Fallout recap: Walton Goggins gives the show's best performance yet

[Editor’s note: This is a recap of Fallout episode six. The recap of episode seven publishes April 18.]

So, the problem with writing a headline like “Welp, that’s one of the grossest things we’ve ever seen,” turns out, is that “grossest things” is a constantly moving target. You can hit publish on a line like that, and then, just three episodes later, you’re watching a woman give birth to salamanders that then proceed to swim on back and graphically eat her alive. And then where do we go from there?

It takes a while for “The Trap” to get to that particular chunk of nightmare fuel, thankfully, which is something of a given since this is one of Fallout’s most slow-paced installments to date. Still, if that gives us more time with Walton Goggins and Matt Berry shooting the shit together, and talking about who’s a Red in Hollywood, who are we to argue?

The appearance of Berry in the flesh (as Sebastian Leslie, the washed-up sitcom actor who lent his butler voice to the Mr. Handy robots) arrives early on in the episode, as cowboy actor-turned-Vault-Tec pitchman Cooper Howard tries to come to terms with his life becoming a sort of rolling party, filled with the sort of people he wouldn’t, personally, ever want to party with. Like Bud Askins over at Vault-Tec, the kind of man who will gush at you, unprompted, about being in “HR R&D,” a truly horrifying confluence of letters. Repulsed by his wife’s co-workers—and the prospect of a future spent rubbing elbows with the kinds of people who view dogs as an “avoidable inefficiency”—Howard drifts into the orbit of those Reds himself, eventually coming face-to-face with the leader of L.A.’s little cell of Communists: the woman who we, back in the future, know as Professional Kyle MacLachlan Snatcher Lee Moldaver.

This Big, Shocking Reveal—not terribly big or shocking, really, since the episode primes us for it pretty thoroughly by letting us know the Ghoul recognizes Moldaver on sight—threatens to distract from the more interesting point “The Trap” is building toward, though. The episode deliberately parallels Cooper’s move toward Communism, back in the past, with Lucy’s realization in the present that the mostly pleasant survivors down in Vault 4, where she and Maximus got captured last episode, have some decidedly cult-like fixations on Moldaver, too. The facile read would be to take Cooper’s burgeoning discontentment as a form of indoctrination, but we’d argue that the episode is actually trying to explain why people join a movement—even ones they’re initially, violently opposed to, as with Coop, and even as the behaviors and rituals surrounding them can get more “naked blood ritual” extreme.

The key to it, to our minds, is that “dog” argument between Cooper and his wife Barb, the finest bit of acting this show has presented for us to date. Walton Goggins and Frances Turner are painfully convincing as two people trying to save the other from themselves, Turner bleeding fear as she demonstrates why Barb might have let herself go a bit “new religious movement” herself, buying into Vault-Tec’s techno-utopian brand of madness. (While dropping terrifying hints, here and elsewhere, that she’s desperate to get her family into one of the “good” vaults. As opposed to…?) But she and her husband are too afraid of two too-distant things to truly reconnect, and so the fractures that’ll lead to him becoming the Ghoul a couple centuries down the line seem, increasingly, to be set.

There are similar divisions at play in the present, as Lucy and Maximus basically swap paranoia and contentment for an episode, him slipping into the comforts of Vault living, while she pushes against them. The Vault 4 material is generally weaker than the past stuff this time around, though, with its intermittent efforts to do what we’ve come to think of as “Vault Comedy” mostly falling flat. (With no offense to Chris Parnell, his cyclopean Overseer Benjamin is just too goofy to work amidst the rising paranoia “The Trap” is trying to build.) The episode gets some good shock moments with the sudden nudity during the ritual, which does the horror-movie trick of being unsettling rather than titillating—and then the absolute horrorshow Lucy stumbles into when she breaks instructions and heads to the forbidden Floor 12. But this is, once you rub at the veneer a bit, a pretty basic “protagonists come to a creepy little community” story, and the very familiar “are they creepy-nice or creepy-murderers?” tension can only do so much.

No, “The Trap” does its best work in the past, exploring the mindset of Cooper, who’s still the show’s most intriguing character—moreso, certainly, than the Ghoul, whose major scene in this installment is an extremely rote confrontation with a local crime-boss that ends in some fairly predictable violence. Goggins is great at drawling polite threats, don’t get us wrong. But the character, as written, has been so sanded down that there’s nothing of interest for either the actor, or the viewer, to easily grab onto. Cooper Howard, in the brief time we’ve gotten to know him, is a fascinating guy—a compelling blend of charm, contrarianism, sweetness, and grit. But his future self remains basically a cliché, albeit a fun one to watch working with his sewing kit, or his rifle, as needs dictate.

“The Trap,” then, is a mixed bag. The highs—Cooper’s monochromatic Vault-Tec ad, the dog fight, the very funny sequence in which Lucy cheerfully propositions Maximus, only to learn the terrifying deficits of Wasteland sex ed—are very high. But they’re also sporadic in an episode with a fair amount of downtime and which sometimes feels like it’s marking time for yet more shocking reveals ahead. Still, it is an episode of television in which Matt Berry says he “sold his vocal rights to that spinning robot they sell to housewives and perverts.” So, y’know; There’s only so harsh on it we can be.

Stray observations

• It’s fascinating to see Berry working in drama, despite the general buffoonishness of the character he’s playing here. “The end of the world is a product” gave me chills.
• Fallout Game Corner: In addition to Vault-Tec, RobCo and West Tek both get name dropped in this episode. Suffice it to say that, if you were a giant robotics or tech firm in the Fallout universe in the years leading up to the bombs dropping, you were up to some incredibly shady shit. Cooper also reveals he fought in the early days of the Sino-American War, the U.S. vs. China conflict that’s still low-key running during the flashback portions of the show and which will eventually culminate in the bombs being dropped. The Battle Of Anchorage he mentions is depicted (as a computer simulation) in one of the downloadable content packs for Fallout 3.
• Michael Esper plays a very convincing creep as Vault-Tec stooge Bud. He extols the virtue of “time” as the ultimate weapon with just the right mix of corporate drone and true believer.
• The bullet extracted from Maximus’ arm was apparently a “rotten human tooth.”
• Aaron Moten, swinging for the comedy fences: “Using my cock? That weird thing could happen… Just for some guys—not me—some guys, when they make it move, it gets all big and hard like a big pimple, and then it pops. They say it can happen to anybody, but it’s…it’s gross.” Great reactions from Ella Purnell, too.
• Overseer Benjamin doesn’t know how to deal with surface dwellers, who can’t handle “one funny joke I told on maybe 10 occasions.”
• Given the whole “Test Subjects” thing: It feels extremely possible that all of Vault 4 has been set up as a test to see if a Vault Dweller can be made as paranoid as a surface dweller, and vice versa. Please also take a reminder that I’m not watching ahead as I write these reviews, so I might be making a fool of myself by grasping at straws.
• The musical sting that plays when Gucy (sorry, Lucy) grabs the New California Republic flag in the classroom is Inon Zur’s “Main Theme” from Fallout 3. Shivers down my spine!
• The Ghoul attaching Lucy’s finger to his severed stump is the kind of blatantly un-subtle metaphor I can hang with.