After three episodes, I guess it’s time for Fallout’s TV universe to sprawl a little further as we continue to get ever more intimate with our cast of messed up, dystopia wanderers and that means that the unkillable determination of Vault Dweller Lucy McClane and the swaggering cynicism of the Ghoul take centre stage while the misadventures of Maximus the Knight take an episode off to give us some space.
However, making its gradual move to the foreground is a fourth plot thread that being building steam since the show started and it concerns a conspiracy that’s been slowly within Vault 33 like a cancer the moment Raiders from the outside made their presence felt.
I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised considering that Westworld head honcho Jonathan Nolan is involved, but the weird thing is, all these hints of massive corruption and sinister doing have happened during the first episode he hasn’t directed. Coincidence?
Poor Lucy McClane is still the hostage of the part zombie creature known as the Ghoul, but as Fallout fans already know, he’s not the only ghoul out there.
Denied the serum that’s kept him from regressing into a snarling zombie for around two hundred years, the Ghoul is now on a clock to recover some more before his strength ebbs and his more animalistic urges gradually take over. After stopping by on one of his Ghoul buddies who is also suffering an attack of the snarls, our Ghoul promptly puts him out of his misery with a well placed headshot that horrifies the eternally decent Lucy.
However, if Lucy knew what the Ghoul has planned for her, maybe she wouldn’t have been so shocked and after a slight altercation that sees both of them lose a finger, he escorts her to the shell of an old supermarket where he trades her in for 60 vials of that serum that stops him going all Romero. As she’s led inside, she’s met by the alarmingly named Snip-Snip, a floating medical robot with the voice of Matt Berry who eases her fears by kindly grafting a whole new finger onto her bloody stump. Getting even deeper into the building, Lucy is even more surprised to see that this makeshift installation has a sizable collection of miserable looking Ghouls whose mental states are in various stages of decay.
However, the addition of a second-hand digit is only a fake out and soon Lucy finds out that Snip-Snip, and his pair of slacker bosses, are going to harvest her organs and if she doesn’t do something about it, the search for her father is going to reach a sudden halt.
Elsewhere, back at Vault 33, Lucy’s brother, Norm, is finding that his usual, lackadaisical attitude is changing to curiosity as he desires to find out what exactly happened to Vault 32 before those raiders came a’ calling. What he finds is disturbing as fuck.
Last episode, Walton Goggins’ scene stealing Ghoul made a crack that people stuck in this dystopian hell tend to get sidetracked by the most random of shit; but while that was a nicely shrewd joke at the expense of RPG video games (soooooo much sidetracking), it’s also a neat bit of foreshadowing for a fourth episode that – if we’re being honest – is something of a filler episode. There’s nothing here that references the Brotherhood of Steel, we learn nothing more about Wilzig’s severed head or what mysterious invention he injected behind his ear, and we don’t even get the merest sniff from CX404. However, what we do get is a slightly separate, mini adventure that gives us some insights into what being a Ghoul is all about, some sizable in-jokes from the video games (Hello Doctor Orderly) and a slow, dawning realisation from Lucy that she might not end this adventure as the same person who started it – if she finishes it at all.
First things first; and the episode gives us the lowdown on the ins and outs of Ghouldom with a merciful lack of exposition thanks to the fact that we can watch it happen due to the introduction of Roger, a Ghoul who in on the verge of losing his humanity. While its incredibly sad to watch this poor creature gradually lose his mind (before Cooper sprays it all over the wall in an act of mercy), it’s an incredibly cinematic way to explain the issues troubling Goggins’ wheezing gunslinger without simply spelling it out with a throwaway explanation and it also helps you feel for the miserable creature the way George Romero eventually fell on the side of the zombies.
However, that doesn’t mean that the Ghoul has mellowed as his health declines and after allowing a captive Lucy slowly expire of dehydration, he takes great, sadistic pleasure from watching his desperate prisoner lap up irradiated water in order to survive. But while we get to see him get more vicious and play tit for that after Lucy bites off one of his fingers, we find this episode is in place precisely to test Lucy’s resolve. Dying of thirst, relieved of a finger and sold to an organ harvesting outfit, the gutsy Vault Dweller simply will not give up on her cheery ideals and as a result she finally manages to overcome her grim fate simply by being really, really nice – well, that and being pretty fucking smart. Unwilling to leave anyone behind, her virtuous nature backfires slightly when she tries to rescue some feral Ghouls, but once the dust settles, she’s not only saved herself, but she’s done it by sticking to her seemingly naive ideals. In fact, she even rescues a dying Ghoul by giving him the very serum he was trading her life for. As a result, we leave the Ghoul mulling things over his life choices after finding a video cassette of one of his old Westerns (when he was alive over 200 years earlier). Does this mean we’re going to get a kinder, less sadistic Ghoul – maybe…
While The Ghouls gives us some great character stuff between Lucy and the Ghoul, the test of the epidode gets a meaty great conspiracy between its teeth by finally pushing Moisés Arias’ arc as Norm as he aims to solves the mystery of Vault 32. So far we find that the Vault was all but deserted before the raiders entered from the outside, but after sneaking in with Chet, they find that waves of depression caused the dwellers to either commit mass suicide or simply kill each other. While the why’s and wherefores are still tantalisingly vague, the most disturbing clue is that the code that open the door for the raiders belonged to his mother, a detail that’ll obviously explode in an episode or two.
The Ghouls may not be an episode that moves the entire season in massive ways, but it moves the pieces in such a way that everything will probably have massive ramifications in the near future. Buy that’s the thing about being sidetracked, it often leads to bigger things…
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 