Fallout has been rightly commended for spinning out many varied story lines while adapting the smash hit video game franchise that tells a gargantuan tale that spans a good two hundred years and deals with the plotting, execution and quirky aftermath of the end of civilisation as we know it. We’ve witnessed government conspiracies that’s seen nuclear holocaust planned for prophet; Vault-dwelling communities used as experiments and pawns; zombie gunslingers; a violent, Mad-Max style surface existence and even a religious order who exercise their will using kick-ass mech suits, but as Season 2 edges even closer to its end, there’s a feeling that the sheer influx of its many plot lines is causing the inferstructure of the show to buckle under the weight. Yes, Fallout is still delivering its particular brand of pointed, cynical satire and post-apocalyptic carnage to a high standard, but can it keep successfully juggling all those dense threads until the end becomes nigh?
After her many misadventures throughout the Wasteland, Lucy has finally, seemingly achieved her goal of catching up to her atrocity-happy father, Hank, in her quest to bring him to justice. However, the way that she’s gotten her reunion might leave something to be desired as she was drugged by her “partner”, the Ghoul and handed over to her parent in trade. Waking in his Las Vegas lair, Lucy discovers that her dad has been making leaps and bounds when perfecting his mind control tech and already has a cluster of cannibals, weirdos and even formally violent members of opposing clans living and working in perfect harmony. Meanwhile, the Ghoul is still where a vengful Lucy left him: impaled on a lamp post on a Vegas street. Stuck out of reach from his serum and slowly succumbing to the feral nature of his disease, he’s rescued by a huge, hulking, cloaked figure who spirits him away and heals his wounds on the condition that he joins a race of super mutants in an upcoming battle against the enclave.
While he flashes back to some overdue questions he poses to his wife concerning the dodgy, apocalyptic shit that Vault-Tec is planning, we also get more information concerning the cold fusion relic which, over two hundred years later, has now ended up in in the hands of Maximus and Thaddeus who debate about what to do with it. But after they’re found by Dogmeat, the (sometimes) faithful mutt leads them back to a still battered Ghoul.
But while the sands of the Wasteland continue to shift on the surface, business in Vaults 32 and 33 continue to get ever more tense. Overseer Steph seems to be getting mire power mad by the minute with the disappearance of Woody and a declaration of marriage to Chad that he had no idea about. Similarly, Betty’s having leadership issues as she squares up to the snack club that’s causing a resources drain during their water shortage issues. Who knew a dystopian future could be so complicated, right?
There’s a sense that Fallout’s sophomore outing is probably going either one of two ways. The first is that it’s going to expand and expand until every single plot thread pops like a balloon in the finale to utterly destroy the status quo in prep for a third season – however, I’m getting the feeling that the show might give a chirpy thumbs up to the second option that means the plot threads don’t pop and everything contained within is only a glorified launching point for future seasons. It would be a shame if a season that’s impressively building one it’s established universe ends up mostly as a taster for bigger things, but there’s a few things that occur in this episode that makes me believe that large swathes of what we’ve seen this season is only a preamble to the future. The main one is the introduction of a super mutant to the show who seem to offer nothing more than a way to get the Ghoul off from being impaled on that pole and drop major hints about an upcoming war against the Enclave. It literally adds nothing to the current season and feels a bit like the nonevent that was the fairly hyped up introduction of the Legion. Whether both of these points prove that the show is marshalling it’s forces for a distant, epic smackdown, it doesn’t really help us right now in the midst of the snarl of stories that are still running at (mostly) full speed.
First things least. While the focus on the illusion of democracy flickering out in the Vaults still brings that social edge that kicked the show off, the continuing misadventures of Vaults 32 and 33 still prove to be somewhat annoying distractions from the main attractions. Yes, it’s important that Fallout keeps at least one toe in the corruption of society, but Betty being forced to exert more of her power to quash problem issues in 33 and Steph going full secret police in 32 still prove to be vaguely irritating fish in a larger, more interesting pond. Similarly, with no mention of all to a choked out Norm and only a couple of scenes concerning Maximus and Thaddeus in the aftermath of the in-fighting of the Brotherhood, prime real estate really does seem to be getting fairly thin and ehen you take into account that the Ghoul’s story also runs head-first into a cul-de-sac, it seems that my suspicions of Fallout getting too crowded are worryingly well-founded.
Or, at least they would be if it wasn’t for Lucy McClean and Cooper Howard. While there’s been a feeling that poor old Lucy has been somewhat aimless this season as she’s been bounced from the Vaults, to the Ghoul, to the Legion, to Vegas and then into the hands of her dad, but now she’s face to face with Hank, we’re finally starting to see a true test to her insistence that being nice is key. While trying to keep her mindset in the vicious world of the Wasteland was one thing, seeing that her father has created a way to make everyone as fine and upstanding as she tries to be (kicked drug habit notwithstanding), means that she’s experiencing yet another troubling moral choice. Technically the world would be better if there were less cannibals and crazed, warring gangs; but is the wide-eyed goody-two-shoes going to think that mind control is an exceptable price to pay?
Keeping that streak of impossible, moral conundrums alive is a much welcome focus of Barb Cooper during the flashbacks, which have been going entertainingly hard on 1950s, cold war paranoia despite being set in 2077. While the scenes featuring a disturbed Cooper finally confronting his wife about the atrocities her company is about to unleash, the fact that she’s the face of it is now revealed not to be as cut and dried as we first thought. Having to make aesthetic choices about the end of the world is troubling enough (how on earth do you select the size of the proposed mushroom clouds that’ll soon be peppering the landscape), but when we discover that Dr. Wilzig (remember him?) gives her some chilling pointers, we discover that her part in the destruction of society was moderately less cold blooded when we first thought.
While Fallout’s narrative flow could hardly be described as anaemic, my natural mistrust of streaming shows and their ability to avoid getting cancelled means that I’m kind of wanting season two to get to some kind of point. With only two episodes left to go, there’s ample time for the showrunners to keep adding to this strange, violent and unpredictable world, but it would be nice if it could all come together sooner or later and not be saved for some far off season me may never see….
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