Fallout Recap: Selling the End of the World

As is so often the case for a series’ penultimate episode, there’s an overwhelming sense of the calm before the storm in “The Radio,” as our three leads converge on what we now know to be the Griffith Observatory. Lucy, having recovered Wilzig’s head — he’s looking worse than he ever has — and the chip lodged in his throat, is headed there to bargain for her dad. The Ghoul has a new reason, aside from the promise of a bounty, to trek there, too. As it turns out, Moldaver is a mysterious figure from his past life as Cooper Howard; she was an anti-Vault-Tec figurehead who enlisted him to snoop on his wife, Barb, on the promise that Barb led a hidden second life. And by the end of the episode, Maximus is to be recovered by the Brotherhood, who no doubt will come down like a hammer on the observatory in the Hollywood Hills when they realize that Wilzig’s chip is there. Remember the elder cleric’s spiel: It holds the power to change the wasteland, etc. There’s poetic symmetry to the fact that this season began, and will probably end, overlooking the L.A. skyline.

The last handful of episodes have been stuffed. It’s enough to lead you to suspect the show to have been conceived with a longer initial season in mind; even at just shy of an hour long, six and seven ask you to get through a lot and retain a lot of new information before the finale. Even so, it’s impressive that the show has managed to weave together the pre- and post-war arcs so seamlessly. While cryopods feel like a convenient device to get the characters from the past into the present — if indeed that’s how Moldaver has made her way to 2296 — the presence of important characters in both timelines leaves us more inclined to care about both timelines equally. The past isn’t superfluous to the drama at hand. It is the drama at hand. With each episode that goes by, Fallout makes it abundantly clear that the events of the past and present are directly connected by more than just the nukes.

On the subject of the past, one of the best scenes in the episode comes in the two-way exchange between Cooper and Moldaver, or “Miss Williams,” as she’s known in 2077. Leading one of the Hollywood Red meetings, she delivers a calm diatribe on the state of America, pointing out that their enemies aren’t the common boys that their soldiers murder in the East but those that hold power at home. Cooper, of course, who fought in the war, is having none of it. “That’s about all the horseshit I can take,” he says, stepping up to leave the room. Cue an exchange of zingers, taking one another to task for their perceived hypocrisies, in Cooper’s case, for becoming Vault-Tec’s mascot for annihilation. “Vault-Tec is the largest company in America. There’s a lot of money in selling the end of the world,” Miss Williams says. “Well, I’m sure there’s a lot of money in selling a political ideology that ends in breadlines,” Cooper retorts.

Through this fiery exchange of ideas, they must come to respect each other enough to continue their conversation in the hall outside, where Miss Williams tells Cooper that she discovered the means to end the resource war that America has been locked in for a decade — and thus prevent nuclear Armageddon — in the form of cold fusion. But Vault-Tec bought it from her “so they could put it on the shelf. All because it didn’t fit into their business model.” Hence why she asks him to listen in on Barb’s meetings at work — she wants his help in getting the cold fusion technology back before the world is destroyed.

Well, a fat lot of good that did. Nevertheless, this meeting goes some way in explaining why the Ghoul is so keen to have a conversation with Moldaver in the present, so far as to go full Inglourious Basterds on a family of lead miners eking out a living in the wastes at the episode’s outset. (The dad and son each wear a set of the armor worn by the elite corps of the NCR in Fallout: New Vegas, so presumably the dad is a veteran from before the fall of Shady Sands.)

Meanwhile, in Vault 4, Lucy is being chastised by Overseer Benjamin for breaching the vault’s trust — despite their gifts of clean water, food, safety, and security — by going up to Level 12. (There’s also the whole “maiming a scientist with acid” thing.) And though the experiment Lucy saw there was indeed heinous, that wasn’t actually from the present — it was a recording of the hideous experiments the old vault dwellers used to subject the new dwellers’ ancestors to in the past. The old inhabitants — a society of mad scientists, essentially — were turning humans into Gulpers, until the Gulpers fought back, and the new dwellers took over. So while Lucy’s reaction was understandable in the heat of the moment, she might’ve jumped the gun.

Her punishment? DEATH. Well, death by banishment to the surface with two weeks’ worth of supplies that will be carried up for her, naturally. So yeah, they’re essentially letting her go. In the meantime, Maximus steals the vault’s fusion core and uses it to juice up his power armor, storming the vault atrium to “save” Lucy from her pending execution. A few broken-in-half vault dwellers later, he realizes his mistake, and our wasteland duo returns peacefully to the surface. But before they can venture onwards to catch up to Thaddeus and Wilzig’s head, Lucy guilt trips Maximus into returning the fusion core to the vault.

They’re getting closer. Maximus even agrees to return to Vault 33 with Lucy when it’s all over. Do I hear wedding bells? Oh — and he even finally tells Lucy the truth about who he is, i.e., not Knight Titus. Lucy, for her part, is very forgiving. “I just threw acid in an innocent man’s face,” she says. “And I’ve only been up here for two weeks. The wasteland sucks.”

It sucks for few more than Thaddeus right now, who still has Wilzig’s head, but whose foot has been crushed into a gory blood-and-bone mush. He’s on his way to a radio station to contact the Brotherhood for a pickup; in the meantime, he leaves CX404 inside a Nuka-Cola fridge because he’s an absolute bastard. What other miseries will befall him? Whatever they are, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. As it happens, he runs into a suicidal snake oil salesman (Jon Daly), last seen by both Maximus and Lucy in episode two. He’s a real Thespy, melodramatic type, and Daly makes the most out of his flamboyant line reads, like: “I have in my possession serums and potions for every malady and misfortune that could possibly beset a wandering traveler such as yourself,” etc.

In exchange for Thaddeus’s fusion core — i.e., the one he stole from Maximus’s T-60 — the snake-oil salesman gives Thaddeus a mysterious elixir, which repairs his foot almost immediately. Later on, when Thaddeus is shot in the throat by a booby-trapped crossbow outside the radio station he borrowed the services of to contact the Brotherhood, it doesn’t kill him. Per Maximus, who just arrived with Lucy, the snake-oil salesman’s snake oil has turned Thaddeus into a ghoul. “I should never have trusted a doctor who smelled like that,” he says. And so Thaddeus runs away, an eminently understandable move with the Brotherhood’s zero-tolerance policy on mutants. But aren’t they supposed to be the heroes, Lucy wonders? Well, as Thaddeus himself puts it: “It’s a complicated organization.”

At least Lucy and Maximus have Wilzig’s head now. As the Brotherhood touch down near the radio station, Maximus picks up another decapitated noggin from one of the station’s many corpse-filled traps, and smashes its face so as to be unrecognizable. He hands Wilzig’s head over to Lucy, and tells her to go find Hank. Before they separate, they kiss — finally!

In Vault 33, the imprisoned raiders are mysteriously poisoned to death, and Betty enacts a scheme to relocate half of the inhabitants of 33 over to 32. (Even Reg and Woody are doomed to live the rest of their lives in separate vaults.) Norm, frankly, has had enough of all this weirdness and hacks the overseer’s terminal to send a message to the hitherto unseen overseer of Vault 31. Pretending to be Overseer Betty, he claims that her mission has been compromised and is told to return to Vault 31 immediately.

And so, with that, the stories of the past and present are drawing to their conclusions, ready to intertwine in the finale. How the timelines will converge — Cooper Howard and The Ghoul, Miss Howard and Moldaver, the mystery of Vault 31, its secrets hidden for hundreds of years — is anybody’s guess. But if there is any inevitability we’ve learned from Fallout, it’s that the sins of the past will always be repeated in the present. We exist, essentially, in a time loop. Even the greatest conflict of them all, a nuclear exchange which deleted at least 90 percent of the Earth’s population, begot more conflict. But that’s the human condition, and that’s what is at Fallout’s gonzo heart: our propensity to fight, to maim, to kill. Civilization, after all, is just a blip on the timeline of human history. Since man discovered fire, we have set one another alight. When the first rocks were used as tools, they were also used to bash in skulls.

In other words? War. War never changes.

Bottle Caps

• The Ghoul saved CX404. More importantly, he called him Dogmeat — the shared name of the many dogs you can find out in the wastes in the Fallout series.

• The mad scientists that meet their demise in the gullets of the Gulpers they created in Vault 4 are the same family that Cooper meets shooting his Vault-Tec ad.

• In the past, we can see Cooper reading an issue of Tesla Science magazine, which is a collectible you can find in Fallout 4. Each magazine boosts your critical damage with energy weapons by 5 percent.

• Cameo alert! The radio host is played by Fred Armisen, the long-standing bandleader on Late Night With Seth Meyers.

• When Norm hacks Overseer Betty’s terminal, it’s the same hacking interface as the one we see in the games.