We are back. Fallout season two starts with a reminder of all the season one shenanigans before launching us back into this bright, occasionally colorful, and always full of terrible people world. Episode One of this spoiler-filled review sees Lucy and the Ghoul tracking down her Dad, Justin Theroux as… not Robert House, but actually, he is? We take a trip back to Vaults 33, 32, and 31 as the fallout from season one has everyone spread apart and struggling. I loved it, let’s get into why.
Lucy and the Ghoul
The episode mainly focuses on Ella Purnell’s Lucy and Walton Goggins’ The Ghoul. Their trek from LA to New Vegas, as they track Lucy’s father, only comes after our introduction to the Robert Houses. Mr. House, as any New Vegas fan knows, runs the city with an iron fist, or at least has for a while.
In the show, we have Robert House, as seen in season one, played by Rafi Silver. There are riots at RobCo as workers are furious at losing jobs to automation. We then see Justin Theroux, who looks quite similar to Rafi’s Mr. House. After insulting some local workers at a bar, he offers one of them 31 million dollars to put a device in the back of his neck. The man refuses, planning to just take the money instead, when House rams the device in and uses it to mind control him into murdering his friends. The scene ends as the man’s brain explodes as fake House(?) ups the voltage and tries to fight back.
The scene gets us right back into the swing of things, in this world of false niceties and horrifically gory reality. The Ghoul and Lucy are running a con to trick some raiders into giving up. They aim to hang The Ghoul, who expects Lucy to shoot him free and help dispatch all who stand in their way. Instead, she dawdles, letting him swing for a bit as she tries for peaceful negotiations. This being Fallout and her speech stat not being high enough, it fails, she frees the Ghoul, and away an absolutely gorgeous, carnage-filled fight goes.
I’m happy that while Lucy is still naïve, she isn’t an idiot. She knows her upbringing was ‘bullshit’ and she doesn’t care. Being decent is still there, no matter how hard the post-post-apocalyptic wasteland tries to tear it from her. Even being forced to eat flea soup from a woman who only cared about the money her late son owed her isn’t even to dull her spirits (well, they did a bit).
The Past
Alongside the trek to find Kyle McLaughlin’s Hank, we see more of The Ghouls’ human life, back as Cooper Howard. His wish to take his child and run vs. his feeling of duty as one of the only people who can stop the oncoming apocalypse looks to be a way to get this mangled mess of a man back to something vaguely resembling human.
The ‘coming this season’ trailer at the end makes it clear that he will talk directly with his wife about the overhead plan to ‘drop the bombs ourselves’ that ended last season. Between this and the Vault, where Mr. House’s mind-control chips were used to turn Americans into ‘filthy commies’, I will be interested to see why we have two actors seemingly in the same role. Cooper Howard, being asked by Muldaver back in the past to kill Robert House, will see him meet Justin Theroux and not Rafi Silver, as trailers have shown.
The Present
Back in the Vaults that started last season, 31, 32, and 33 things aren’t going well. Their shared water filtration system is still damaged, and they need a replacement water chip (hello, Fallout 1). A small side journey takes us to a ‘Project of inbreeding support group’ scene that is hilarious. Vault 32 is being led by Steph Harper, who, after losing her husband to a raider attack, has put poor Chet in charge of the now-named ‘Chet Jr.’ No, it is not his kid, and she could not care less about whether it lives or dies.
In Vault 31, we see the youngest MacLean, Lucy’s brother Norm. He’s still being terrorized by the tiny, mostly useless middle manager brain in a robot. Stuck with little water and dwindling supplies of food, he decides to thaw out every remaining middle manager member in the Vault as a chaotic last-ditch play.
New Vegas
We end things with Hank MacLean reaching New Vegas. After getting dressed up smartly and having a delicious cup of coffee, Hank sends a message to ‘Mr. House’. He promises to be fixing things and that he is going to be the most important man imaginable to House’s future. While the show isn’t going to commit to any canon ending for the New Vegas game, it will be interesting to see how they thread the needle. As is, the first episode is a delight, propelling us back into a weird, wacky, and compelling world while looking as good as ever.
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Fallout The Series S02E01 Review
Played on
Amazon Prime Video
PROS
- Avoided too much telling/not enough showing
- Effects looked great given how terrible the screener quality was
- A natural follow up to the first season, logically
CONS
- ‘Coming this season’ trailer was too spoilery
