It’s Fallout Episode Five and we’re greeted with Dr. Wilzig’s rotting, disembodied head. Thaddeus and Maximus are gathered around a barrel fire, Max still in his power suit of course. They’re celebrating their successful retrieval and Thaddeus wants “Titus” to brand him, to make his squire-ship official. Everything is going just great, and Max is feeling comfortable for once, queue the drama!
After making the foolish decision to trust Thaddeus with who he really is Max does a god-awful job of explaining what happened to Titus. This of course leads to Thad thinking he offed him for the suit and they fight. Having power armor gives Max a huge advantage and he crushes Thad’s foot, but the plucky squire has an ace up his sleeve when he uses his knowledge of power suit maintenance and removes the fusion core from the rear hatch. Thaddeus limps away leaving Max to suffer, stuck potentially forever, locked in to his stolen power armor.
After the title screen we cut back to Max as a gaggle of Radroaches approach his locked-up armor and start doing their best to burrow in and get at his tasty meat. Before they can chew on his eyeballs though a shot rings out and Lucy has stumbled upon Max. After a bit of a tense back and forth she frees him out of the armor in exchange for a Rad-Away to help cure her radiation sickness. As they geek out over the power armor together we cut back to Vault 32 where Norm and Chet are beating cheeks back to home. They make it back and are immediately sniffed out by Betty, who can tell they are up to something.
We get a short scene of Lucy and Max (whom she thinks is called Titus) discussing life in the vaults and their mutually aligned goal of finding the Doc’s head. Max hides his frozen armor under a bunch of junk and they take off together using the tracker up Dr. Wilzig’s nose to try and catch Thaddeus. We’re back in Vault 33 again (a bit of whiplash honestly) and it’s election day! We get a funny back-and-forth between one of the candidates, Reg, and a vault dweller who just can’t help himself. He has to let him know he’s voting for Betty, and Reg ends up doing the same.
We whiplash right back to Lucy and Max as they walk along some train tracks. Lucy asks Max for some basic info about the last 200 years above ground. She wants to know what happened “after the bombs fell” and Max tells her they dropped back when he was a kid. There has been a recurring flashback showing a young Max being saved by the Brotherhood after he Indiana Jones’ed it inside a refrigerator during a huge explosion. Lucy has memories of being “out in the Sun” with her Mom but thinks her deep love for her Mom made it “all feel so real”, hmm.
We cut back to Norm as he’s doing more snooping into the history of inter-vault personnel trades. We get a quick history of all of Vault 33’s overseers, who just happen to have come from Vault 31 nearly every single time. We then see that Betty has won the role of Vault Overseer and you got it, she was a transfer from 31 as well. It’s her second time as overseer and seemingly every single transfer from 31 has ended up as an Overseer of 33.
Back on the train tracks with Lucy and Max, we get a stand-off. A couple in heavy clothes is facing them down. Everyone pretends to not be armed but tensions are high. Max wants to shoot first but Lucy refuses to give him her pistol. She gets everyone put their hands up and slowly walk across while facing each other, which has about a .01% chance of working but damn it she wants to be a good person!
As they get close we see the couple are really strung out looking and they pull their guns first. Max snatches Lucy’s gun and dispatches them both but not before he’s shot through the left shoulder. Turns out the couple were fiends, aka cannibals. After finding out what fiends are Lucy finally admits how much she hates it “up here”. Max then does what any good Fallout player would do, and loots the Fiend’s corpse.
Back in 33 Woody is feeling glum over his loss, he put up nearly 10 posters after all. Poor guy. Norm is trying to get Chet to be more interested in what they found out in Vault 32, but he’s team coward and wants to ignore it and move on with his life. He’s still with Steph and she just happens to be from Vault 31 as well. Norm asks her how Vault 31 is different from 33, she says “Maybe the mashed potatoes were a little better” and she gives a bit of an insane-looking smile before Norm heads off to get back to his job of feeding prisoners.
Lucy and Max stop by Shady Pines, where the sign says 34,852 people lived after it was established in 2142. Lucy can’t handle the fact that civilization has restarted without them. In her mind, her vault’s entire purpose was to save the world, and the realization that life had gone on without them hits her like a truck. They then head to the site of a massive explosion, potentially nuclear in scale. Max then tells her that this is the bombing he was saved from, and again we see the scene of him as a child saved inside a refrigerator from the blast.
Max is bleeding profusely from the gunshot wound he tried to ignore so they head to a local Vault-Tec lab to try and find him a first aid kit. Lucy goes in first and then Max follows, before he can find her he enters a room labeled “Medical Supplies that locks him in, decontaminates everything, and then sends him falling down a chute, oh no!
Back in Vault 33 Betty says the board has made the decision to use 33’s residents to repopulate Vault 32. We revisit 32 which is now wiped clean of all the death and destruction that Norm and Chet had found previously. It’s pristine, outside of a few destroyed computer terminals. Things get ominous when Norm asks Betty while inside the 32 Overseer’s office about his Mother’s Pip-Boy. Betty, quite ominously, tells him it was buried with her and that she is sure because Betty and his Father are the ones who buried her with it.
The episode ends as Lucy and Max awaken, safe and sound. Lucy looks thrilled and assures Max that they’re going to be OK because they’re in the safest place in the world. They are in fact inside a Vault. The final scene is them looking through a window at a pristine Vault, full of life as the music swells.
Wrapping Things Up
Fallout Episode Five is another excellent one, it relies less on propelling the narrative forward and instead on growing our characters. Max is a coward but wants to be better. Lucy is kind but has started to realize what the world truly is. Norm trusts nothing, and his intuitions are feeling correct. I’m intrigued by where things are going, and we get a new Vault to play in next time!
Fallout Season One Reviews
- Full Season
- Episode One
- Episode Two
- Episode Three
- Episode Four
- Episode Five
- Episode Six
- Episode Seven
- Episode Eight
Fallout Episode Five Review
PROS
- Character Growth
- A New Vault!
- Intrigue about Vault 31
CONS
- Tons of cutting back and forth again
