Review: Fallout, "The Beginning"| Season 1, Episode 8

"War... War never changes."

Image: Amazon Prime

“When you put it like that, it sounds downright morally questionable.”

I expressed this sentiment in my review of the first few episodes, and it bears repeating: I’m incredibly annoyed with Amazon’s decision to release all of Fallout’s first season at once. It’s anyone’s guess as to why they made that decision, from a decision to bypass spoilers to thinking it would lead to higher viewership to some cynical strategy for increasing ad-free subscriptions. (The latter theory was suggested by a friend of mine, and given how obvious the black pauses in episodes telegraph where commercial breaks are supposed to go, it’s my odds-on favorite explanation.) Whatever the reason, Amazon obviously made it out of “fiduciary responsibility” as opposed to any creative decision—and in doing so, either intentionally or unintentionally, wound up underlining the series’ sharpest point.

But we’ll get to that later. The main reason why this decision annoys me is that as I was going through the first season, I spent the time wishing I was reviewing it on a weekly basis for all of you. Fallout left a strong impression in its first three hours, and that positive impression only continued as the season did. Embracing the true law of the wastes, the narrative has been “sidetracked by bullshit every goddamned time,” sending Lucy, Maximus, and The Ghoul on a series of side jaunts: nearly getting dissected in a supermarket, taking refuge in a mutant-loaded vault, running afoul of bandits masquerading as a legitimate militia. The series didn’t fall into the “X-hour movie” trap that so many streaming services do, laying out episodes that were distinguishable as episodes.

More satisfying, they were distinguishable as Fallout. I spent a lot of time gushing about the aesthetics and Easter eggs of the first episodes, and I continued to watch the series in a perpetual Pointing Leo meme state as those references persisted. Every episode has featured sequences that are alternatively hilarious, violent, gross, tragic, and even step into bizarre “Wild Wasteland” territory on a couple of occasions. Allowing the characters to get distracted repeatedly never felt like killing time; it felt like an enrichment of the experience, the sense that the creative team was as excited to dick around in this sandbox as anyone else who’s fired up one of these games in the last 27 years. As a fan of the series for all of those 27 years, this has been about as rewarding an adaptation as I could have hoped for.

“The Beginning” keeps that feeling of appreciation going to the end, even if there’s only one fully bizarre element in a Robobrain Roomba and only one bit of gonzo Bloody Mess violence in Brotherhood adept taking a tumble into spinning Vertibird blades. This is a finale that’s all about tying up loose ends strung throughout the season, while scorching some of the earth behind it, and setting our quartet of wastelanders (the rebranded Dogmeat gets the bump to series regular in my eyes) off on their next objectives. And while it might be a bit too prompt in the way it ties off some of those loose ends, it makes its reveals land with appropriately atomic force.

The explanation of exactly what is going on comes as the two prominent narratives of this season come together: Lucy’s quest to see where and why Hank was taken, and Norm digging to figure out the truth of the power structure of Vault 33. (On the latter, I retract my initial skepticism of the show’s decision to go back to Vault 33, as there’s been great work by Moisés Arias, solid bureaucratic comedy, and incredibly chilling moments.) Both quests reach their apex here, as Lucy brings Wilzig’s head to Moldaver at her headquarters—Griffith Park Observatory, expertly reimagined as post-apocalyptic compound—and Norm finally gets behind Vault 31 to see why it provides all of Vault 33’s Overseers.

And it turns out, all the unanswered questions have the same horrifying answer, delivered via a mix of Moldaver speeches, flashbacks of Cooper spying on the Dr. Strangelove-esque meeting of America’s corporate leaders, and matter-of-fact exposition from the Roomba-mounted brain. When Birdie of Vault 4 asked what the experiment of Lucy’s vault was, it was clear a reveal was coming, and the reveal is awful even by the standards of what we’ve seen before. Vault-Tec decided that by creating the technology that could save the world, it was the company that would determine how best to save the world, and that they should push the world to a point where it would need saving. Vault 31 isn’t part of a trinity, it’s the puppet master to govern the events of its adjoining vaults, and by extension the next phase of human development. Hank, Betty, and Stephanie have all survived 200 years in suspended animation, and are prepared to usher in a new world order ruled by the most diabolical of all forces: middle management.

The reveal of this conspiracy is both a development that pays off the looming dread of the previous few episodes—a dread that reached its peak in Norm and Chet’s exploration of Vault 32—and also the proof of how accurate an adaptation and continuation of this story it is. Fallout the television series understands the truth that’s buried at the core of Fallout the video game franchise: how truly fucked up the world was long before the bombs fell, and that the ramifications of said fucking reverberate even centuries later. Behind the violence and wackiness is truly bleak stuff, billions of lives determined by a handful of men and women driven by profit and devoid of morals. “The Beginning” stares into that, summarized with matter-of-fact statements to horrified looks. My personal favorite, Bud’s brain explaining their ultimate logic: “America outsourced the survival of this company to the private sector. But it would’ve been insane to keep a failed nation alive. So we kept Vault-Tec alive instead.”

The revelations regarding Lucy’s family and the truth of Vault 33 are as earth-shattering as they could possibly be, though they are one of the main quibbles with the finale in that learning them leaves Lucy nearly catatonic. Watching Lucy learn the harsh realities of the wasteland and having to adjust her moral compass to survive said realities has been a consistent joy of Fallout, and Ella Purnell has been great at showing how her fundamental optimism is continually bent without being broken. Here though, she’s broken, a stunned silence governing the majority of her time onscreen. And while it’s certainly understandable, it does keep her from being a proactive member of events of “The Beginning,” save one symbolic aiming and one subsequent shot of her pistol.

Image: Amazon Prime

The active role in current events belongs to Maximus, who returns to the Brotherhood with his decoy head in a ruse that lasts all of 30 seconds, only to earn a stay of execution by directing them to its true location. It’s a bit of a contrivance to keep him alive, but it works, especially as it continues the trend of showing that for all its display of knightly virtues, T-45 power armor and vertibirds are the only things separating the Brotherhood of Steel from any other faction jockeying for power in the wasteland. The long-departed Rubicon taught me that any Michael Cristofer character has some form of ulterior motive, and Elder Quintus displays an ambitious pragmatism that pulls on Maximus’s impulses. Even if he doesn’t know Maximus has found his own definition of home—the promise Lucy made for them to return to Vault 33 together—it’s still a perfectly calculated pitch.

Maximus’s intelligence interrupts the emotional display, as Brotherhood vertibirds swoop down on the Observatory—and instead of the expected “Flight of the Valkyries,” it’s to the velvet tones of Nat King Cole “I Don’t Want To See Tomorrow.” This is another slow-motion scene of violence, but unlike the first raider attack on Vault 33 or Maximus’s ill-advised rescue attempt in Vault 4, this is brutal warfare on a Saving Private Ryan level. Seeing the Brotherhood artillery mow down the NCR remnants, or the remnants finding the way to crack the power armor shell, you’re seeing the Fallout catchphrase of “War never changes” (spoken twice in this episode with the force of knowing the viewers are waiting for the shoe to drop) writ large.

There is a twist to the battle, as the T-45 power armor is laid low by a man who learned its weaknesses 200 years ago. As much fun as Walton Goggins has been playing a nameless gunslinger heartlessly blasting his way across the wastes—and he’s a ton of fun in the final scenes as he wipes out a full detachment of the Brotherhood—he’s been delivering even stronger work in the Cooper Howard flashbacks. Flashbacks can be a thankless part of a lot of shows, but Goggins has kept a lot of that material afloat from the polished nature of Cooper’s Vault-Tec pitch to the growing discomfort he has with Vault-Tec’s soulless nature of doing things. Here, while he’s similarly stunned into silence by his wife coldly laying out the near-extinction of the human race, he conveys as much with his face as he does with his normal loquaciousness, that despite all his hopes he’s personally and professionally in bed with pure monsters.

In the present day, he shows how that realization has eaten away at him and provided the motivation beyond surviving for the sake of it, scarring Hank’s face and spitting out the question that’s been on his lips for two centuries: “Where’s my fucking family?” He doesn’t get an answer, as Hank rockets away to parts unknown—or at least unknown to him, in a final reveal that motivated my loudest Pointing Leo moment. It’s a promising direction for the series, opening up the present Ghoul in the same way it’s been opening up Cooper’s past. Even with all we’ve learned about him there’s still considerable blank space between his discovery of Vault-Tec’s plan and fleeing the bombs as a birthday party entertainer, and even more between that moment and where he is now.

And the present day shows further promising directions for a second season of Fallout, as Lucy takes the Ghoul—and Dogmeat by extension—up on the offer to join the hunt for Hank alongside the wastes, leaving Maximus to be hailed as the warrior who killed Moldavar and secured the cold fusion technology. (Also leaving poor Norm sealed in the control room of Vault 31 with all his attendant knowledge, though none of our other main characters are aware of that.) It’s the right kind of season finale, one that clears up the quests that drove the action of the first season and sets new ones in motion, and ones that leave a lot of room to get sidetracked by bullshit with increasing regularity.

Even with all the references and ground covered in these eight episodes there’s still a voluminous amount of content for Fallout to cover, the surface only scratched in terms of settings and themes and items. It’s clear that the ambition to do so is here, given the sight of a Deathclaw skull, the name drop of “super mutant” in the fateful meeting, and the final shot of Hank’s ultimate destination. And Fallout proved, with confidence and cleverness, it’s earned the right to get as far into this world as it’s willing to go. War never changes, but here’s hoping release schedules have that luxury, and we get the chance to crack that Vault door open ever wider in the future.

Stray observations

• Thanks for reading as always! A second season is coming, here’s hoping that it’s released in a way that allows us to have steadier conversations.

• I quibbled in my first review about how frequently the creative team were incorporating needle drops in the first few episodes, but either I became accustomed to their use or they became more appropriately deployed as time went on.

• Given all the buildup of “the Flame Woman” in the previous episodes, it was a disappointingly quick dispatch of Moldaver in the Observatory battle. We likely haven’t seen the last of Sarita Choudhury given we don’t get an explanation of how she also survived for 200 years, but for how much she resonated to present Shady Sands survivors and past activists, it feels off that she’s left as a corpse Maximus is unwillingly using to climb to power in the Brotherhood, and a conscience he may or may not follow.

• Quick sidebar for how great the casting remained over the course of the season, every role pitch-perfect. Highlights are Matt Berry as the voice of Mr. Handy robots (and the out-of-work sitcom actor who provided that voice), Glenn Fleshler as the gloriously named small-time crime boss Sorrel Booker, and Fred Armisen as DJ Carl playing “authentic fiddle tunes.” The latter in particular feels he stepped into the wasteland from a Portlandia sketch.

• We confirmed that Maximus wasn’t responsible for Dane’s near-crippling injury, but that they did it themselves out of fear for what they’d encounter in the wasteland. Hopefully we see more of them as the Brotherhood shifts to its newly powered position.

• On the Brotherhood scribe topic, no sighting of Thaddeus in the finale, but his running off to avoid Brotherhood judgment after being ghoulified is the smartest move that Fallout’s creative team could make. Out-of-his-element Johnny Pemberton is the best use of Johnny Pemberton, and as they’ve moved past what could have been ongoing tension between him and Maximus, he’s in perfect position to be a recurring player in future episodes. I look forward to seeing what the makeup team does to him.

• I was expecting de-aged Kyle MacLachlan in the flashback to more closely resemble Dale Cooper, but with the hair and costuming, I was more reminded of David Dastmalchian in the highly entertaining Late Night with the Devil.

• “Not much food in here, expect the occasional very large bug.”

Vault-Tec Operations Manual

• Okay, let’s get this out of the way right now: NEW. FUCKING. VEGAS. As far as dropping a teaser for a second season, prominently featuring what’s arguably the best game in the series as Hank’s final destination is the most guaranteed way to get my attention. The show takes place 15 years after the game, so history remains recent enough for characters to return. Personally, I’m hoping to see the Kings make an appearance.

• Speaking of Fallout: New Vegas, it’s hard for any fan of the series to miss “Mr. House” himself, Robert House (Rafi Silver) representing RobCo at Vault-Tec’s meeting. Though a limited presence, he gives off House’s cold profit-motivated energy (“There’s a lot of earning potential with the end of the world”) and his skepticism of Vault-Tec fits with his plan to forge his own way forward in the post-apocalypse. It remains to be seen—although it seems the safe bet—that season two is about to make “The House Always Wins” the canonical New Vegas ending.

• That board meeting is a frenzy of references, as RobCo, Big MT, REPCONN, and West-Tek are all prominent corporations whose products and headquarters are frequently featured in Fallout games. And the executive speculation bears horrifying fruit as Vault experiments: Vault 27 was deliberately overcrowded, Vault 87 was dedicated to experimentation that led to super mutants, Vault 106 pumped psychotropic drugs into the atmosphere, Vault 29 separated parents and children. A vault governed by a milkman robot hasn’t shown up anywhere I’m familiar with, but it’s absolutely not beyond the pale.

• Glad my prediction that we’d be referring to CX404 as “Dogmeat” took less than a season to come up. Still holding out for the incorporation of some cyberdog components.

• Ron Perlman cameo in season two or we riot.