Going into the finale of Fallout’s second season, I knew that it was impossible for this last episode to resolve every plot thread set up throughout this season. Where the first season operated with the hopes of being successful enough to justify a future, season two had the full confidence of a show that will be able to see its vision out, and so it spend this season laying groundwork for what’s to come.
Thankfully, we also got a banger finale full of great moments to hold us over until season three.
When you look at the totality of the plot heading into this last episode, you had to know most of the various threads would be pushed to next season. You had Lucy and her father, the mind control chips, Cooper looking for his family and his pre-war flashbacks, the cold fusion diode and House, the NCR and the Legion, the Brotherhood, the Enclave, the trio Vaults, Norm and the unfrozen super managers, on and on and on.
It would have been an impossible task to even try and handle all this in one episode, so I appreciate how Fallout decided to handle the finale. The show clearly didn’t feel pressure to resolve everything, so the finale handled only what needed to be handled, or at least set up for next season.
Most prominently featured, as has been the case throughout the second season, was Cooper/the Ghoul. This season has focused heavily on him (arguably to a fault) and the finale is not an exception. While he remains a curmudgeonly guy, this finale served as validation for the journey he has been on throughout the first two seasons, and the changes that traveling with Lucy and Maximus have triggered within him.
He spends the majority of this episode with Robert House in his ear like a manic conspiracy podcaster, warning him about the dangers of the Enclave, the cold fusion diode blowing up planets, and how hopeless the world is. When he finds empty cryo pods where his wife and daughter were meant to be, no one would blame the Ghoul for giving in to despair and assuming he will never find his family. Perhaps if he didn’t find the Colorado postcard, he would have.
It’s much better to have this moment inspire hope in a man who now has unshakable confidence that his family is alive, and that he knows where to find them.
While not down solely to them, I do think Lucy and Maximus have reminded Cooper of the man he used to be, the man beaten down by a betrayal we still don’t understand the full extent of. We now know that he and Barb were still on good terms when he was “outed” as a communist, and that their divorce was most likely a ploy to protect her. However, that means we have even more questions about how exactly he ended up a ghoul, how he and Janey survived when the bombs hit Los Angeles, and how she would have ended up back with her mother to find a vault.
(Though many now theorize that Cooper ghoulified himself on purpose so that he would have as much time as needed to find them.)
We will find out more in due time, but for now, Fallout has presented a man with renewed purpose and sense of self, who is on his way to Colorado with Dogmeat at his side.
What will he find when he gets there? The power and influence of the current Enclave remains nebulous, despite this finale making a significant effort to portray them as if they will be at their strongest. We now know Hank and Stephanie are both Enclave agents and that Hank worked to send mind control chips to as many people as he could on the surface. It’s a safe assumption that they maintain some sort of power base in Colorado and that is where the Ghoul will eventually find himself and his family.
You can imagine that Lucy will have this nagging suspicion about everyone she meets now, and as she spread the news to others, they will, too. We don’t yet know just how many of those chips are out there or how many secret Enclave agents can be activated.
The mind control plot has obvious similarities to the plot of Fallout 4, where everyone suspects everyone of being a synth. One of my favorite things about this show so far is how they have weaved elements of all the main games into its narrative. You have Fallout 3 in Lucy trying to find her dad, Fallout 4 in the Ghoul trying to find his family, Fallout 2 with the Enclave, the water chip issues from Fallout 1 in Vault 33, and obviously the New Vegas influence with the setting of season 2. Practically the only plot element missing is searching for a G.E.C.K. system.
This show has done a terrific job of pulling from the franchise in interesting ways, and I expect fans will be able to look to Fallout Tactics for hints towards season 3, or at least the Colorado portion.
Lucy’s initial search for her father, at least, has come to its conclusion with the finale of this season. With Diane Welch’s head being killed and the influence of her personality gone, she at least managed to break her father’s hold on the people within the corporate vault, and she now has an amnesiac father that she can seemingly manipulate however she wants, which is a heck of a plot setup for next season.
Lucy has been tested in pretty much every way since finding her way to the surface, and it will be interesting to see how those experiences influence her approach to Hank. However, while I like this concept, I wish we saw a bit more of Lucy in this finale, or at least more of a Lucy in control.
In general, I feel like Lucy took too much of a backseat throughout season 2. She was undoubtedly THE main character of Fallout’s first season, but ended up being the most passive of the three main characters in the finale. We don’t even see what she does to Diane Welch’s head, and then she is only rescued from Hank because she happened to be along the way as the Ghoul sought his family, then she lets her father one-up her one more time by activating his chip himself, robbing her of a satisfying choice regarding his fate.
This was a trend throughout Fallout’s second season. She spends so much time being caught by people. She’s caught by the Legion, she’s tranquilized by the Ghoul, she’s imprisoned by her father. At every step, we got less of an active hero version of Lucy and more of a passive arc.
I fully recognize that this was the point of her arc, as the Mojave and the larger wasteland teach her the realities of the people around her. The issue is that she also felt less important overall compared to the Ghoul and Maximus. Maximus also spend a lot of this season stumbling into danger, but he remains an active participant in the direction his character goes, whether he’s bashing in the head of Brotherhood Paladin to save some kids or stealing the cold fusion diode.
Maximus also gets exactly the kind of epic finale moment I wish Lucy did as he fights off multiple deathclaws with his badass NCR power armor, using missiles and wrist blades to wreck damage. Even when it fails, he gets the ultimate heroic moment of wielding a roulette table and a pool cue, hopelessly outmatched but willing to die if the NCR hadn’t shown up to save him.
(Speaking of the NCR, it’s about time! The ranger being introduced exactly the same as the opening of New Vegas was perfect.)
In general, the arcs for both Maximus and Lucy suffered a bit this season with how much importance and screen time was given to Cooper between his pre-war flashback and current-day ghoul adventures. I know the Ghoul is the most popular character and Fallout was mostly responding to audience demand, but I hope this isn’t a continuing trend in season 2. Lucy is a huge reason why I enjoy this show, and I want more of her, not less.
Thankfully, both Lucy and Max are positioned to play a pivotal role in what looks like the third major clash between the Legion and the NCR for control of New Vegas, with House seemingly still lurking in the background to interject himself where opportunity presents itself.
The same is true of Norm, who began to transition towards more of a main character role but also lacked the screentime to let his story line reach its potential. I liked all of his scenes this season, and despite it being somewhat anticlimactic I enjoyed how the radroaches slaughtered all the Vault 31 management dorks. It’s just a shame that so many interesting concepts and plot beats were introduced through his plotline, and none of it really went anywhere this season.
Vaults 32 and 33 had the same issue, despite Steph’s ascension up the ranks of interesting Fallout characters. I can dedicate thousands of words to analyzing the reveal that she and Hank were married, were both Enclave agents, and how that rewrites the dynamic between her and Lucy.
Unfortunately, I also feel much the same way as I do about Norm. Vault 32 and 33 have a plotline that would have benefited from more time and attention that Fallout simply cannot give it with only eight episodes. The show couldn’t even find time to give Lucy and Maximus full attention, let alone side characters and plots.
We had a whole super mutant resistance introduced with one scene and nothing else. The Legion were introduced early and vanished until the finale. The Brotherhood left after Maximus ran and didn’t come back until the post-credits scene of the finale, which is really easy to miss since it’s the only post-credits scene this season.
Fallout is a busy, busy show and I can easily see how they can plan for 5 seasons, which they are according to Maximus’s actor. The story would benefit from melding storylines back together, though, as we are hopefully getting with Maximus and Lucy in Vegas during the Legion and NCR war. Get Norm and Claudia back to Vault 32 and 33, and you have a neat three subplot focus between those two and Cooper in Colorado.
Spreading all this out made for a somewhat disjointed second season, as much as I loved it. Moving forward, I hope Fallout either releases more than eight episodes a season or condenses the plotlines together.
All that being said, season 2 crowned Fallout as my favorite video game adaptation to date. You can make the argument for Arcane, but I find it more impressive that Fallout is trying to coexist within the established lore and tone of the games, where Arcane largely did its own thing. Until further notice, this is the gold standard for video game adaptations and one of my favorite shows running.
Now comes the wait for season 3.
Images Courtesy of Amazon Studios
