This week’s fantastically acted duel between Justin Theroux and Walton Goggins rearranges Fallout’s chessboard and makes it feel like the series is finally pushing itself in a new direction.
Photo: Prime
Spoilers follow for the second season of Fallout through fifth episode “The Wrangler,” which premiered on Prime Video on January 14.
Who’s responsible for the American apocalypse? In its second season, Fallout’s been complicating our presumed answers to that question. We thought it was Barbara Howard. We thought it was Robert House. And now it might be neither of them but actually Cooper Howard? What drama!
If the first four episodes of Fallout sometimes felt meandering, indulgent, lost in the Wasteland’s desert, then the showdown between House and Coop in the fifth episode, “The Wrangler,” comes as a thrilling course correction. The fantastically acted duel between Walton Goggins and Justin Theroux rearranges Fallout’s chessboard and makes it feel like the series is finally pushing itself in a new direction regarding what we do, or don’t, know about how the U.S. stumbled into a nuclear holocaust. If this episode isn’t part of Goggins’s and Theroux’s Emmys-consideration packages, someone fell down on the job.
Fallout follows a very simple rule in its characterizations: The person you thought was a good guy was probably actually a bad guy, and the person you thought was a bad guy was probably actually a good guy. It’s a crazy world in the 23rd century, and no one is quite who they appear to be. That switcheroo worked best in the series’s first season, when the cynical, cannibalistic Ghoul was revealed to be Cooper Howard, a former Hollywood star wracked with guilt over both his onetime support for the nefarious Vault-Tec and his wife Barbara’s role in blowing up America for corporate profit. And so far it’s been a fascinating way for Fallout to introduce House, the CEO of a tech, robotics, and weapons company who absolutely sucks (developing mind-control devices and using them to force people to kill each other is pretty gnarly) but who also, maybe, is partially driven by a desire to save as many fellow residents of New Vegas as possible. They’re both opaque, complicated men, and Fallout positions them like circling fighters sizing each other up, identifying weaknesses and planning means of attack.
This began in the third episode, “The Profligate,” when House ambushes Cooper at a veterans’ awards dinner, cornering him in a bathroom and acting like a real wacko. House’s agenda is to get Cooper to reveal himself as secretly working against Vault-Tec for resistance leader Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), but Cooper isn’t that foolish. His refusal to engage with this erratic stranger gives the whole interaction an uncomfortable, on-edge air that immediately sets up the men as rivals. House insults Cooper’s friend Charlie (Dallas Goldtooth), who served with Cooper on the Alaskan Front during the Sino-American War, by calling him a “pinko.” He tries to intimidate Cooper by monologuing ominously about how if “you back billions of bodies into a corner at the same time,” the resulting situation will be “messy, messy.” Theroux plays House with mustache-twirling menace, but the scene scores laughs because of how well Cooper undercuts this guy (whom he doesn’t yet know to be House); Goggins gives him the perfectly bemused air of a man trying not to roll his eyes before extricating himself from a boring conversation. The interaction ends when Cooper chastises House for wanting to “talk politics when a man has his dick in his hand,” and it’s notable both because of how irritated the usually easygoing Coop gets and because the scene is so imbalanced. House knows more than he’s telling Cooper, and by essentially mocking him for his lack of information, House is setting up an antagonistic dynamic that pays off in “The Wrangler.”
As has become Fallout’s way, “The Wrangler” is a split-timeline episode with the flashbacks involving Cooper contextualizing the present. How did Cooper lose not just his biological humanity when he became the Ghoul but also his consideration of other people? What led to this nihilistic refusal to believe that people helping people could make the world a better place? Why didn’t he assassinate House like Moldaver wanted him to? How did House build an entire weapons system to defend New Vegas, and did he use Moldaver’s cold-fusion technology to do that? The conversation with House in 2077, in the New Vegas that House will eventually claim as his own personal city and weaponized fortress, fills in the gaps.
At first, the scene amplifies the distance between the pair. Cooper enters House’s hotel suite on a higher landing, looks unimpressed as he gazes down on House’s workstation of screens monitoring all kinds of data and probabilities, and gets pissy when House demands that he come downstairs so that they’re on even ground. Goggins’s line delivery of “I don’t want to come down there” is Rick Hatchett levels of snippy; Theroux’s rejoinder that the men’s fates are “mathematically intertwined,” and his tendency to roll his r’s and aerify his w’s, is annoyingly grandiose. These two can’t stand each other, and the charge between them is more electric than any other character pairing this season. Fallout then slowly shoves the “apex competitors” together with Cooper resisting but ceding ground and House pushing and gaining the advantage.
When House reveals that he knows about Cooper spying on Barbara, Theroux plays the moment sly and Goggins betrays a very slight eyebrow raise — more an indication of curiosity about House’s surveillance power than an admission of guilt. Cooper lands his own blow when House blathers on about his equations pinpointing the date of the end of the world, and Goggins, with extreme sarcasm, deadpans the line, “A calculator told you that?” It’s just two dudes jabbing at each other to cover up their own fear, especially when House reveals that the date the data coalesced to show him the end of the world was April 14, 2065, or the birthday of Cooper and Barbara’s daughter, Janey, and that the date the world would end jumped up by a month when Cooper bought a ticket to Las Vegas to come and scope out House. That’s a barrage of information for both Cooper as a character and us as the audience, who until this point thought it was Barbara Howard whose actions would be so devastating. If we’re to believe House, and it’s actually Cooper who has a not yet revealed central role in the nuclear drop, which takes the future Ghoul in a whole new direction, one that Cooper himself doesn’t yet understand.
Again, the destabilizing impact of this reveal is in how these actors play the moment. Theroux abandons his suave, Clark Gable–lite act and lets House’s paranoia show as he screams “Who ends the world?” at a departing Cooper. Goggins drops Cooper’s veneer of sneering indifference, his dismissal that House is “just a fucking lunatic,” and drowns his worries in the alcohol that he’ll stay addicted to even centuries later as the Ghoul. By the end of “The Wrangler,” it’s unclear how either of these men will act on this information and whether they’ll ever see each other again. But the reveal that Cooper Howard is a lot more dangerous than we thought, whether he intends to be or not, is just what Fallout needed to actually move forward.
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