Fallout
Uranium Fever
Season 2
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Lorenzo Sisti/Prime
Was anyone else reminded of Pluribus this week? “The Other Player,” another eminently enjoyable 50 minutes of television — maybe it seems like I’m sitting on the fence with such consistent star ratings, but I just think Fallout is a solidly four-star show, with little deviation so far either way — circles around similar, and franchise-familiar, moral questions. Is the wasteland really worth saving when it is so rife with bloodshed, barbarism, and brutality? What is it about our species’ propensity for war, anyway? Why the hell doesn’t war ever change? At this point, should humanity just be relegated to the irradiated scrapheap? Take Hank’s monologue about All’s Quiet on the Western Front, one of the more egregious examples of the series’ writers deploying a somewhat hammy, but appropriate, metaphor for our never-ending cycle of conflict (this episode was written by Dave Hill, whose credits include Game of Thrones and The Wheel of Time).
“I saw the same thing on the surface,” says Hank, confronted by Lucy in the executive vault. “People fighting over petty things, like bottlecaps.” (He’ll be familiar enough with the world of Fallout not to bat an eyelid by now, but there’s something deeply amusing in imagining Kyle MacLachlan reading that line in the script for the first time. “Why the hell are they fighting over … bottlecaps?” It is, of course, the preeminent currency deployed throughout the wasteland, curiously standardized from coast to coast.)
Anyway, forgive the slight tangent. Back to Pluribus: Hank has himself assembled a large staff of worker bees, docile automotons controlled by his newly refined mind-control chip. (It seems like the heads have stopped exploding, though let’s not write off some level of gore off-screen. After all, human sacrifice should never stand in the way of scientific progress, nor corporate growth!) Like “The Others” of the Apple TV+ series, these surface dwellers, among them ex-cannibals, Legionaries, and other such denizens of the post-apocalypse, have been stripped of their individualism; while they do not share a collective hive mind, they are effectively one big pacifistic, ever-smiling mass. Lucy is horrified to witness the result of her father’s latest experiment, having stolen these people’s lives, memories, and personalities. But how many of them — like our old friend the Snake Oil Salesman — willingly gave all of that up for the chance to expunge their lifetimes of trauma? A fair few, you’d wager. As Max and Thaddeus discuss elsewhere during the episode, Lucy’s relentless idealism has only been possible because she grew up in the rarefied bliss afforded by a vault. Sure, subterranean life has its downsides, but at least you’re not going to sleep worrying that you’ll wake up with a knife to your throat or that you’ll be dragged to a distant cave by a super mutant. (More on this later with Ron Perlman!) Even brainwashed, no wonder they all want to stay when Lucy gives them the opportunity to escape. The overarching question here is essentially the same as that in Pluribus: is peace worth the erasure of the human spirit?
Honestly, when you survey the conditions of the wasteland, that question doesn’t feel as cleanly open-and-shut as you might otherwise expect it to be, nor does Hank’s Vault-Tec (and RobCo) approved remedy seem all that outlandish. But then, perhaps that’s the conflict that is most present in all of Fallout: the fight to sustain one’s humanity, and the human spirit at large. (Between its gonzo tone and extremely silly sense of humour, it’s perhaps a little easy to overlook how the world of Fallout is rife with tragedy. Child slavery is normalized. Eating people? Bon appetit!) This conflict also manifests as the internal duel between The Ghoul and Cooper Howard, the two personalities within one prune-wrinkled, noseless man that have raged at each other for two centuries. It’s telling that while he’s impaled outside the Atomic Wrangler, struggling to reach his vials before he is rendered a feral, zombie-like corpse, he reminds himself of his own basic humanity: “My name is Cooper,” he says. “I have a daughter. Her name is Janey. She’s alive.” Don’t quote me on this, but it feels like the first time that The Ghoul has explicitly acknowledged his former self.
This reminder of his sole purpose — to see his family again — is almost enough for him to unskewer himself, but he slips at the last moment, sliding back down the Ghoul-bab. At which point, like a hulking angel descended from the heavens, a gigantic person-man-thing appears, snaps the pole in half like a twig, and carries The Ghoul back to the safety of his grisly, viscera-strewn lair. Fallout heads would obviously know this to be a super mutant as soon as they see that Hulk-like build and hear the guttural voice. But for the uninitiated: super mutants are usually what you get when you dip a human being into a vat of FEV — the Forced Evolutionary Virus, which Norm was reading about on Barb’s terminal last episode — and different variants have appeared throughout the series. (In Fallout 3, they’re standard enemy fodder, save for an intelligent mutant called Fawkes, who you can recruit as a companion. Fallout 4 takes largely the same approach. In other games, like New Vegas, they are more complex; there’s an entire settlement full of friendly muties called Jacobstown. They’re also the main villains of Fallout 1, led by a maniacal monstrosity called The Master.)
And yeah, huge cameo alert: this particular mutant is played by none other than … Ron Perlman! Remember Barb’s “war never changes” line? That’s the tagline of the Fallout games, and has been spoken by Perlman — the series’ narrator — in every major game installment since the series was born in the late ‘90s. And of course he’s a mutie in the show: that deep, gravelly voice and brawny build — here in the U.K., we call it being a “brick shithouse” — make for the perfect combination for playing a super mutant. He shoves a chunk of uranium into The Ghoul’s open stomach hole. “There’s a war coming, and we need you healthy,” he says. And then he drops a huge bit of lore on us, describing their common enemy as “the people who set all of this in motion,” that presumably being the entire nuclear apocalypse: The Enclave.
Look, I’m not about to say “I told you so!” after last week, because in retrospect, it was kind of obvious. (I do feel a little smug about my seemingly accurate prediction that the Enclave will be revealed as the show’s overarching antagonists by the end of the season, but as Fallout likes to beat us over the head: one must always beware hubris.) There’s a part of me that feels like it’s a bit unadventurous to default back to the mainline series’ go-to bad guys; maybe the show could’ve invented its own existential threat. At the same time, their absence would’ve likely felt a little weird if we went for another season without more explicit reference. Further confirmation that the Enclave was behind all of this comes in a flashback, when Barb encounters none other than Wilzig (Michael Emerson, now with a body) in an elevator at Vault-Tec HQ. Turns out he was also present in the pre-war timeline, and so was presumably frozen like the rest of the 2077 ensemble who have made it through to the post-atomic present. It’s also revealed that he’s the one who told Barb to sell the spectre of nuclear war as a business opportunity in that meeting we saw at the end of season one.
Barb tells Cooper all of this at the Lucky 38 after he finally confronts her. The latter is furious that his wife would so nonchalantly welcome Doomsday; she says that she’d do anything to ensure Janey’s survival. (Including the extinction of countless species, the deaths of billions, and a perma-scorched landscape that will remain basically uninhabitable for centuries? Yeah, maybe not.) But there are “worse people out there” than her, she says, before telling Cooper about her encounter with Wilzig. Unless it’s a red herring, the Enclave is at the wheel. And you’d suspect that, in the present timeline, The Ghoul knows a lot more about them than he’d have let on. (He has been around for over 200 years, after all. And the Enclave has done a lot of evil shit in that time.)
Soon thereafter, Cooper accompanies a trashed Hank to his suite in the Lucky 38. While he’s unconscious, Cooper opens the case that Hank has handcuffed to his wrist; it contains an extraction device. Barb appears, and sticks the device in Hank’s neck, pulling out the fusion chip. Meanwhile, in the present timeline, Max and Thaddeus are led to The Ghoul, bruised and battered from his ordeal in Freeside — but alive, crucially. He does not look especially pleased to see them. At least he hasn’t lost his charm.
• Apologies for the lack of mention for all the stuff going on in Vault 33, but that’s the least interesting element of the show for me right now. As much as that “Uranium Fever” song-and-dance number makes for a bit of formal fun; great direction from Lisa Joy there. It’s clearly setting up a civil war that broadly parallels the ideological split of our times: boring but sensible pragmatism (Betty and the need to ration water) versus exciting but unsustainable populism (the increasingly power-hungry Reg and his incest club). With a dose of on-the-nose xenophobia for the age of Trump: “You’re from Vault 31. I know things are different there. You 31ers are plum different.” To which another vault dweller chimes in: “It feels good to finally hear someone say that out loud!”
• Thaddeus mentions that he was born in The Boneyard, which was the first Fallout game’s title for the city of Los Angeles, named so for the ruined skyscrapers that rose above the horizon like… you know, bones. Fans have wondered how the Boneyard might fit into the new lore established by the show. He doesn’t go any further than to say he lived on “the shithole side,” but it stands to reason that it’s somewhere in the ruins of L.A. proper. Even so, Shady Sands was itself moved from its original Fallout location for the show. Maybe there’ll be a minor retcon.
• Hopefully that isn’t the only NCR vs. Legion action we see this season, but that sequence in the executive vault is a fun bit of fan service regardless.
• No, I haven’t forgotten about the episode’s first scene, in which House (well, fake House) and Barb discuss an exchange of cold fusion for the mind-control device. I’m still waiting to see how that plays out in the last couple of episodes.
• Lastly, on the subject of chips: no mention of the Platinum Chip from Fallout: New Vegas yet, a storage device that contained the necessary data to upgrade House’s Vegas defense system. It was set to arrive the day after the bombs fell. Had it gotten there in time, not a single nuke would’ve hit Vegas — though only a handful made it through anyway, and mostly away from the city itself.
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