the wasteland, Knight Titus and Squire Maximus are on a Vertibird en route to the shantytown of Filly. Poor, withering Maximus, who can’t catch a break, tries to start up a conversation with his new lord. Titus just chucks his codpiece at him and tells him to clean it. (I like that they’ve gone with the jockish egotism of the Brotherhood in Fallout 4. I also want Titus to die.) They arrive at a clearing in a forest some miles from Filly, where Maximus finds some stuff left behind by Wilzig and CX404.
But before they can pop the Champagne over their newfound clue, a monkey in the wrench: A Yao Guai, which is essentially a mutated bear, appears from an adjacent cave and takes to beating the living shit out of Titus. (Titus haters, we’re eating good!) This is the sort of scene that Fallout fans have surely been waiting for. God, not only is it a live-action Brotherhood Knight in live-action power armor, it’s a live-action Yao Guai, and they’re having a live-action punch-up! And — get ready to cheer — Titus kicks the bucket after Maximus withholds a life-providing stimpak from him, determining that Titus is not worthy of the armor he wears.
At least, that’s what he tells Titus and himself. There’s an ambitious dark streak running through Maximus. I’ve clearly no love lost for Titus, glad he’s dead, etc., but should it really be down to Maximus to essentially make that choice? We get a glimmer of his darker interiority when Titus tells him that he’ll be executed for playing a role in the death of a Knight. “Not if I bring back the target.†Ice cold, baby. Maybe we have a dark horse on our hands.
After a very funny exchange with a friendly wastelander (he asks her to stay with him in his dilapidated house; “This could all be yours,†he tells her, gesturing to the shack), Lucy ends up in Filly. Not to be confused with Philly — she is very much still in or around postapocalyptic Los Angeles. This little rough and ready shantytown takes design cues from a handful of the major settlements in the 3-D Fallout games, most notably Fallout 3’s Megaton, though there’s a touch of Fallout 4’s Diamond City, too. (It also made me think of the town Tina Turner lords over in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.) In reality, Filly gets its name from the mounds of scrap and dirt we see piled around the place. The town is built out of an old landfill site in the middle of a forest. This is the closest thing the wasteland has, we can probably assume, to an economic hub.
Lucy’s first port of call is Ma June’s Sundries, owned by one Ma June (a wonderfully caustic Dale Dickey, who cackles through her lines like a wasteland witch). The set is replete with familiar props from the Fallout games: There’s an assortment of Pip-Boy models hanging from the window, a mini-nuke for sale, and even a laser rifle on display at the back. Lucy asks about the raider gang from the vault; Ma June just finds it hilarious that there’s a “sardine-fucking dipshit†vault dweller in her presence. That’s until Lucy says the name “Moldaver,†and Ma goes deathly serious. As if it weren’t already clear, Moldaver isn’t to be fucked with. “Everyone knows who Moldaver is,†she says.
It’s in this conversation that Lucy’s naïveté is on full display; she isn’t completely blind to the fact that surface dwellers like Ma June (and her grumbling partner in the back, Barv) have suffered chaos and indignity in spades, but she doesn’t do much to hide her subterranean privilege. She gets contempt back. And who can blame people who grew up in a radiated hellhole for snubbing someone who had it so much better and now comes crying about their poor, kidnapped daddy? One should imagine that the lion’s share of Filly’s denizens are orphans. As Ma says, “The vaults were nothin’ more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned.â€
“You know what folks up here say about the vaults? Fuck the vaults.â€
Then our characters converge for the episode’s prolonged, action-packed climax. Wilzig and Lucy reunite at Filly; it seems the guy knows more about her vault than he’d previously let on. Then … the Ghoul! He’s back! He’s here to collect the bounty on the head of Wilzig, which came through the night prior “through all six agencies,†and he’ll happily blast his way through the townsfolk to get to him. But not before shooting off poor Wilzig’s foot, which Ma soon replaces with a steampunk-looking prosthetic that gorily fixes to the stump.
The shoot-out is tremendous, with buckets of gore, and it stays true to Fallout’s gallows humor. (Why should the Ghoul waste his cherry tomatoes on a guy with a bullet hole in his neck?) Lucy intercedes with a valiant speech calling on the Ghoul to stand down (“fucking vault dwellers,†replies Ma). Unfortunately, the tranquilizer dart she uses on him is, quote, “a very small drop in a very, very large bucket of drugs.†(As expected, Walton Goggins is killing these line reads.) And then our third player enters the game: Maximus, swooping in Iron Man–style in his newly fitted T-60 power armor. While the two hammer it out, Ma convinces Lucy to take Wilzig to her client, who turns out to be … Moldaver. Lucy wanted to head that way anywho, right? And, as Ma argues, Lucy needs Wilzig-shaped leverage to get anywhere close to a conversation with Moldaver. It’s a pretty easy choice. Such will be our journey for the rest of the series.
Well, not for Wilzig. With many miles still to go, they stop at the ruins of a crashed Soviet satellite. He tells Lucy that he isn’t going to make it, and she cues up another inspirational speech about how they’ll endure the journey together. “No, you see, I’ve just taken a cyanide pill,†Wilzig says. “Vault-Tec Plan D. It was the most humane product that Vault-Tec ever made. It was quick, painless. It tasted like banana. I was surprised it wasn’t more popular.â€
But Wilzig still wants her to take him to Moldaver, even in death. If she does so, he says, she can change the future. But how can she carry his corpse across the wastes? That’s where the handheld chainsaw (in Fallout terms, a “ripperâ€) comes in, folks! Just before he dies, a pretty mega reveal: Wilzig knows Lucy’s full name. Good timing to pull that one out.
Cut to black, the gnarly sounds of Lucy decapitating a now-dead Wilzig, and we’ve got our MacGuffin: his disembodied head, which still contains that glowing blue chip from the beginning of the episode.
Fallout never changes.
Bottle Caps
• Lucy comes across a family of skeletons who had committed Vault-Tec-approved suicide earlier in the episode. Hope the baby-size skeleton liked the taste of banana.
• Like many other Fallout fans, I did not have a lot of love for Fallout 4’s awkward, bulky weapon design. That is best embodied by the game’s assault rifle, which was nothing less than a steampunk monstrosity. It’s the gun that Titus wields in the show, and it seems to be the standard-issue weapon of Brotherhood Knights. I don’t mind it so much in live-action: They’ve seemingly tweaked the design so it’s even bigger, more like a heavy machine gun, and it looks cool handled in power armor.
• On the subject of weapons from the games: The handgun wielded by Maximus looks to be the Model 6520 10-mm. pistol from Fallout 1, which is a nice callback. In a Q&A event I attended, co-showrunner Graham Wagner said that he had been playing Fallout since 1997, so I wonder if this was his influence.
• Unfortunately, I have not seen Lost, but I’m taking Michael Emerson’s all too brief, quirky, and charming cameo as a cue to catch up.
• Ghoulgins’ bullets look like mini-mini-nukes, hence why his shots literally blow people’s limbs off.
• The Ghoul stabs the dog. Boo! And then saves the dog. Woo! I’m starting to think he has a soft spot for canines.
• I really hope we spend more time with Ma June and Barv. Maybe a spinoff: Barv and Ma Go to Vista …