Note: This story contains spoilers from “Fallout” Season 2, Episode 5.
After a friendship appeared to be developing between Lucy MacLean and The Ghoul during the pair’s journey to New Vegas over the course of “Fallout” Season 2, Wednesday’s episode ended with a major betrayal.
In the final minutes of Episode 5, titled “The Wrangler,” The Ghoul revealed to Lucy that he brought her to her father Hank in New Vegas to use her as a bargaining chip to find his wife Barbara Howard and daughter Janey — he then shoots her with a sleeping dart.
“Lucy feels like they have a real friendship developing. He got her out of real trouble in Episode 3 and has been her spiritual guide, in a sense, to the Wasteland through other episodes. She really feels like he cares about her at some level,” showrunner Geneva Robertswon-Dworet told TheWrap. “It’s very jarring for her to realize that he’s still using her. It’s still exactly the dynamic that they had when they first met in Season 1, when he dangles her into the water to bait a Gulper to come potentially eat her.”
“It was a moment that we knew we wanted to get to, because it would make Lucy feel like even the person that she was closest to in the Wasteland was still against her,” she added. “It feels like the whole Wasteland is against her.”
Walton Goggins told TheWrap he understands The Ghoul’s decision, noting that his “heart is broken” and that it “is not with joy that he betrays her.”
“[The Ghoul doesn’t] want to do this, but this is, ‘I’ve got to find my family.’ I understood how painful it was for him. This is a dude who doesn’t experience that with anyone,” Goggins said. “So what does it say about his journey back to being human? To me, it says f—ing everything. All of a sudden, you have this new relationship that radically changes yet again.”
Ella Purnell added that the twist was “shocking” because she “wanted to hold on to the idea that perhaps they were turning a corner.” But, unlike Lucy, she had a feeling it was coming.
“The show and this game is all about choices, and the character you become is all about the choices that you make on the way. I knew he was going to be presented with a difficult one and I didn’t know what he was going to choose,” Purnell said. “Was this going to be the moment we realized that Lucy’s rubbed off on The Ghoul to the extent where he now chooses to do the right thing? Or does self-preservation and survival come first? It could’ve gone either way and I wasn’t entirely surprised, but very shocked.”
The Ghoul faces the consequences of his actions almost immediately, as Lucy uses a Power Fist that she steals earlier in the episode to knock him out a window, resulting in his body gruesomely going through a pole and leaving him stuck.
“It’s very sad for Lucy because she just constantly, repeatedly gets knocked down,” Purnell added. “My admiration for her comes from the fact that she doesn’t let it stop her. She quite literally falls to the ground and up she gets with one final metaphorical last word, if you will.”
As she begins to close her eyes, Lucy finally comes face-to-face with her father. Now that they’re reunited, audiences will have to wait and see how Lucy handles her latest moral dilemma: holding her father accountable for the bombing of Shady Sands.
“That’s a very rich moment for her in her character journey when she re-meets her father, who is someone who has ideas about what should happen to the Wasteland and how to fix the Wasteland,” Robertson-Dworet said. “We wanted to get her in a place where she might be most willing to listen to those ideas.”
“There’s a great question where somebody asks her, ‘Are you looking for someone you love or someone you hate?’ I don’t think she knows, I think it’s both. The gray area is that it can be both, she can both love and hate him,” Purnell said. “Is she really going to bring him to justice? Is she going to try and change his mind? Is she going to bring him back to the vault? Is she going to be so influenced by the Wasteland at that point that she just shoots him and walks away? I don’t think it’s as simple as she thinks it’s going to be.”
“Fallout” Season 2 releases new episodes Wednesdays on Prime Video.
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