This story reveals the ending of “Fallout” Episode 5, now streaming on Prime Video. Don’t read further if you haven’t watched.
The budding “Fallout” Season 2 buddy story between the perma-jaded The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) and idealistic vault-dweller Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) took an abruptly dark — and pointed — turn in Episode 5 of the Prime Video series (now streaming).
The episode ends with a shocking mid-season cliffhanger… or should we say polehanger?
Tranquilized Lucy shockingly rises up from a seedy hotel room floor, flips on her power fist device, and deals a blow to her newly revealed betrayer, the unsuspecting Ghoul.
The Ghoul flies wildly out of the hotel window and ends up gruesomely impaled on a pole that’s part of a bus stop below. The look on his face is pure realism that this could be the end. But really? The Ghoul from “Fallout” getting poled to death mid-Season 2?
“We talked about this ad nauseam. The Ghoul is not someone who can live forever. He’s not impervious to dying,” Goggins tells USA TODAY. “So being impaled like this, it can kill him. That’s all I can really say.”
What happened to The Ghoul and Lucy MacLean in ‘Fallout’?
It’s a shocking turn for the fellow travellers, each headed through the apocalyptic wasteland to Las Vegas for different reasons — Lucy to find her nefarious vault overseer father, Henry “Hank” MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan), and The Ghoul to find his missing wife and child from his past life before nuclear devastation.
Lucy and The Ghoul started to get along as they saved each other’s lives and survived together in what Goggins calls “an apocalyptic road trip.”
“You had these competing ideologies, Lucy’s being optimistic, and The Ghoul’s being nihilistic. It’s like, which one is going to win out?” says Goggins. “Something is happening to The Ghoul even as he resists being human in front of anyone. Something is changing in him.”
So, close to finding his wife and daughter, The Ghoul makes a deal with Hank’s newly acquired servant, the Snakeoil Salesman (Jon Daly), to turn over Lucy to her father. When the oily messenger arrives at the hotel, Lucy is confused and devastated.
“You can’t actually be considering this,” Lucy stammers as The Ghoul tries to hide his tears. But the deal terms are made clear. Hank is watching over the stasis chambers of the wife and daughter of Cooper Howard, the Hollywood star who is now the radiation-ravaged The Ghoul. He has to give up Lucy, or Hank will “terminate” his family’s slumber.
The Ghoul tranquilizes Lucy, explaining of the betrayal: “It couldn’t be helped.” Even Goggins is still conflicted.
“Does the Ghoul betray Lucy? Yes, there’s an argument to be made for that,” says Goggins. “But he is a quarter-mile from his family. This is a person who feels no regret for anyone or anything. But with Lucy, he does have feelings for her as a human. It was hard. He couldn’t deal with it.”
The guilt leads The Ghoul to lower his guard and fail to notice Lucy, who rises for a fateful shot.
“I thought we were friends,” Lucy says out the window to the impaled Ghoul. She passes out as The Ghoul moans, deep down on the pole.
Goggins says when he read the powerful scene, even he was blown away.
“It was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I couldn’t believe all that happened,” he says. “And then it was like, ‘How are we going to film this?'”
Just getting The Ghoul set up with the pole took three days of preparation, with two “long” days of shooting, he says.
Is the Ghoul really dead in ‘Fallout’?
Goggins has been masterful in portraying the emotional conflict through Season 1, says “Fallout” executive producer Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
“The Ghoul is someone who has literally used Lucy for bait. He’s a cold transactional person 100 percent focused on finding his family,” says Robertson-Dworet. “With Walton, you can really feel the pain because the Ghoul has become fond of Lucy despite his intentions never being good. I appreciated the level of guilt that Walton brought.”
The show EP stands by the possibility of The Ghoul’s death this week or at any time, no matter how beloved the character.
“I go back to ‘Game of Thrones,’ one of my favorite watches,” says Robertson-Dworet. “Anyone was on the table for potential killing off.”
So, The Ghoul has a pole through his chest, possibly dead. While Lucy wakes to find her father, Hank, over her with a sinisterly warm smile.
