Mid-Season Check-in: Some Thoughts Now That ‘Fallout’ Season Two Is Finally Cooking

When the new season of Fallout began, I had every intention of covering it weekly. But then it was Christmas, then New Year’s, and Netflix released the last prolonged gasp of Stranger Things, and honestly… Fallout just wasn’t that interesting. Sure, it finally caught up with Maximus and the Brotherhood of Steel, but that storyline turned out to be duller than dirt. Or at least it couldn’t hold a candle to Hank exploding heads as he tried to perfect that mind control doohickey, Lucy getting addicted to DRUGS, MAN, and the constant pull of those pre-Ghoul flashbacks revealing Cooper’s interactions with Robert House and, potentially, how the world really ended. Seriously, who cares about some pseudo-religious Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot coup when the show might finally get around to showing how the bombs dropped?!

Thankfully, last night’s fifth episode, titled “The Wrangler,” was actually GOOD good, so to celebrate I figured I’d do a little mid-season check-in to go over what all’s been going on.

- The show teased two big guest stars this season, Kumail Nanjiani and Macaulay Culkin, and then seemingly offed both of them within an episode. Kumail’s character, Xander, is for-sure dead; Maximus smashed his skull in to save a roomful of baby ghouls, and in doing so likely incited an internal war within the Brotherhood. Culkin’s character, Lacerta Legate, may still be around, though. He’s a member of Caesar’s Legion, which is currently split into two warring factions. When the Ghoul saves Lucy from the Legion’s clutches, he detonates an explosive between the warring sides of the camp, inciting a fierce battle. Lacerta could have died in the explosion or the ensuing fight, or maybe he didn’t die at all. We just don’t know, but we haven’t seen his body and there are still three episodes left for him to turn up in. I have a feeling he’ll be back.

- Another guest star, Jon Daly, returned as the “Snake Oil Salesman” this week, and it seems like he may be around to stay. Or at least, his head didn’t explode when Hank implanted the mind control chip in him, so he’s the first successful test subject! Not sure if Hank simply perfected the technology, or maybe ghouls are just the only creatures that can survive the process. Either way, I’ll miss the blood geysers (I always do).

- The show’s been doing this neat parallel between the Ghoul and Lucy, where in the present Lucy slowly loses her moral certainty and becomes a killer, and in the past Cooper Howard tries to avoid becoming an assassin but may, somehow, trigger Armageddon. Get it, they’re the SAME BASICALLY.

- Oh! Also, Lucy and the Ghoul encountered a nest of Deathclaws in Vegas, which is a monster from the games that I think was supposed to be a big deal (I haven’t played them). The twist, however, is that we already saw Cooper encounter a Deathclaw in the past, when he was a soldier stationed on the Alaskan battlefront. The monster isn’t a post-Great War abomination but something that was already roaming around before the bombs dropped. The question is: why? And how? And who? Ok, there are several questions.

- Robert House may be getting close to answering all those questions! When Cooper finally catches up with the real House (Justin Theroux) in this week’s big flashback, House explains that he’s super into predicting the future via mathematical models. He knows that Cooper was sent to kill him, and he also knows that Cooper is somehow linked to the end of the world. And though House isn’t sure who will drop the bombs, he does posit a potential unseen party could be involved… based on the existence of the Deathclaws. He promises, however, that he won’t be the one to start the Great War. In fact, he’s making the deal for Vault-Tec’s cold fusion so he can keep himself robotically alive and protect his city. Wait, is he a good guy?

- My biggest takeaway from the flashbacks, however, is that de-aged Flashback Kyle MacLachlan looks legit. None of that uncanny valley smoothness to this young buck, no sir! I mean, I’m sure the seams would start to show if the camera lingered too long, but it always seems to cut away from his face just in time. I always figured Hollywood would eventually nail the de-aging CGI effect, but I wasn’t expecting it would happen on Kyle MacLachlan, on freaking Fallout. Eat your heart out, Star Wars!

- By the end of episode five, we know that the Vault where Hank has been holed up doing his little experiments is also the Vault where Cooper’s wife and daughter were held in stasis. We see their tubes; we don’t see them in the tubes. Hank tries to use that knowledge to force the Ghoul to take Lucy back to her original Vault, but she rebels and knocks him out a window. Ghoul gets impaled on a pole (he’ll be fine) and Lucy ends up in her father’s clutches. And somewhere, Maximus has stolen the cold fusion tech, and stuff is going down with all the denizens of Vaults 31, 32, and 33, but I gotta be honest — it’s getting really hard to care about any of that. The narrative is so driven by the revelations of the flashbacks and their impacts on the present, which means the gravity of the show is centered on Ghoul/Cooper. Lucy holds her own strictly due to proximity and their whole buddy-road trip vibe, but everything else feels like a distraction. It’s all world-building, sure, and I know those storylines will connect somehow, but until they do? It’s a big yawn.

- Except for Norm finding mention of something called the “Forced Evolutionary Virus” on a computer in an old Vault-Tec office. That seems promising! Too bad he might get killed before he can get to the bottom of it. Oh, who am I kidding, I don’t care about Norm either.