From the very start, Fallout has established Cooper Howard as a central piece of not just the show, but the lore of Fallout itself as his scenes bounce back and forth between his days as a pre-War actor and activist and his current life as a bitter, old ghoul. “The Wrangler” offers some of the biggest and most important moments yet, and also delivers one of the very best episodes of Fallout yet, as Cooper navigates pre and post-War Vegas. He’s quickly becoming this franchise’s version of Forrest Gump and I mean that in solely as a compliment.
It’s a terrific hour of TV and Fallout at its very best.
Other than a bit more of Norm’s travels with the unfrozen residents of Vault 31 and Lucy’s own parts of her travels with the Ghoul, this episode is heavily Cooper-centric, offering Fallout a bit of singular focus that we don’t typically see from the show. I think it works excellently, offering a version reminiscent of an episode of Lost that I think could serve as a blueprint for Fallout moving forward. It has so far avoided growing the cast much beyond its core trio and as such doesn’t need to worry as much about finding time within each episode for all the characters, but there’s such narrative potential in the way this episode tells its story, and I hope Fallout can find some way to replicate this formula moving forward.
Obviously this is easier with Cooper considering the nature of being a ghoul, but why not have these kinds of split timelines with the others? We could benefit from seeing flashbacks of Lucy and her father in the Vault as we see them in the present, especially with Lucy seemingly in Hank’s hands. There are also many possibilities in seeing the days of Maximus growing up and rising through the Brotherhood’s ranks in the past while he flees them in the future.
Whatever Fallout does, we do have this one, where Cooper arrives in Vegas on his mission to kill Robert House in the past, while the Ghoul drowns his sorrows in Freeside in the present.
Most of the really exciting scenes and revelations happen in the pre-war Vegas scenes, which are packed with various characters operating with numerous agendas. Moldaver is there to make sure Cooper kills House. Cooper decides to instead try and take the cold fusion tech being delivered to House. House wants cold fusion to power his attempts to become digitally immortal. Hank has the cold fusion tech handcuffed to hiss wrist like the nuclear football, and we don’t know if he’s working for Vault-Tec or a double agent for someone else. Barbara Howard is there to seemingly make sure the sale to House goes through.
How this will all shake out remains unclear, but leads to one of the best single scenes in Fallout so far when House’s (confirmed) body double leads Cooper to meet the real version atop the Lucky 38.
Justin Theroux has been excellent in limited time as House so far, but here he gets to really shine as this show erases any doubt about how they would portray the character. This is classic New Vegas Robert House, sure of his own superiority and intelligence and outraged that anyone would doubt it. He is a massive geek with goofy headgear and a mathematical model to predict the exact date the world ends. He thinks he knows and controls everything but is terrified that deep down, he knows he doesn’t.
The most interesting points to take from this scene are that the birth of Cooper’s daughter had some effect on House’s formula to predict the end of the world, and even more so that he also seems some shadowy influence at play that he cannot identify, and who he believes will be responsible for unleashing the bombs, rather than the “reveal” from the first season that Vault-Tec would do it themselves.
Most believe this to be the Enclave, but regardless I love this part because ultimately, it doesn’t matter who shot first, so to speak, and that has never really been the point of Fallout. Anyone could have started the end of the world, and everyone prepared in their own way for it. Vault-Tec, House, the Enclave, China, all of them could have fired first and all of them could have just reacted afterwards.
What’s important is how this turns Cooper against Barbara, and how House prepares to defend the city he loves from destruction.
The exchange is a high point for both characters, as Cooper walks away seeing House as a crackpot and whatever plans he had fly out the window, as he decides to spend the rest of the night getting plastered before passing out. He drunkenly rides atop a bucking nuclear bomb ride, trying not to fall, as the world does the same. The last pre-war scene suggests Cooper is about to confess everything to Barbara, which may initiate the end of their marriage.
These scenes, of course, are directly paralleled in the Ghoul drinking away in Freeside before being contacted by a brainwashed and cleaned up snake oil salesman that Hank abducted and attached a mind control chip to. The Ghoul is literally sent out a window via a Power Fist punch from Lucy, and impaled on a pole in the process. This episode may have seen him break something with both his wife and Lucy, and all because he’s trying to do what he thinks is right.
Speaking of the snake oil salesman, or chicken…lover to put it politely, his immediate willingness to serve as Hank’s latest test subject was an interesting glimpse into the mind of a wasteland resident. It can be easy to look at the humor in Fallout and lose sight of just how miserable the daily existence of the average person is. This guy generally comes across happy, or at least accepting. He whistles down the road and has his fun (FISTO!!!) but the second he’s offered a chance to forget it all, he doesn’t hesitate. Maybe he would regret it afterwards if given a chance, but when offered an escape from being attacked by mutant creatures for just walking down the street, he did what he thought was right.
Lucy herself spends this episode trying to do what she thinks is right, but instead falls further into familiar Fallout vices. Most prominently, she goes to buy Addictol to kick her Buffout addiction and ends up murdering a separate robber who was there first. She also steals the aforementioned Power Fist, as any self-respecting Fallout fan would.
It’s clear that Lucy is just as lost as the Ghoul, especially when he betrays her right to her face and agrees to return her to Vault 33 in exchange for the lives of his family. Everything that has happened since she found out about her father nuking Shady Sands has mounted on her shoulders, despite her best efforts to grin and bear it.
I worry for her now that she is in her father’s hands again. The man has a lab full of mind control chips and apparently not much in the way of moral or ethical guardrails to stop him from doing whatever he wants. Between her run-in with the Legion, drugs, murder, and now the Ghoul betraying her, Lucy’s going to be in her darkest mood yet, and I worry about what she will decide to do.
It’s heartbreaking since the Ghoul clearly hates betraying Lucy, and probably betrayed her for a lie as I have serious doubts that his family are in Hank’s cryogenic pods. Fallout not actually showing them is a major red flag that they are there. Whether Hank realizes this or not I am unsure, but call me skeptical.
Meanwhile, Norm is facing betrayal of his own, albeit a far more predictable and less heartbreaking one. Perhaps I’m just being cynical, but I suspect that Claudia has acted so vulnerably in order to get the truth out of Norm and was likely helping Bud Askins’s shady FEV assistant. These middle manager dorks are exactly the type to do that, hoping to earn points with the bosses they can’t even be sure still exist, and see promotions and bonuses and all sorts of corporate bull in their future.
We also got confirmation that Future Enterprise Ventures was code for the Forced Evolutionary Virus, which must be involved in the experiment with the trio Vaults.
Both MacLean siblings are in dire straits right now. I expect the next episode to be MacLean focused as a result, unless they press pause for a week to return to Maximus’s story, but either way Fallout is preparing to serve a heaping portion of MacLean family drama and I am excited for it. They are truly on their own right now, with no obvious help in sight.
(Unless I’m completely wrong about Claudia and a contingent of the Vault 31ers will be on Norm’s side.)
Images Courtesy of Amazon Studios
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