Fallout recap: The apocalypse gets very dark (and very good)

[Editor’s note: This is a recap of Fallout episode five. The recap of episode six publishes April 17.]

War never changes.

It’s the first line of almost every Fallout video game, a weary reminder—voiced, more often than not, by the great Ron Perlman—that while the circumstances of annihilation might change, the impulses driving humanity toward it probably won’t. It’s an idea Fallout the TV show has mostly only danced around so far, illustrating self-destructive impulses on the part of the various deranged weirdos that populate the Wastes without exploring them in detail. But now “The Past” has arrived, and a reckoning is in order.

Writing about “The Ghouls,” I noted that Fallout wasn’t all that interested in being a “mystery show,” one of those devious, convoluted puzzle boxes of the type that series producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are so well known for. Well, here comes episode five to blow that particular supposition out of the irradiated water, as Fallout goes heavy on a series of central mysteries in this hour, most especially: What the hell is actually going on with Vault 33?

Before that, though, we get one of the most existentially horrifying meet-cutes in recent memory, as Lucy comes across the remains of a truly ill-advised bro-down between Maximus and Thaddeus. (In a fairly laugh-light hour, Aaron Moten and Johnny Pemberton get the biggest giggles, flirting their way into a little ritual branding between buds.) Once Maximus reveals the truth about his identity, though, the jig is up, and Thaddeus leaves his “knight” paralyzed in his armor, waiting to be devoured by bugs. It’s genuine nightmare shit, which makes Lucy look all the more radiant as she rescues Maximus, negotiating some help in exchange for some anti-radiation drugs to help her cope with the water she drank in the previous installment.

“Trust” is the theme of the hour, as our two leads (Walton Goggins sits this one out) get to spend some time acting like actual human beings, building on the brief rapport they had back in “The Target.” There’s poison at the root of it, of course—Maximus, having just gotten burnt on honesty, is sticking to the “Knight Titus” lie—but there’s a genuine relief to watching two people basically be normal with each other on this show for a minute. Moten and Ella Purnell play well together, laughing and joking in a way that feels less flirtatious than simple relief at meeting someone they don’t have to keep their guard up around. All of which breaks down the moment they see two other human beings, and Fallout reminds us how quickly, and fatally, tense this series can get.

There are more “important” scenes in “The Past,” moments that will matter more for the show’s over-arching plot. But the slow confrontation that takes place between Maximus and Lucy and two random strangers on some random California railway bridge is the bit of the episode that will stick in my memory the hardest. The knee-jerk way the strangers (and Maximus!) lie about being armed. The way Lucy all but begs all involved to not be psychotic, just this once. The slow shuffle as both parties try, for half a minute, to co-exist. It’s a masterfully tense sequence, and when the other couple, all hungry eyes and scabrous skin, catch sight of Lucy’s potentially valuable Pip-Boy and pull iron, it’s a far grimmer lesson in the law of the Wasteland than anything our young Vault Dweller was taught at the hands of the Ghoul.

No wonder she misses the Vault, and is so excited when she and Maximus get captured and dropped back into one by episode’s end. After all, she hasn’t been getting the crash course in the nasty ways Vault-Tec built its little paradises that her brother Norm has been receiving across this hour. Understandably freaked out by all the bodies he and Chet found in the remains of Vault 32, Norm goes digging in the vault computers, realizing that every single elected Overseer for Vaults 32 and 33 over the last 200 years has been someone who transferred in from their “friends” over in Vault 31 (a pattern that repeats itself in this episode, as Leslie Uggams’ Betty handily snags the election out from under her hapless opponents). With a little background knowledge of what Vault-Tec operating procedure tends to be like in the Fallout games, there’s really no limit to how dark this particular plot thread could get. But at the very least, it’s starting to seem like the affable dopiness exhibited by the residents of Vault 33 might not be entirely due to their literally sheltered natures, as opposed to some kind of horrific conspiracy.

I still haven’t gotten the darkest reveal “The Past” has to offer, though. That builds off of a casual timeline-disrupting remark from Maximus, that the bombs fell “when he was a kid”—ultimately revealing that the wreckage of a city he and Lucy are currently walking through isn’t the remains of some pre-War city that got nuked to rubble by Chinese bombs. It’s Shady Sands, a town established 70 years after the bombs dropped, and which hosted a thriving population of more than 30,000 people—before someone came along and nuked the damn thing again. It’s a doubly devastating reveal for Lucy, who realizes that while war was busy never changing, she and her friends and family have had their heads buried in the sand, waiting for a “Reclamation Day” that had already come and gone. Sleeping through one apocalypse can be chalked up to misfortune, after all, but two? That’s just poor form.

“The Past” is a heavy hour of television, but in all honesty, Fallout was probably due for one. The show still slips in some goofiness around the sides, whether it’s in the wobble of Vault 33's ridiculous Jell-O cakes, or Pemberton’s insistent glee on getting a big burning “T” placed on his neck. But the show isn’t shying away from the darker aspects of this franchise as it moves into its back half, and it’s produced one of its most memorable, irresistible installments to date.

Stray observations

• Timeline fun for nerds! In Fallout canon (and as shown back in “The End”) the bombs fell (the first time) back in 2077. The original Fallout game kicks off less than 100 years later, in 2161, with the sequel following 80 years later in 2241, followed by Fallout 3 in 2277, Fallout: New Vegas in 2281, and Fallout 4 in 2287. (Fallout 76, despite being the latest game in the series, is actually the earliest chronologically, set around a Vault that opened way too early back in 2102.) Fallout the TV show is set in 2296, the furthest down the timeline we’ve yet seen. It’s not clear if the show and games are canonical with each other, although more on that in a second.
• Fallout Game Corner: Okay, this one is a doozy. Shady Sands is a town visited in the original Fallout, eventually revealed to have been founded by survivors from Vault 15. (The player goes hunting through it for a replacement water chip, with no luck.) A century or so later, the Sands becomes the capital of the New California Republic—the closest thing to a fully functional society we see in the Fallout games. There are 15 years between Fallout: New Vegas—the last game that showed the NCR as mostly alive and well—and the show, so it’s hypothetically possible that they could have gotten nuked again in the intervening time. It’s depressing as hell to contemplate, though.
• R.I.P. to Titus and Thaddeus, “The T-Boys!”
• Of course Lucy is a power armor nerd.
• Current theory: Vault 32 residents—notably Leer Leary’s very funny, mustachioed Davey—are being raised to be ideal sitcom characters.
• Lucy recounts a memory of her mom playing out under the “artificial” sun that is either very sweet, or very foreshadowing, depending on how these next three episodes play out.
• “So, Earth is round, Earth is flat, where are you guys at on that these days?”
• “You guys use pre-war technology to find and collect pre-war technology to make sure no one has pre-war technology?”
• It comes amidst a very dark scene, but the reminder that Lucy is sporting an extremely discolored, previously-owned finger is a nice touch.
• Shout-out to the designer that catches Lucy and Maximus with a fake door painted on a wall, presumably one Wile E. Coyote.