New Vegas, Robert House And A Glorious Return to the Wasteland

Exploding heads, twisted experiments, mind-control and nefarious plots to destroy the world. I’m so glad Fallout is back.

Amazon released the first episode of its excellent video game adaptation a day early this week. The new release schedule means we get an episode per week rather than the entire batch all at once like Season 1. This means we get to talk about the show for the next eight weeks, which I think is a lot more fun than a binge.

In any case, there’s plenty to talk about in the Season 2 premiere. We have a bunch of different subplots and two timelines to cover. Spoilers ahead!

Lucy and The Ghoul

Lucy (Ella Purnell) and the Ghoul / Cooper (Walton Goggins) formed an unlikely alliance in Season 1, and they’re teaming up in Season 2 to track down Lucy’s father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) who we discovered was a pretty nefarious bad guy at the end of the first season. He’s left a bloody trail in his wake, though our heroes stack up quite a few bodies as well – though Lucy does not approve of the bounty hunter’s murderous methods.

I’m reminded of the opening line from Stephen King’s novel, The Dark Tower: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Granted, Hank is not a man in black, but it works as metaphor. And Cooper certainly is a gunslinger.

When we encounter him first in Season 2, he’s strung up ready to be hanged by a group of bandits. It turns out this was a trick. Lucy turned him in for the bounty on his head, and the plan was to shoot the rope and free the Ghoul. But Lucy tries, instead, to negotiate with the bandits. Let them go – with the caps – and they can all go their separate paths. Naturally, they don’t much care for the deal and it quickly turns to violence. Things end badly for the bandits. I almost forgot how much fun it was to watch the Ghoul in action. It’s also fun to hear the Marty Robbins song “Big Iron” play over the whole thing – a song broadcast on Radio New Vegas, Mojave Music Radio in the game, Fallout: New Vegas.

From here, they continue to follow Hank’s trail, with one quick pitstop for some flea soup. They come to a Vault that’s clearly been out of service for a long, long time. The Vault residents are all dead, and it appears they were dressed in rather brazen communist attire. A propaganda film plays on a loop, and several of the long-dead Vault Dwellers appear to be rigged Clockwork Orange-style to watch. “The Vault made them communists,” Lucy says, horrified on several levels.

The corpses all have devices stuck to the back of their necks, which brings us to a newcomer to this story: Robert Edwin House, played by Justin Theroux.

Mr. House I Presume?

In a flashback to the before times, we meet Mr. House at a bar where a number of angry men watch TV and get increasingly upset by a video of the RobCo Industries founder. “We didn’t vote for him!” the men grumble. “Oh yes you did,” House replies. “Every dollar spent is a vote cast.” The grumbling grows more menacing. “I think you’re in the wrong bar, pal,” a rather large man tells House.

“Obsolescence,” House replies. “It’s a heck of a thing. I try to see it from your perspective, but it’s hard to imagine being so dim as to be caught off guard by the inevitable.

A trio of the bar denizens drag House outside and House asks the big man to punch him in the face. “I think I’d enjoy it,” he says. After the punch: “I’m rarely wrong, but let’s move on.” Justin Theroux is so good in this role.

He shows them a trunk filled with $31 million in cash. He offers to give it to one of them if he’ll just put a device in the back of his neck. The man, already on the brink of violence, makes a counter-offer: Why don’t they just break his hands and take the money instead?

House reacts quickly, driving the pronged device into the man’s neck and pulling out a sort of remote control. He tells the man to “get rid of your friends” and hands him a baseball bat. Much brutality follows. When the device stops working and the man seems to shrug off any further commands, House turns the dial all the way up to eleven . . . and the man’s head explodes. Popping heads are a recurring theme here.

“The world may end,” House muses over the carnage, “but progress marches on.”

When Lucy and the Ghoul enter Vault 24 – another little nod to Fallout: New Vegas – they come across one human being still alive. He’s not a Vault Dweller, but rather someone Hank brought with him to leave as a messenger. He’s implanted the same type of device into the man’s neck, and he speaks the message that Hank commanded him to, calling Lucy “Sugar Bomb” (a nickname based on the fictional breakfast cereal) and urging her to go home over and over again until . . . pop!

The Ghoul asks Lucy if she’s going to take her father’s advice. “No,” she says. “He won’t stop hurting people.”

Keep Your Loved Ones Safe

Scenes from the present are interspersed with more of Cooper’s flashbacks to the days leading up to the nuclear war. He’s learned that Vault-Tec – and his wife – are planning to start the war themselves, with Robert House pressing the button. We also learn, in the present timeline, that Las Vegas was spared when everything went to hell because House was able to shoot down the rockets before they landed.

Torn between his horror over what his wife is planning and his loyalty to his family, Cooper makes an attempt to escape with his daughter. When a test of the nuclear response systems goes off, the town he’s passing through goes into full panic mode. His daughter tells him she’s scared and he scoops her up. A very futuristic military hovercraft flies overhead and Cooper looks up to see a billboard with his own face on it:

There’s a certain grim irony to this, but it’s enough to convince Cooper to turn back around. How can he run from a nuclear apocalypse? He meets with Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) who urges him to go with is wife to Las Vegas, where she’s supposed to meet with House. He doesn’t want to go, but he doesn’t really have a choice. It appears that Cooper is headed to Vegas in both timelines.

Meanwhile, Back At The Vault

We get lots of funny little scenes back at Vaults 31, 32 and 33. In Vault 31, poor Norm (Moisés Arias) is trapped, running out of food and water. The overseer – the disembodied brain of Vault-Tec senior junior vice president, Bud Askins – taunts and torments him. Why starve to death when he could just go into his father’s cryopod and essentially live forever? The other choice, he suggests, is an injection of a lethal poison that will kill him and turn him into dust. Quick and painless.

“You’re living in my world,” Bud monologues. “These three vaults are the product of decades of strategizing. … You’re just some malcontent who wandered down the wrong corridor. What hope do you have against the greatest achievement in the history of vertical integration?”

Norm chooses the third option: Chaos. He snaps the needle off of Bud’s robotic arm and goes to the terminal. Much to the overseer’s horror, Norm thaws out the entire Vault – dozens of cryopods all belonging to members of Bud’s Buds, the Vault-Tec management protégés who were destined to lord over Vaults 32 and 33 for hundreds of years. What happens when they’re all let out at once remains to be seen, but chaos is certainly the right word.

The current overseer of Vault 32, Steph Harper (Annabel O’Hagan) is one of these pre-war Vault-Tec employees. Of course, nobody but Norm and Lucy know the truth about Vault 31 and nobody knows where either of them are. So the plotting and scheming of Vault-Tec continues unabated, though perhaps not for long.

We get some pretty hilarious scenes in the Vaults. Poor Chet (Dave Register) has become Steph’s babysitter. She even wants to name the baby Chet Jr. despite the fact that it’s not his baby. Reg (Rodrigo Luzzi) starts a support group for the offspring of incestuous relationships – one hazard of generations upon generations of people living in a confined Vault with a small population. Two of the attendees are there not for support, but for validation – and because they think the rules forbidding marrying your cousin are being changed. (I think they’re cousins – this could be a Jaime and Cersei Lannister thing). They leave in a huff when informed that no, the rules aren’t changing.

Working for the Man

Finally we come to the man himself. Hank arrives at the Vault-Tec building in New Vegas, and checks into his terminal. “You have 462,311 unread messages,” the terminal voice tells him. “Well let’s get to it,” he says, grinning. Hank is a bad guy, but it’s kind of endearing to see how much pleasure he takes in the little things. A cup of fresh coffee elicits a grin. He gets out of the mech suit, cleans up and puts on a sharp suit and a Pip-Boy, smiling contendly into the mirror. Later, wandering the halls and offices, he comes across a yo-yo which makes him grin like a little boy with his new toy.

Hank leaves a message for Robert House. “This is Hank MacLean reporting for duty, sir,” he says as he sits at a desk, speaking into a microphone. Nobody at Vault-Tec knows he’s there. Nobody at Vault-Tec knows much of anything these days. He relays some of his observations about Vault 24 and the progress, or lack thereof, on House’s devices. He says he’s sure he can sort it all out and then they can talk about his promotion. “When this is all over,” he says, “you will be begging me to help you.”

All told, I thought this was a great season premiere. Lots of funny bits, some great, gory action. A lot of care has gone into the details, from Cooper’s kitchen to the Khans’ wasteland hideout. And the casting is so spot-on. Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, Justin Theroux, Kyle MacLachlan, all the supporting cast. Just top-notch.

Of course, the other main character, Maximus (Aaron Moten), and the entire Brotherhood of Steel plot was left out of this episode, so we’ll have to wait until next week to see where that story goes.

I also loved the music choices this episode. “Big Iron” obviously, but also “Cheek to Cheek” by Peggy Lee, whose songs “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and “Johnny Guitar” were both featured in Fallout: New Vegas.

Then, of course, Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away,” which takes on a very haunting and ominous tone when a cabal of wicked corporate executives are planning a nuclear war. We also get the Del-Vikings “Come Go With Me” which fits the tone of this show perfectly. The Ink Spots have been a big part of the Fallout franchise with songs like “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” In the Season 2 premiere, we get “It’s All Over But the Crying.” Perfect.

And last, but not least, as Hank wanders the halls of Vault-Tec, we get “Working for the Man” by Roy Orbison. I’m not sure there’s a more perfect song for this scene.

What did you think of the Fallout Season 2 premiere?

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