Okie-fudging-dokie, that might be my favorite episode yet. Episode 5 of Fallout’s second season sees a focus on Lucy, The Ghoul, Coop, and the real Robert House. The stakes are set, questions are answered, and Norm sucks at fighting.
New Vegas
The episode begins with Lucy and Ghoulp scared crapless as three Deathclaws “from Quarry Junction” stand around menacingly. Coop’s quick thinking with a grenade distraction allows them to skedaddle away through a broken fence. It might be a little easy, but those big bads are being set up for something spectacular looking down the line.
They are legitimately gorgeous, even in this unfinished, horrendous quality screener. As morning comes, the folks of New Vegas come to life, and Coop describes his quest to Lucy.
He’s searching for Barb and Janey as they were assigned to a management-level vault. He’s found two of them, one in California and another in Oregon, both empty. As Lucy goes to the general store to find some Addictol to help with her buff-out shakes, Ghoulp heads to the bar to get crunk.
This season has done a solid job of quickly moving the plot along. Questions are answered, new ones are posed. People rarely stand around not saying what we’re all thinking, and the show is better for it.
Old Vegas
We cut to Coop and Barb arriving in Vegas, pre-war times. Coop and Muldaver have a tense conversation in the airport, where Coop tells her he’ll stop Robert House from getting Cold Fusion, but he will do it without killing him.
De-aged Hank is back! It looked good in my fuzzy-as-all-heck screener, and he’s got a fancy briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The glorious version of the Vegas set looks, well, glorious.
As Coop and Barb head to Robert House’s casino for a party, we see the US Congresswoman from a previous episode getting kicked out. She’s protesting, and the wink that Walton Goggins gives her as he tells her to keep fighting is perfect.
This episode is almost entirely about Cooper Howards vs. his Ghoul persona. A man playing at being a cowboy in his past, he’s doing it for real now, and you can see that it is starting to eat him alive. This chase for his family is everything, and it is, after 200 years, turning him into an empty shell.
As Coop follows Hank, he is confronted by… not Robert House. Seeing the only man we’d ever seen play the role, the one the public believes to be the real deal, walk up to Coop and say “Mr. House would like to see you”, gave me chills. Victor is back, and Justin Theroux’s mad genius immediately lets Coop know that he’s there to kill me.
Great acting all around, tense music, beautiful visuals. This episode has been absolutely stunning so far, and it only gets better.
Snake My Oil
The Snake Oil Salesman from season one is back. He who gave Thaddeus the syrum that saved his life, but started his turn into a ghoul (or… maybe a super mutant?) is back! He’s, luckily enough, on his way to New Vegas.
Flower picking, skipping, and Rad Roach stabbing are the order of the day as our intrepid merchant is hoping to see his beloved. Cut to him on a date with his police robot companion at a lovely dinner, and I hope to see more of this absolute piece of garbage.
Hank, the uncivilized pervert that he is, cracks the salesman in the back of the head with a crowbar, and one scene later, voila, he has his first positive test result. Full-on mind control is finally in the cards, but who is he doing it for?
Vault 31 heads ‘home’
Vault 31’s group heads to Vault Tec HQ in LA. We see the vendor couple from Philly back in season one. They’ve taken up residence and are growing a ‘Roach Farm’. They let the ‘vaulties’, as they call them, feel free to take any supplies.
All Bud’s Buds want, though, is to get in contact with ‘the investors. The F.E.V., as it turns out, isn’t about any future enterprise ventures, but the Future Evolutionary Virus, because of freaking course they are.
Norm gets along with the lovely Vault Tec employee who had only been there a week. She can tell, because he’s not crazy like the rest, that he’s not really Bud’s successor. They make friends over her lost life, and not being insane.
Bud’s assistant overhears them. In a fit of rage, he unplugs the terminal Norm had hacked into, Barb’s. As Norm was learning about the F.E.V., he instead got choked out, nearly to death, as our time with them came to a close.
I thought we were friends
The main thrust of the episode is Cooper Howard vs. the Ghoul. We jump back and forth between Cooper and Ghoulp as he talks with Robert House in the past and Lucy in the future. Robert House is a brilliant, weird as all hell, mathematician and roboticist.
He has worked out exactly when the world will end, April 14th, 2065, at 5:17 AM. Cooper replies that the date is his daughter Janey’s birthday, how very curious. House is vexed that he can’t understand Coop. Why, in his model, did the date of Armageddon change when Cooper bought the plane ticket to New Vegas?
House claims, and I have no reason not to believe him, that neither he nor ‘those idiots’ at Vault Tec will drop the bombs. Cooper is a wild card to him, and he’s worried there is another out there. The one that drops the bombs that end the world is an unknown, and he needs Vault Tec’s Cold Fusion technology to live forever and power up his defense forces for Las Vegas.
His words unsettle Cooper, who goes on a whale of a bender after leaving House’s office. It cuts back to the Ghoul, looking more human than we’ve ever seen. Lucy, on the other hand, is feeling less human than ever before. On her quest to break her addiction, she chose to steal the addictol (along with a sweet power fist) from the local shop. Inside, she finds the shop owner dead inside a trash can, and his incredibly obvious killer standing at the counter.
She tries to talk her way out of any violence, but the oaf reaches for a gun, and she tries to maim him. Instead, she mercs the vile bastard, but something in her has obviously changed. She has killed a human, and Ella Purnell’s acting is incredible as the weight of that murder comes to bear. It was in self-defense, but he was a person.
The episode ends with The Ghoul selling Lucy out to her father. He knows they are in New Vegas, and he’s sent the mind-controlled Snake Oil Salesman with an offer. Take my daughter back to Vault 33, and I will not kill your family, Cooper Howard. Unwilling to risk that Hank is lying (we know he isn’t), Ghoulper shoots Lucy with a stun dart. She’s a tough cookie, though, and as Cooper struggles with what he’s doing, she puts on the power fist and sends him flying out a window, impaling him on a pole. The episode ends as Hank walks into the hotel room in which Lucy is passed out and tells his Sugar Bomb that they need to talk.
Wrapping Things Up
That episode was incredible. I have no notes, outside of please give me more. Cooper Howard shines through the Ghoul’s eyes in a way never seen before. Both his fear of the Deathclaws, the fact that Mr. House knows all about them.
How quickly the story is trucking along has me excited. Next week is my final early review, as they did not offer us episodes 7 and 8 in advance. Season 2 is in full swing, Funko is once again leaking plotlines, and the track ‘Family’ from the OST is pure gold.
Fallout Season 2 Episode 5
Played on
Amazon Prime Video
PROS
- Lots of Answers
- Intriguing New Questions
- Cooper/Ghoul line blurred more than ever
- Lucy's withdrawals and horrors
- Snake Oil Salesman!
CONS
- Deathclaw escape was a touch easy
