“I understand the HOW; I do not understand the WHY.” Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, is a sharp guy, and he grasps the contours of the nightmarishly oppressive regime he serves pretty well. He just can’t understand why it works the way it does. What possible ideological justification for giving yourself absolute power can there be?
The answer was right in front of his face, which is what made it so difficult for him to see. You don’t give yourself absolute power for some other reason. You give yourself absolute power because you really want absolute power. And once you have it, you construct a system that makes it impossible for that power to be relinquished, ever.
The Party, the group formed with this idea in mind and in permanent power after its successful implementation, is Orwell’s riff on Hitler and Stalin, projected into a future in which similar tendencies topple the English-speaking world into tyranny as well. In the final episode of Fallout’s first season, we get a capitalist answer to all that, one in which the people appointing themselves god-emperors for life aren’t the vanguard of a revolutionary party but the CEOs of America’s most powerful corporations. Ask yourself which is more likely to happen here. Ask yourself which is more likely to already have happened here.
Anyway, all this information is relayed to poor naive Cooper Howard through the listening device he attached to his wife’s wrist computer thing. But that’s not the worst of it. With peace negotiations hurting Vault-Tec’s bottom line, Barb and her boss Bud Askins (Michael Esper) offer the assembled CEOs a deal. If they invest in Vault-Tec, they’ll be given a number of Vaults to run as they see fit, no questions asked. Immediately they all begin fantasizing about ways to torture residents to death, in one way or another. All in the name of progress of course, wink wink, nudge nudge.
Of course, an investment like this requires some kind of guaranteed return, and the peace negotiations prevent that guarantee. Unless, Barb says, they cut out the middle man and drop the bombs themselves. The death of the planet is a small price to pay for being the undisputed rulers of the ashes. “War never changes,” says Vault-Tec executive Barb Howard of the situation on planet Earth. Yeah, not if she can help it.
Coop is aghast. So is Lucy, who learns her own side of the shocking truth from Moldaver when she brings the warlord Wilzig’s head in exchange for her father’s freedom. The head contains the secret of cold fusion, and with it unlimited power of the literal kind — enough to light up the city for the first time…well, probably since the nuclear destruction of Shady Sands, ordered by none other than Hank MacLean. Like all the other Vault 31 residents, he’s from before the war, a secret class of executives called “Bud’s Buds,” cryofrozen and thawed out to be rulers of the future when needed.
(Norm, who’s braver than he’d ever give himself credit for, discovers this all firsthand inside Vault 31, where Bud’s brain in a jar seals him in with his frozen overlords. A brain in a jar, man. Old school!)
Unfortunately, Maximus doesn’t get the message about Hank in time, freeing him before Lucy warns him they don’t want to take daddy dearest with them. It’s not just Maximus’s childhood that Hank wiped out — it’s Lucy’s, too. When her mother learned the truth, she fled to Shady Sands with both kids, whose hazy memories of that time are all they have left of their brief lives on the surface. Hank took them back, then killed them all. The only way to ensure peace is to kill everyone who’s not us, he explains helpfully.
Needless to say this terrific stuff for Kyle MacLachlan, who can be very scary in his all-American way when called for, and for Ella Purnell, an actor with eyes seeming designed to register and process this kind of life-shattering information while brimming with tears.
There are other combatants for the future in the fray. After being brought back to the Brotherhood and nearly executed, Maximus instead finds himself in good with the High Cleric for his moxie. He’s also spared because Dane, his old buddy, admits they sabotaged their own shoe out of fear of the mission, without ever realizing Maximus would take the rap.
Both wind up on the front lines of the Brotherhood’s brutal assault on Moldaver’s compound, which is staged with maximum blood splatter, surface-to-air missile explosions, and Road House–style bodies-through-wooden-tables mayhem. It’s the visceral payoff the season needed.
Maximus makes his way to the command center, where Hank seizes a slain knight’s armor and knocks him out cold. The Ghoul arrives in time to spare Lucy the pain of executing her own dad, scarring Hank’s face, confronting him with their past connection, and demanding to know where his family is. (Check Vault 31, Ghoul!) Hank flies off to return to the nerve center of the entire sordid operation: the Enclave. With Maximus down for the count, Lucy and the Ghoul team up to pursue Hank. An eventually revived Maximus is praised by Dane (incorrectly, as I suspect they know) for killing Moldaver and hailed by all the Brotherhood like he’s the King in the North.
Fallout may be the first show I’ve ever watched that actually benefits from the standard streaming model of a simultaneous full-season release. Watching this show, moving from level to level and world to world, following Lucy and Maximus and the Ghoul and Norm on their side quests, getting those Cooper Howard cut-scene flashbacks: Watching Fallout feels like spending the weekend trying to beat a video game.
I mean that as a full-on compliment, by the way. Making no effort, and showing no desire, to conceal its roots in an entertainment-first art form, Fallout is that rarest of beasts: a post-apocalyptic romp with a sense of humor too black to be cute about it. In the process provides a real star turn for Ella Purnell in particular, the one lead whose face is on display for all to read at all times and who thus has to carry so much weight on her shoulders. I want Lucy to beat this game, and I’ll be happy to watch her try.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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