[Editor’s note: This is a recap of Fallout episode four. The recap of episode five publishes April 16.]
In talking about Prime Video’s Fallout over these last four episodes, we’ve largely skipped over its merits as Hollywood’s latest big, expensive video-game adaptation. Partly that’s because a series has to stand, first and foremost, on its own strengths; no amount of in-jokes, Easter eggs, or bobbleheads can spackle over a show’s basic obligation to function as a compelling narrative (something Fallout has mostly achieved, we’d argue, despite a few lulls here and there). But also, there’s the fact that the series hasn’t necessarily engaged with the Fallout games as games very much; the story beats, the music, the look of the thing are all fairly spot-on, but—barring the fight sequence in “The Target”—there hasn’t been much here that replicates the experience of actually playing Fallout.
“The Ghouls,” though, addresses that deficit in spades. After all, what could be more Fallout than that classic series mainstay, Exploring An Abandoned Vault Where Something Fucked Up Happened, Way Before You Got There?
In fact, this episode is something of a twofer: We not only get Chet and Norm investigating the ruins of Vault 32—where some overachiever apparently set out to break the record for “Most Messed Up Thing Anyone’s Ever Done With A Foosball Table, Impalement Edition,” amongst other grisly deaths—but also Lucy clearing a classic Fallout dungeon (an abandoned supermarket) after the Ghoul sells her to two of the most affable organ harvesters we’ve ever seen on TV. That also means we get plenty of time with Matt Berry as cheerful dissection-bot Snip-Snip and Fallout’s most fucked-up sex scene since the last one, so, honestly, what’s not to like?
The theme of the day is survival, of course, as the Ghoul runs Lucy through a cynical crash course on who gets to eat who out in the Wasteland. (Hint: The person with power is the one who gets to set the table at any given moment.) It’s a philosophy that makes some room for sympathy—note the way the Ghoul lets his old buddy Roger, deep into the process of becoming a zombie-esque feral ghoul, go out on a happy memory before he puts a bullet through his rapidly degrading brain—but not restraint. After all, the ass jerky isn’t going to make itself, right?
And, sure, some of this stuff is a little on the nose (or lack thereof), as the Ghoul all but forces Lucy to suck down irradiated water to buy herself a few more days of life, literally forcing her to become more like him to survive. But the presentation is spot-on, the rising clicks of the Geiger counter on the young Vault Dweller’s Pip-Boy pushing back ineffectually against the far more insistent drumbeat of survival. One of Fallout’s greatest strengths, so far, is its ability to leverage the grotesque as it makes its various points, and the vileness of the water, and the repeated shots of Roger’s—we don’t know how to put this— butt flesh hanging off the Ghoul’s backpack, are a constant reminder that, in the words of our old pal Tom Hanks, the weak in this world are meat. This is something that only gets underscored when Lucy bites off the Ghoul’s finger just before he makes the hand-off and gets her own severed in return.
It’s a shocking moment, a reminder that Fallout, despite its comedy impulses, is under no obligation to play nice with its characters. Sure, Lucy gets a new (albeit very dead-looking) finger re-attached a few minutes later, after she’s passed into the custody of Snip-Snip (in what is, transparently, another set-up for an attack on her idealism). But Fallout never wants you to forget that, in the Wasteland, you’re only one slip-up, one oversight, one missed vial, from being someone else’s meal.
That’s true out of the Wasteland, too: We don’t check in on Maximus or Thaddeus this episode, and so we’re left to draw our parallels between Lucy’s ordeals and her far more well-fed friends and family back in Vault 33—even if not all of them are getting the Jell-O cake they so desperately desire. And these weirdos do want things, albeit in ways that come off one part tragic, three parts hilarious. Case in point: the scene that sees Lucy’s grieving (and pregnant) best friend Steph stop by Chet The (Former) Door Guy’s place to drop off some of her dead husband’s effects, a process that goes from consolation to grief-based sexual role-play to explosive water breaking in the course of about a minute. As we noted above, Fallout’s lack of subtlety about the human body is one of its strengths, and this is a quick, funny bit of sketch comedy that also reminds us how out of touch the Dwellers are with their actual feelings.
Which might explain why things went so wrong over in Vault 32, which now appears to have exterminated itself well before Moldaver and her crew of killers ever passed through on their bloody little errand. Despite the Vault Dwellers helpfully graffiting things like “We know what you did” on the walls right before dying—the most video game-ass thing to ever happen in a video-game adaptation ever—Norm and Chet can’t make heads or tails of it. Fallout isn’t especially concerned with being a mystery show—it’s too irreverent to treat the various MacGuffins it’s been setting up with the necessary respect—but it does at least make a creepy spectacle of the artfully arranged corpses that greet our two adventurers on their little side-quest, before ultimately revealing that the whole thing has something to do with Lucy and Norm’s mom.
The main event, though, deals with Lucy herself, who gets another object lesson in the dangers of compassion after threatening the incredibly pleasant organ harvesters into letting go of all their captives, including the feral ghouls they’ve had locked up for discount parts. (The sight of horrified people locked up in supermarket freezers is another entry in Fallout’s big list of “fucked up stuff we never knew we didn’t want to see,” by the way.) But even getting her first kill (on a turning feral named Martha) only serves to harden Lucy’s resolve to be good in a world that seems to demand badness: Citing the “Golden Rule, motherfucker,” she gives the Ghoul his mind-saving medicine before tromping off into the Wastes. Ella Purnell, as per usual on this show, nails it: She’s completely convincing as a version of Lucy that’s getting harder, but not crueler, in response to the need to survive.
We end, though, on the Ghoul, whose own desperate desire for more of that life-giving fluid gets sidetracked by an even more primal need of his own: an old copy of The Man From Deadhorse, the movie we saw him filming back in “The Head.” Walton Goggins’ eyes are hard to read here and not just because we’re seeing them from beneath about a pound of Deadpool cosplay. Is he reminded of the compromises of the past? Taunted by his own former appearance? Or just wrestling with the reminder that there are, from time to time, more important things than the pure, desperate need to survive?
Stray observations
- In focusing on headier stuff, I’ve probably lost sight of the most important thing about this episode: Matt Berry voicing a very polite robot that wants to take out your organs. Berry doesn’t bust out any especially weird line reads, but it’s always a pleasure to hear his soothing voice in non-soothing circumstances.
- Worth noting that the Ghoul clocks Lucy’s last name with interest.
- “Sometimes a fella’s gotta eat a fella.”
- Goggins, unsurprisingly, only gets better the more room the show gives him to show the nuance lurking behind the Ghoul’s surface cruelty.
- Dear Chet: We know the line is only really there to prime the viewer for the water breaking right after. But if we could never hear “Now that is one wet lady!” in the midst of a sex scene ever again, that would be super.
- Dr. Snip-Snip has impeccable bedside manner: “You’re lucky I don’t have to use a thumb! Our finger inventory’s in a sorry state.”
- Fallout Game Corner: Mr. Handy robots date back to the original Fallout games, although Snip-Snip is pretty clearly modeled on the versions from Fallout 3 onward. Radiation King TVs are all over the place in the Waste, and anyone who’s played Fallout 4 knows Abraxo drain cleaner is a great source of antiseptic (or drugs) in that game’s crafting system.
- “It’s v-very poisonous!”