As we continue to travel deeper into the wastelands of Fallout’s second season, you can feel that the people in charge are all about stacking up those narrative building blocks in a way that hopefully will pay off later on. However, while the world of Fallout is famously one where virtually everybody, be they rich or poor, are crawling over each other to get a leg up, be it in a managerial capacity or just as a matter of good, old fashioned survival. But what happens when people start doing it within their various groups.
While we’re still yet to properly reach New Las Vegas, there’s a noticable whiff of civil war in the air as we start to see that the indecision and in-fighting that’s starting to brew within the Commonwealth, is occurring elsewhere too. That’s right, if you thought that we were done with the bulk of the world building for this season, baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet as we’re about to be introduced to new fractions populating the Wastelands of America, and they all fucking hate each other.
After her half-hearted Sophie’s Choice moment which saw dystopian goody-two-shoes, Lucy MacClean choose a wounded, female stranger over her extremely negative traveling companion, the Ghoul, we find that the former Vault dweller has managed to find where this women came from and has escorted her back to her people. Unfortunately, her people are the Legion, a vicious, warlike group of survivors who have haphazardly picked ancient Rome as their template despite not knowing how to correctly pronounce “Caesar”. It seems after an in-house disagreement about who should rule in their dead Caesar’s stead, the Legion has been atveach other’s throats, but after immediately slaughtering the wounded woman (so much for her, right?) they suggest that Lucy would be perfect for Pima Nocta. But after the understandable refusal and her constant pointing out of the historical inaccuracies of their culture, Lucy promptly finds herself crucified for her troubles.
Meanwhile, the Ghoul has managed to cut out the poison that waylaid him and between flashbacks of 2077 that see him meeting his future target, Robert House, for the first time at a veteran’s dinner, he realises that he still needs Lucy’s help to get to New Las Vegas. Attempting to get reinforcement from the New California Republic, he finds that they’re now in a sorry state with do many fractions vying for power, so the Ghoul decides to invoke a full on civil war within the Legion to provide cover to get Lucy out.
Speaking of civil war, the arrival of Harkness at the Brotherhood’s base at Area 51 has put a major crimp in Quintus’ plan to untite various rebellious branches to wage war on their own Commonwealth. However, when Maximus proposes killing Harkness, he’s angrily rebuffed as such a thing would undoubtedly cause a war that no one is ready for. However, when Harkness approaches Maximus in an attempt to get information, they go on a mission together where Max gets to see how fun being a Knight in the Brotherhood Of Steel can really be. But when an old, ghoulled-up friend of Maximus’ pops out of the woodwork, he’s forced to make a rash decision that could spell doom for everything he cares about.
While I wouldn’t say that Fallout’s second season has gotten off to a slow start, you can’t help but notice that all of the characters are no closer to New Las Vegas than what they were two episodes to go. Obviously, this means that the season is planning to keep stacking up those stakes so when the touch paper is finally lit, hopefully something gargantuan will take place. It’s a good thing, then, that this world still remains an amusingly fucked up place that continues to be a darkly satirical walk through an incredibly cynical apocalypse, but to stoke those rising fires of civil war within the Brotherhood, we first see what it’s done to another infamous fraction from the game.
To be fair, the Legion doesn’t seem to have much use when it comes to the bigger picture as they are introduced and then mostly neutralised in a single episode, but it does manage to expand the universe a little more, give an utterly random role to Macaulay Culkin and continues to make that point that just because someone has come to power in this messed up future, it doesn’t mean they’re right, or even competent. While Lucy doesn’t get much of a showing this episode other than getting crucified for a bit, watching her try to reason with a Roman cult who pronounces Caesar with a hard “c” just ends up with her getting yet another harsh lesson that nice guys (and gals) tend to finish last out here.
Elsewhere, due to the temporary omission of Norm’s thread and with no call backs to Vault 33 or Vault 32, we now have more space to take a closer look at Cooper Howard’s assassination mission back in 2077. But while we just get more teasing between him and House and more backstory on the Ghoul’s eventual journey towards his current, noseless predicament, it’s the stuff in 2296 that gives him a bit more to do. However, while introducing us to the ravaged dregs of the NCR – maybe the only faction who isn’t completely batshit and amoral – expands the world a little further, we’ll have to see if his act of forcing the Legion into out and out war with itself will come back to bite him.
However, the most gripping thread this season still continues to be the continued extinguishing of the idealism that’s occurring within Maximus as his allegiance swings like a pendulum in a really cool metal suit. The fact that he’s so quick to suggest murdering Harkness to the council shows that the parts of him that were once good are still rapidly scabbing over, but when his proposed target takes him under his wing and invites him to join him in what I guess would be the Brotherhood’s equivalent of a joy ride (fly a helicopter, fight some rogue robots – sounds like a genuine blast), Maximus starts to see the Commonwealth’s representative’s point of view. Or, at least, he does until they stumble across a soft drink sweatshop populated by both normal and Ghoul children and ran by Maximus’ old squire, Thaddeus. Of course, since the Brotherhood’s creed sees the zombie like Ghouls as abominations, Harkness readies his huge machine gun to exterminate the infected children – however, proving that he isn’t so far gone to allow someone to murder a roomful of children, Maximus kills his partner by flattening his skull with his own Super Sledge hammer – so its goodbye to Kumail Nanjiani then, I guess. It’s ironic because before, Maximus was all set to murder the representative in order to facilitate the rebellion, but in killing Harkness in order to save a bunch of Ghoul kids, he’s potentially doomed the Brotherhood to civil war when Quintus and his fellow conspirers won’t be in a position to defend themselves. Oops.
While there’s a feeling that both Lucy and the Ghoul’s plot threads are moving at a surprisingly deliberate pace, it’s thankfully offset by the fact that the Maximus story is going great guns and could conceivably go anywhere. Fingers crossed that things start crystallizing for them all a bit faster, but until it does, the Brotherhood is looking after us nicely.
Hot dog.
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