For those missing Maximus and the Brotherhood during Fallout’s season 2 premiere last week, “The Golden Rule” gives them what they wanted in spades, with a heavy focus on Maximus’s promotion to Knight and the looming tensions within the power-armored tech frat he calls home. Along the way, Fallout continues the moral struggle between Lucy and the Ghoul, and introduces two new (somewhat) factions to the increasingly busy Wasteland.
Let’s talk about the hostile mix brewing in this week’s episode.
The feature players this week are definitely the Brotherhood of Steel, as we catch up on Maximus’s new place in the hierarchy. The credit attributed to him for Moldaver’s death has seemingly elevated him to a place as Elder Quintus’s current favorite, and there is a level of respect and sucking up being afforded to him that was entirely absent last season.
Maximus seems not to care much about it at all. It’s clear that he is jaded to the mission of the Brotherhood, a problem made worse with his relationship with his friend Dane on shaky ground and the west coast Brotherhood eagerly tossing the Codex aside in search of more power.
His brief time with Lucy had a lasting effect on how Maximus saw the world, and you can tell that he is grappling with the question of whether the Brotherhood has always been what he sees now, or if it is transforming to something “worse” because of their acquisition of cold fusion.
I love the direction Fallout is going with the Brotherhood, as it is a direction Bethesda has been taking the franchise since they got their hands on the franchise with Fallout 3. That game saw a splinter faction of the Brotherhood in the Capital Wasteland, who decided to rebel against the direction Elder Lyons took their chapter of the group, as he had rebelled in his own right against the mission that sent him east to begin with. New Vegas showed us a version of the West Coast Brotherhood weakened considerably by war with the New California Republic, which carried over into the show in season 1.
At most I can understand being annoyed that the Brotherhood are basically portrayed as a dumb fraternity. Having them play with grenades and blow up cars and treat Area 51 as a giant playground (shout out to the Zetan chucked out of the icebox) is a considerable change from how Fallout has portrayed the group. A place like Area 51 would be filled with the kind of technology the Brotherhood was created to find and preserve.
It works here, in my opinion, because it shows how far off-mission the Brotherhood has become.
We can see in this episode how diplomatic relations even between different chapters of the west coast Brotherhood have become tense, with the meeting between Elders showing a bunch of petty leaders jealously hording what power they have, as well as the knight who challenged Maximus to a duel and is in turn killed after pulling a knife. These are bitter people who only see value in strength and will seek it wherever they can find it.
With cold fusion in their hands and giving them considerably more power, it makes perfect sense to have a resurgent west coast want to snatch back power lost to Arthur Maxson’s more powerful east coast faction, and the hostilities seem inevitable after the arrival of the east coast Paladin at the end of the episode.
One of the larger questions coming out of this episode is how the east coast found out about the meeting to begin with. Many are speculating that Dane told them, as they are clearly disillusioned by the direction of the group and looking to recruit Maximus to the same belief. I hope Dane makes it out of the coming fight.
I can’t imagine Maximus sticking around much longer, whether he joins Dane or just runs off on his own. He is clearly miserable and disillusioned by the Brotherhood. The flashback to the bombing of Shady Sands reaffirmed how Maximus was raised to leave the world better than how he found it, and saved by his parents by that line of thinking. The character we met last season obviously believed the Brotherhood served the mission of making the world better, but he doesn’t believe they do anymore. Not after meeting Lucy.
Meanwhile, Lucy’s decisions lead her unwittingly into the path of a new faction (to the show), after she chooses to help a Legion slave and accompanies her back to a camp of theirs.
Fallout’s season 2 premiere portrayed the relationship between Lucy and the Ghoul as firm, if still a battle of ideals, so it was interesting to see how easily their partnership dissolved when tested here. The two of them view the world very differently, and the brutality with which the Ghoul approached the two Legion slaves clearly chilled Lucy to the bone.
While I am eager to see Lucy’s worldview challenged by what she has gone through and will go through, she is the ultimate counterpoint to the worldview of the worse people around her. She is a good playthrough of a Fallout game, the protagonist unleashed upon the world who has a transformative effect on the world around them. It’s no surprise that she would choose to save the slave who would definitely die from the radscorpion attack instead of the ghoul who will suffer for a while but ultimately be okay.
What the Ghoul does now is the more interesting question. He brings up the titular golden rule when Lucy abandons him, suggesting that he will return Lucy’s decision to not save him, if not outright seek revenge on her. Well know he’s heading down a path back to the man Cooper Howard used to be, but it’s going to be a longer, harsher journey and one with many setbacks.
As a result, I’m curious whether he will actually help Lucy escape the clutches of the Legion. This will almost definitely be a turning point for Lucy, where she may falter slightly in her beliefs and see the world the same way the Ghoul does, albeit temporarily.
Speaking of, Fallout did not show much of the Legion this week, but almost certainly will in the next episode, and this will assuredly result in the best hints yet as to the canon outcome of Fallout: New Vegas. The Legion get decimated in pretty much any ending where the player doesn’t side with them, and I highly doubt “Legion wins” is the direction Bethesda is going. I’m sure they will thread the needle with as few canon-deciding details as possible, but between House and the Legion, avoiding any ending at all becomes near-impossible.
Finally, we also get another faction set loose upon the Wasteland in Norm and the Vault-Tec middle management dorks he unthawed at the end of the season 2 premiere. Norm continues to take advantage of his increased screen time and importance, bluffing and bribing the residents of Vault 31 into helping him escape with good old stock-issue corporate motivation.
(He also dumped Bud’s Brain into the trash, and hopefully ate the brain beforehand.)
I’m curious if Norm will eventually name himself as Hank’s son, and if the name Hank MacLean will mean anything to the Vault 31ers. I’m also curious where exactly Norm will fall on the spectrum between Hank and his sister, Lucy. Norm seems to be possess more verbal charisma than his sister, or at least has been able to pass his speech checks where Lucy does not. He now has a group following him and will surely turn them back on the other two Vaults. For all his meekness in season 1, Norm clearly has an inner strength that is emerging more and more with each episode and could result in him being willing to make decisions that Lucy will not.
I hope he’s closer to Lucy than Hank, merely because we are finally seeing the real Hank MacLean, a callous, awful man gleefully sacrificing rats and special VIP executives in the name of completing Robert House’s work.
Considering Hank’s many failures with the mind control chips in this episode, I can’t help but raise some questions about the bombing of Shady Sands. The chipped mom who delivered the bomb certainly died in the end, but he was also capable of carrying out his task in a way none of Hank’s other subjects were. Knowing one of those chips was used also makes me wonder how Hank could have been involved considering he has none those on hand and, judging by his repeated Mojave nuclear winter fanservice, the “courier” of the bomb came from the Mojave.
The implication here is Hank was in contact with House, or some version of House, while overseer for the Vault, and could not single-handedly carry out the nuking of Shady Sands. Fallout is hiding some cards up their sleeves here and I’m eagerly anticipating their reveals. Shady Sands has turned into a central moment to the entire show, one I expect Fallout will revisit from multiple angles.
It’s yet another tantalizing plot thread in a show that is off to a strong start to its second season.
Images Courtesy of Amazon Studios
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