With its penultimate episode of season 2, Fallout has started bringing its main characters together on the New Vegas Strip, and with them came an episode that blew things up for some characters and weaved others together in previously unknown ways. It’s an episode packed with huge reveals for fans of the games and, per usual, more and more questions about what exactly these reveals mean.
Oh, and along the way you get a pretty strong episode of Fallout.
I’m at a point where this show is going so deep with its cuts that I wonder how much of this really hits with someone who isn’t already a Fallout fan. Cooper handing cold fusion over to the President of the United States is a gigantic reveal, but what if you have no idea who the Enclave really is or this man’s role with them? Does the sight of Freeside cheering on the “return” of the New California Republic mean that much if you don’t have that long history of seeing them in the games?
Does Steph’s whole story here mean anything if you don’t know what exactly went down with the United States and Canada before the bombs dropped? Is the reaction to Chet revealing her as Canadian nearly as funny?
Don’t get me wrong, I love that Fallout is making a show so satisfying to people who previously knew and loved the franchise. For all the worries about video game adaptations and whether they will respect and know the lore of said franchise, absolutely no one can claim this show does not respect its source material. Every episode is packed with moments large and small that show they know their stuff.
You also don’t need to be the type of fan who digs deep into the lore of the United States annexing Canada in order to understand the brutality Steph experienced. Seeing power-armored troopers indiscriminately gunning people down until a suicide bomber took one out paints a clear picture of what she went through even before losing her mother.
Still, for someone like myself, this episode catapulted Steph up my list of favorite characters and I’m actually somewhat rooting for her now. It’s a mark of a good TV show when a single episode can so effectively change the conversation around a character like Fallout did for Stephanie Harper. She went from a cartoonishly evil figure to a haunted survivor of American imperialism, got a fascinating tease of her journey with the scene with Cooper in Vegas, and now I really want to know more about her.
(Also, throw her future eyepatch on her and Steph’s hotel worker getup is straight out of the Kill Bill movies.)
Perhaps a better example of a scene that hits hard for Fallout gamers and perhaps not as much for the average viewer is the scene of Maximus marching through Freeside in his new power armor while its downtrodden residents cheer the “return” of the New California Republic.
Fallout has certainly tried to make clear that the NCR is a big deal, and that its loss is something of a tragedy for the wasteland. We’ve seen glimpses of the stable society in Shady Sands, and multiple protagonists with ties to them. I think this show wants us to view the NCR as something at least close to good guys and I love that Lucy pokes fun at the fandom debates over the NCR and the Legion by pointing out that one side are murderers and slavers and torturers while the other side is “vaguely problematic.”
All this being said, there is only so much Fallout can do to communicate how important the NCR is to the franchise, and how much many fans like myself feel some feelings over the reaction of Freeside to them. The NCR has been kicked over and over throughout this show and there has so much unfriendly debate about how they have been treated that it’s great to see a sign them get a win, even if it’s a relatively small one.
Of course, you don’t need to know or care in the slightest about the NCR to geek out over the culmination of the hero walk through Freeside being a knock down, drag out brawl between a power-armored Maximus and multiple Deathclaws.
It’s a fight that doesn’t go completely according to plan, unfortunately. Thaddeus loses an arm ahead of time and can’t help, as his transformation is in full swing. Even worse, Maximus is tail-whipped through the gates of Freeside, breaking them and leaving the populace fully exposed to the Deathclaws. He will now have to spend at least part of the final episode trying to protect people from them, which is a fitting way for Maximus to end his journey through this second season.
Meanwhile, the Ghoul manages to reach the Lucky 38, and as we all likely expected after last week’s episode, uses cold fusion to bring some version of Mr. House online. At the same time, Lucy finally gets the upper hand on her father and makes her way to the mainframe powering the mind control chips.
This whole sequence of the Ghoul wandering the Lucky 38, Lucy escaping her father, and Cooper handing cold fusion over to the President of the United States, was one of my favorite in all of Fallout so far. It’s a thematically rich bit of storytelling as we see the Ghoul undoing the mistake he made so many years prior, in another life, while Lucy tries to avoid making a similar mistake.
It speaks to both Hank MacLean’s charisma and horrific talent for manipulation that I spent the majority of this episode wondering if Lucy was falling for the nonsense he was selling. Lucy has been through multiple harrowing experiences since leaving Vault 33 to find her father, experiences her brother also faces in his own way, and other people would see his solution to the violence and suffering on the surface as a tempting one, even if temporarily.
As for how exactly the brain control devices work, well, Fallout gave fans something to chew on in the form of Diane Walsh’s rotten head. My first reaction was that she must be serving as the personality template for those implanted with the devices, since their placid, meek personalities match what we’ve seen from her.
Of course, we also have to question how placid and meek she really is after the meeting she set up between Cooper and the president. She may be an Enclave agent working towards this outcome from the start.
This is yet another moment that works much better for fans of the game, as show-only Fallout fans will have no idea about the president and the larger role of the Enclave pre and post-War. I fully expect the show to dive into all that moving forward, but it’s interesting to think how Cooper handing over cold fusion might seem like a good, but suspicious move to some, while it’s obviously the worst thing he could have done for others.
I’m sure the people writing this show are well aware and planning very much around fans who haven’t played the games, but I still wonder what they expect the reaction to be to moments like this one.
And now the Ghoul has returned cold fusion where it was always meant to be, and we have some form of Robert House back. I can’t say this was a “good” move, either, as Robert House is a selfish megalomaniac drunk on a dream of reviving and controlling a version of Las Vegas that he loves. It sure didn’t stop me from cheering when his face popped up on screen, though. Reintroducing House to modern New Vegas is a great move and I hope this isn’t some recording to come and go once its message is delivered.
We will find out soon enough, as Fallout’s season 2 finale is upon us. My expectations are high, and I maintain that if they stick the landing here, this season can be even better than the first. There’s a lot this season still needs to resolve, and clearly other stuff that will be pushed to the third season, so I expect the finale will be a very busy one.
Here’s hoping Fallout delivers yet again.
Images Courtesy of Amazon Studios
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