When I got done watching Fallout’s second-season finale last night—and in anticipation of writing this recap today—I took a step that I normally don’t. Rather than my usual approach, which involves identifying the strongest feelings an episode of TV elicits in me, and then working outwards from there, I tried to do a more systemic accounting of what the hell Fallout had been trying to accomplish with this season. I went back into my notes, broke down each of the show’s major characters and plotlines this season, and then did my damnedest to track their beats and the morals and ideas they were playing with to come to some kind of conclusion about where it’s all been heading. I did this not because I necessarily think you can reverse-outline a season of TV into making sense, but because I was trying to triangulate a feeling I was having. A hollowness, either in the show, or simply in my reactions to it, as this finale lurchingly dragged a whole year of TV to what felt like a profoundly inelegant halt. I didn’t want to just leave off on “Is that fucking it?” both because it’s, y’know, my job to figure things like that out and because I have a lot of affection, both for the Fallout brand and for this specific expression of it (which is often thrilling and funny, even when it can’t manage to be much else). This show has been smart and thoughtful in the past, and has the potential to be smart again whenever it wants. And so I went hunting through the mental underbrush, searching for an idea lurking in the heart of this hour of TV more compelling than “Be sure to tune in for Fallout season three!” Reader, I failed.
We open tonight with war still never a-changin’, as Caesar’s Legion ends its bloody internecine struggle—but not its determination to say “Caesar” funnily—and Macaulay Culkin names himself the hyper-violent cosplay group’s new leader. Culkin doesn’t actually get much to do here, because, like so much of this finale, the Legion material is simply window dressing being plunked down to set up next year’s show. But since I was hard on him back in my recap of “The Profligate,” I will note that Culkin wears a laurel crown convincingly, especially if you’re looking for an emperor with a talent for entitled petulance. Will he be able to carry the weight of being a major villain in a new season, the way Justin Theroux and Kyle MacLachlan so ably did this year? I have my doubts.
Speaking of Theroux, he spends most of this episode trapped in podcast form, and blaring out of Walton Goggins’ wrist, as the digital version of Robert House from last week’s big cliffhanger downloads himself into a Pip-Boy so he can give The Ghoul a guided tour of the Wonderful World Of Exposition. Maybe it’s because Goggins plays The Ghoul himself as completely indifferent to House’s various vague warnings about the Mysterious And Ominous Enclave—Fallout season three…coming…some time!—or because Theroux’s so much better when he can fully embody the character, but this resolution for House’s arc this season is as dull as it is bizarre. Fallout couldn’t have done more to build up the House character throughout this season if it tried, positioning him as a force of nature at the very heart of both its satirical and storytelling intents. Choosing for him to do nothing in the finale—either in the present day, where his return has been heavily foreshadowed, or in the past, where he’s featured so prominently—feels like a huge waste. Like so much of Fallout’s second season, it was a lovely performance, but with no clear end.
Sure, you could argue, House’s guidance was instrumental to Cooper Howard’s quest to find his family—giving his old pal Lucy a little assist in the process, as he stops her from getting a brain hijacking chip shoved in her neck by dear old dad when their paths briefly intersect tonight. But what does that story even mean at this point? The Ghoul finds Barb and Janey’s cryopods in the Vegas management vault empty, except for a postcard pointing him toward Colorado, and decides that hope was worth it after all. But there’s no true humanity in Cooper’s renewed search for his Popsicle MacGuffins—nothing to match that moment from two weeks ago, when Goggins gave his all depicting a man holding desperately to the final fraying edges of his humanity. With the reveal that Barb Howard—who, a year ago, delivered the most profoundly chilling moment of this entire show—was really just a nice lady with some bad bosses, where are we meant to find a hook to give a damn about in The Ghoul’s quest for her? If this was the last we saw of him—walking off into the sunset with a renewed spirit—I could just about buy it as a semi-sweet ending. But that’s not this show, not with the renewal already handed down. Instead, Fallout trades a smarter story for a more simple one. Again.
That’s the through-line of this whole episode, really. Take the plotline with Maximus, for instance, who spends the whole episode trying to hold the line against a single-file pack of Deathclaws attacking the city of Freeside. There’s the slightest frisson of tension that arrives when the show sets up a classic Spider-Man 2 subway-car moment—Maximus, his power armor destroyed, shakily confronts the beasts with a makeshift spear and a shield made out of a discarded roulette wheel, a genuinely cool image—only to brutally subvert it as the Freesiders decide this will not be their “band together around their vulnerable young hero” moment. But then, like a literal fucking genie’s wish, the NCR holdouts from half a season ago suddenly arrive out of nowhere, heavily armed and in numbers the show never even hinted they had on hand, dispatching the threat as easily as you can say “Fuck it, this draft’s already running long.” Is that a worse deux ex machina than the stuff that happens with Norm tonight, when his revolting Vault management trainees get wiped out by a horde of highly selective radroaches who somehow know to leave the fifth-string protagonist’s love interest as the only survivor of their rampage? Fallout, why ya gotta make me choose?
All of which brings me to this: Am I naive for thinking that a season finale should be more than another punting of the narrative football? That it should serve as a capstone, if not for a whole story, than at least a chapter, squaring the circle on interesting characters like Steph Harper? Instead, we get about a minute of Steph freaking out in her Overseer’s Office in Vault 32 while the mob outside talks itself into killing her, only to pick up her ex-husband (!) Hank’s secret Enclave communicator and initiate Phase 2 of their evil plan for the Vaults. What’s Phase 2? What is the Enclave meant to represent in this story? What does any of this mean, beyond the most simplistic movement of pieces around the chess board? “Fuck you,” is what it means. “If we tell you that now, we can’t sell you another Prime Video subscription next year.”
The one exception to all this—the one loop that actually closes itself in this finale—is the one surrounding the MacLeans: Lucy and especially Hank. If there’s one way Fallout season two has been undeniably superior to the original article, it’s been in the foregrounding of Kyle MacLachlan’s performance as this hideous and heartbreaking man, who manages to sound almost convincing when he drops chilling lines like “You don’t mean that… And if you do, very soon, you won’t.” In a show where almost every character is some kind of cartoon, MacLachlan successfully threads the needle, presenting a man who is incapable of understanding that his overwhelming need for things to be pleasant is really just an overwhelming need for things to be controlled. He’ll build a perfect world for his little girl, and if that means he has to do a little brain surgery to make her more perfect, too, well…you don’t build utopia without dropping a few Sugar Bombs, right?
And while MacLachlan gets all the really juicy lines, Ella Purnell is right there keeping up, expressing ten different flavors of heartbreak at a world that just keeps demanding she kill its kindest parts. If Lucy ended season one bowed but unbroken, she ends season two with her illusions about goodness as fundamentally shattered as the skull of poor Diane Welch, whose severed head begs for death when the younger MacLean accidentally wakes it up in the brain chip “mainframe.” It’s the one real choice any of our main characters make in this whole season finale: the decision to kill something good but ultimately ineffective in the face of horror. Later on, even Lucy doesn’t seem to know if she’ll brain-wipe her dad or just kill him—a decision he ultimately takes out of her hands, spouting some last-minute Ominous Exposition before hitting the button to Dougie Jones-ify himself. Her last-minute reunion with Maximus doesn’t feel especially earned, but at least, as she looks over a Vegas about to be embroiled in a war she believes she could have prevented with just a smidge more cruelty in her heart, it feels like this member of our leading trio has gone under some kind of fundamental change as part of her journey this season.
With the exception of that two-person highlight, though, we leave Fallout’s second season with an incredibly expensive sense of “I told you that story so that I could tell you this one.” Which feels like a colossal waste of not just money and time, but the talents of a whole host of incredible artists and performers. The series’ first season made it clear that this show could be about more than just playing the hits of a popular video game’s TV Tropes page, that it had something meaningful and cohesive to say about the ways the world dies. Season two demonstrates how it can also, frequently, be less than that: a collection of good scenes held together by strong performances and not much else, riffing on ideas without ever building anything fundamentally solid. The finale sits firmly at that lazy heart: At nearly every turn, when given the chance to say something, it instead simply feints, listlessly gesturing at a cool idea it can tell you about in the future. Fallout does a fine job, even at its worst, of presenting a vivid portrait of the Wasteland. Rarely has it ever felt like more of a waste.
Stray observations
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- • First up: He’s not in this episode, but you can check out my interview with Jon Daly about playing recurring character the Snake Oil Salesman here.
- • Shock of shocks, the old Caesar’s will is simply a statement that he “is” the Legion, and it should end with him.
- • Culkin’s Caesar’s Palace joke got a small smile from me.
- • Digi-House’s line about “wandering travelers with something to prove” trying to kill him feels like a direct reference to the games.
- • I might joke about Theroux being trapped in a wristwatch for this entire episode, but he does get some fun line reads, including relishing telling Cooper that if he shoots the Cold Fusion diode “the damage would likely extend to other planets.”
- • It must be tough to be a Deathclaw, only ever being as strong as the plot demands you be for any given scene. See also: being a suit of power armor.
- • Hank being a nerd for the Myers-Briggs personality is such a good middle management note. (I would have thought he’d prefer ISFPs over ISTPs for his legion of workers, though—less independent.)
- • We get no real resolution on Thaddeus this week, but watching Johnny Pemberton run around waving a floppy severed arm and aiming a rifle with his toes was undeniably pretty fun.
- • House says he figured out the Enclave was involved in plotting the end of the world when he saw the Deathclaw in Alaska through Cooper’s Power Armor. How did that clue him in to the Enclave’s actions? Fuck you, watch next year.
- • The pre-War flashbacks tonight mostly felt like a retread, as Barb is nice now and Cooper eventually gets arrested on the orders of the House Un-American Activities Committee as a way to sweep him under the rug. But the reveal that Steph seduced Hank into marriage is pretty fun, even if the de-aged MacLachlan still looks about thirty years older than Annabel O’Hagan.
- • True to form, Hank gets the one really effective tease for season three, telling Lucy that “The surface is the experiment, not the Vaults,” and revealing that his brain-chipped cronies are already out in the Wasteland following unspecified orders.
- • We still have no actual explanation for what happened to Cooper and Janey on doomsday, or how they got separated. Last we saw them on the days the bombs fell, he was getting her out of Los Angeles on horseback.
- • Fallout game-lore corner! First, a cute one: The shot of the NCR ranger shooting the Deathclaw during their big rescue is taken directly from the opening cutscene of Fallout: New Vegas. And then, significantly less cutely, there’s this episode’s after-credits sequence, in which we check back in on what the Brotherhood has been up to ever since Maximus ditched them. Turns out that Quintus is still completely crazy, which he proves with his intention to build a new copy of the single worst thing that Bethesda Softworks added to this series when they bought it 20 years ago: giant slogan-spouting robot Liberty Prime. I hate Liberty Prime, and think it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of basically everything good about Fallout—but that’s a conversation for another time. Suffice it to say that I groaned audibly at the reveal.
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.
