Fallout recap: A few great weirdos can't save a mostly dull penultimate episode

[Editor’s note: This is a recap of Fallout episode seven. The recap of episode eight publishes April 19.]

When you design the pacing of a modern TV drama, there are, basically, two general approaches to how you can handle the penultimate episode of your season. One model (made most famous, probably, by Game Of Thrones’ “The Rains Of Castamere”) is the one that says that episode 7, or 9, or whatever number is “Your season order, minus one,” is the ideal time to blow everything up—knocking your viewers out of their comfort zones, and leaving you with a full episode in which your characters can wrestle with the aftermath of whatever horrible shit just went down.

Fallout…doesn’t do that. No, “The Radio” is a far more traditional next-to-last episode for this surprisingly strong first season of TV, slowly moving all of our characters into position to have their minds blown by whatever big reveals series showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet have been cooking up for the finale. Lucy and Maximus find out the (not as dark as it seemed) secret of Vault 4; the Ghoul finds out where Moldaver is hiding out these days; Norm follows some leads and gets closer to the mystery of Vault 31. If none of it sounds all that interesting, well…that’s kind of by design. As a show that’s built up a decent backlog of mysteries in its second half, Fallout, pretty much by definition, can’t tell us too much that’s interesting here, because otherwise the gratification it’s withholding can’t be effectively delayed.

An episode of this type, then, has to live in the smaller moments, which “The Radio” has varying success with. The material surrounding Lucy and Maximus, for instance, is a mixed bag, with the members of Vault 4 revealed to be so saintly, in both their overall intent and their treatment of those who’ve sinned against them, as to feel artificial, just to rub in how our heroes have been acting like heels. On the other hand, the series of subsequent confrontations between our two leads—first with Lucy successfully playing on Maximus’ better impulses to get him to return 4's stolen fusion core, and then forgiving him for lying about being a Knight—are genuinely heartwarming. Fallout is, at its core, a series about what goodness looks like on the edge of survival, and a lot of its most interesting character work happens in Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten’s eyes, as they decide those questions for themselves.

The Ghoul, meanwhile, continues his trip through a series of post-apocalyptic Quentin Tarantino vignettes, this time threatening guest star Erik Estrada and his kids into giving up Moldaver’s new digs at the Griffith Park Observatory. To repeat a common refrain in these reviews, it’s not that Walton Goggins isn’t good in these scenes, projecting amused, pragmatic menace as easily as breathing. But the character as written is such a rote “Western badass” cliché that it robs the scenes he’s in of any tension. Of course he’s going to goad young Tommy into going for a gun and trying to avenge his murdered brother; of course he’s going to cut the young idiot down in seconds. These are the things that happen when a Western badass comes to your house and sits at your table and eats your dinner, zombie makeup job or no. And Fallout always feels a bit like it’s painting by numbers as these scenes play out.

For once, our flashbacks to the Ghoul’s past life as Cooper Howard don’t offer much respite, either. After attending (and then performatively storming out of) the “Communist” meeting at the cemetery, Moldaver almost instantly convinces Cooper to spy on his wife via a bug that syncs up to her Pip-Boy. We don’t get to hear any juicy stuff, of course, because, well…this is episode seven of eight, right? Goggins and Sarita Choudhury have good chemistry together in their handful of scenes, but it’s a less fascinating trip to the past than the ones we’ve gotten before.

“The Radio” works, then, mostly at the edges, when it gives us more time to luxuriate in the wonderful weirdness of the Wasteland. The biggest delight is the return of Jon Daly as the snake oil salesman from “The Target,” hilariously re-introduced trying to blow his own head off with a long gun before getting distracted from his task when he sniffs out a new mark. Pausing his suicide thanks to the passage of Johnny Pemberton’s Thaddeus—limping across the Wastes after Maximus smashed his foot into a pile of lovingly rendered gore a few episodes back—Daly gives a hilarious hard sell for a panacea for all that ails the young squire, giving a mixture of goofball and genuine menace that’s right at the heart of Fallout the TV series’ tone. The show wouldn’t work if it was all top-hatted psychopaths peddling medicine that (spoiler alert) secretly turns you into a radiation zombie, but that level of unsettling comedy is at the center of the show’s best moments. (See also Fred Armisen’s cameo as radio-station operator DJ Carl, who does not take requests, and who’s ready to cheerfully decapitate anyone who doesn’t enjoy traditional, original fiddle recordings with a giant mousetrap. Hell, maybe we would just watch a TV show of Johnny Pemberton wandering the Wastes, running into weirdos like this.)

Ultimately, a TV show cannot live or die on plot alone. Big reveals are exciting; Spooky cliffhangers (like Norm disappearing into Vault 31, only to be confronted by…something…in its eerie halls) get the blood pumping as a matter of course. But these things are also a cheap carb—or a non-renewable fossil fuel—to dip back to Moldaver’s intellectual seduction of Coop. Character work is the cold fusion that keeps things powered for the long haul, and “The Radio” just doesn’t keep the lights on as well as it could. It has some fun moments, a few good gags, a nicely earned kiss, and one very good dog. But it can’t do much to transcend that fact that it’s an episode almost entirely about setting up what happens in the next episode. Alas!

Stray observations

• “I’ve got a little show-biz secret for you: A good bad guy doesn’t see themselves as a bad guy.”
• First dark laugh of the episode: Former Vault 4 Overseer Lloyd Hawthorne insisting—as he and his wife are devoured by their own monsters—that their deaths are not an argument against letting scientists rule the world.
• “What was the experiment in 33?” is the kind of question that’ll put chills down your spine, huh?
• “Pfffffffff. That’s the sound of your lower intestine falling… right the fuck ouuuuuut.” Daly is really good in this.
• Oh, and all the Raiders down in 33 got poisoned to death, Chet and Woody got moved to Vault 32, and Steph (also originally from 31) is 32's new overseer. I’ll be honest: The Vault material was the most placeholdery stuff in the entire episode. The visual effect of the vault assignments popping up out of the Pip-Boys was neat, though!
• “You’re a coward. “We all are, Norm. That’s why we live in a Vault.”
• Armisen can be a small-doses performer, but he and Pemberton are great in their little sketch together, including the “great job on these booby traps!” reveal of the dead bodies surrounding the station.
• Great sound work as Thaddeus breathes through the crossbow bolt in his neck. Pemberton is a great fit for this show; hope there’s more of him in the almost certainly-happening season two.
• A very cute touch: Lucy and Maximus kissing in such a way that the severed heads they’re holding kiss, too. This show!
• Fallout Game Corner: The hacking interface Norm uses to break into the Overseer’s computer is, of course, the hacking mini-game from the 3D Fallout titles. Good job guessing the password with so few mistakes, Norm!