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Okay, ad break over. We’ve started a whole new season of Fallout, and on the heels of that first season, this show continues to stack up. I didn’t get the chance to give a full review of the first two episodes on their own, so I’m covering the first three here. This is not a blow-by-blow recap. Hopefully you’re watching the show, and if you’re not, what are you thinking? Like, really?
The show is excellent. It deserves all the things. They shot this entire second season in California. The production got a special deal with the state to give them some money back, and they brought the whole show here, everything on location. And you can tell. It feels real, lived in, practical if you will.
The Chip Is the Through Line
The structure still works the way it did last season: back and forth between 2077 with Cooper Howard, played by Walton Goggins, and the present two hundred years later, where the Ghoul and Lucy are still hunting her dad Hank.
The first episode opens with a really strong moment, a flashback to Robert House. I love the actor who plays House. He does a wonderful job. House puts this mind control device on a guy as a test, and it blows the guy’s head up. That technology is the through line for these first three episodes. They’re threading the needle the same way they did last season, and I’m willing to go with them because they earned all my goodwill in the previous season.
The parallel storytelling keeps paying off. A lot of the same qualities Coop had in the past, he still has. His thinking has evolved and he treats things differently, but at his core he’s still making basic decisions off that same programming, and by programming I mean how he was raised.
Meanwhile, in the present, the Ghoul and Lucy track Hank to an abandoned Vault 24, where they find out Hank went there and pulled some information. While they’re there, a raider with one of those chips on his head starts repeating information over and over until his head explodes. They realize Hank did that. Hank put that thing there.
Back at Vault 31, Norm is starving himself out while the little Roomba brain with the needle keeps pitching him on a peaceful death. Then Norm eats all the ration stuff, realizes wait a minute, I’m bigger than him, and takes the thing over. And what does he do? He releases the executives. That’s a whole other thing that’s now in motion, and it’s interesting to say the least.
We also get a brief look at Vault 33, where Steph is now the overseer and can’t get access to the system. Something’s going on, she’s having issues, and I believe those issues are ultimately going to lead to her demise or something close to it. They don’t revisit that thread again in these episodes, but I think they’ve set it aside for a very specific reason.
And then Hank makes it to Vegas. He finds an old Vault-Tec corporate office, gets fully dressed up in a suit, and leaves a voice message for someone in the past, saying Vault 24 made progress on the brain computer interface, another vault handled miniaturization, and all it needs is integrating. He’s confident that if he just rolls up his sleeves, he can bring it all home. He’s still working. The guy is insane, and he’s still working. As his thread continues, he escalates to using Vault-Tec clients to do dirty, shady things to keep the project going. Because remember the goal for Reclamation Day: when the people on the surface are no longer a threat, or think like we do, then we can come back out and everyone can have society.
Hank’s Bomb and the Origin of Maximus
Episode 2 gives us the origin of Maximus, for real this time. We start in the New California Republic, and you get to see the world they had started to build. It looks amazing. They’re rebuilding, they’re trying hard. Then a guy rolls in with one of those chips in the back of his neck, and Maximus’s dad sees something’s wrong, jumps into the back of the pickup, pulls the tarp back, and it’s a hydrogen bomb. He tries to fix it, can’t, it locks, and a three minute countdown starts. He runs home, puts Maximus in the fridge, tells him he’s going to survive, and you see what happened firsthand.
And then they cut briefly to Hank, and his vault display reads detonation confirmed while he goes and reads a story to young Lucy. Literally, Hank is the reason Maximus’s family died and the New California Republic went up in flames.
Back in the present, Lucy hears someone calling for help and finds victims of a rad scorpion attack. The rad scorpions look pretty damn cool. If you’ve played the games, you know the rad roaches and the rest, and this is one of our first glimpses of the actual lore-based, game-based monsters. I’m excited for the other ones we’ve seen in the trailers.
Coop gets stung by the scorpion, and Lucy has exactly one stimpak left. He’s begging her for it, and she makes the call: the human woman will die without it, Coop will make it, and she’ll come back for him after the dropoff. Coop knows better. He knows exactly how that scenario goes. And sure enough, the woman Lucy rescued takes her straight back to her people and turns her over to a group of very Roman-esque raiders who serve someone they call the Kaiser. They mean Caesar, they just don’t know how to pronounce it. It’s so funny, because Lucy, who was a teacher living in a world with real history books, immediately goes, I think you mean Caesar, Kaiser is more German. And then, oh yeah, you guys are Romans. This is not good. They crucify her. Not with nails, they just hang her up there like, yeah, whatever, something will happen.
Meanwhile the Ghoul finds a little robot named Victor, who tells him the last of the NCR holdouts are nearby. There’s a handful of them, maybe two or three, waiting on reinforcements from Shady Sands. Yeah. The place that’s never coming back. They give Cooper the gold inhaler stuff he needs, and he tells them honestly: nobody’s coming. Nobody’s coming at all, and I’m sorry. And then he goes and turns them in to the Romans, because all he wants in exchange is Lucy.
On the walk in, we get the backstory of a lighter, back when he was Cooper in 2077, at a ceremony where one of his friends was getting an award, and that whole story tells you who he is as a person. When we come back to the present, he’s looking at that lighter, and Lucy asks him what he did. His answer: probably something good, but it definitely was something stupid. He blows their dynamite stash, kicking up a smoke cloud, because the Romans have been split into two feuding factions ever since their original leader died. So he turned in the NCR, then destroyed the deal he made, hoping to leave the whole camp in disarray. He gambled.
Maximus Starts a War
Episode 3 follows Maximus as the Brotherhood meets. They’ve got a relic that can generate more of the energy they need, and they’re weighing whether to challenge the Commonwealth. Then a Commonwealth paladin shows up, apologizes for interrupting, and gets told, we understand, we’re discussing a civil war. And the paladin is basically like, look man, this ain’t going to go down the way y’all think it’s going to go down.
He takes Maximus out for a training exercise in the hopes of ingratiating himself. His pitch is simple: we’re soldiers, we should be running this, not all these clerics. Along the way they stop at a soda pop plant, and who’s running it? Thaddeus, from last season. Arrow through the neck, became a ghoul at the end, remember him? He’s running the plant with both human kids and ghoul kids. The paladin decides he’s going to eradicate the ghoul children and leave the human children alone. Maximus doesn’t want him to do it, and Maximus clocks him over the head with a rocket-powered hammer. Essentially starting a war.
That’s where we’re headed next week.
The Verdict
Why did I lay it all out like that? Because it’s hard to review something that’s good. I want to just come in and go, this is good. There are no plot leaks, no loopholes, the story is making sense, they’re deeply engaged in the story they’re telling, and I’m here for it. This show is excellent. Because of this show, I went and got a PlayStation and got into the games. The story is compelling, there’s a lot of nuance to it, and the interweaving of past and present makes for a very exciting story overall.
So what’s the Know-It-All Index for these first three episodes? They’re running at a solid nine. All three, straight through. And that’s a hard number to give, because I’m holding them up against last season, and last season was excellent too. We’ll see where it all leads.
If you want to get caught up, my full playlist of last season’s reviews is linked from the video, and I’ll be talking more about this one on the live stream. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments on the video.
I cannot wait to talk more about this show. Never forget, everyone loves to know it all.
