Fallout: The Beginning

“War never changes.”

As it stands, I’ll say right off that this was a damn good season of TV. Not only an excellent introduction to a rather layered world, but also just a well told story. A journey of discovery and absurdity.

Now that journey comes to an end, with all parties converging on Lee Moldaver at Griffith Observatory in the ruins of Los Angeles. Where truths are revealed, and a new journey begins.

Just as ‘The Radio’ was a well-made penultimate episode, ‘The Beginning’ is a well-made season finale. It’s not perfect, but it wraps up the story of the season while providing plenty of set-up for ongoing character arcs and the wider world of the Wasteland.

There are some things I found a little too neat or contrived. Like the whole confrontation between the Ghoul and the Brotherhood of Steel at the Observatory. Just seemed hard to believe that those trigger-happy knights in battle would let Cooper monologue and shoot one of their guys before doing anything to him. Or that Maximus somehow made it to the top of the Observatory long before any other Brotherhood soldiers do.

But these are easy flaws to overlook, especially considering Fallout isn’t really a franchise that’s married to the concept of realism.

Death to Management

Conversely, I loved the entire culmination of the various story arcs and how they overlap together as the Brotherhood fights Moldaver’s NCR remnant.

The reveal about Hank MacLean being a bad guy was a bit obvious beforehand — with all the mounting evidence of Vault 31’s shadiness — but I wasn’t quite ready to learn that he's a two-faced sociopath who nuked an entire civilization along with his own wife. And I definitely was not expecting him to be another time-displaced character.

That was a finely-crafted twist, which was built up to and executed very nicely; Hank talked to Cooper on the phone a couple episodes ago, though I didn’t initially pick up that it was Kyle MacLachlan’s voice.

And it comes right on the heels of an even bigger twist, not just for the show but for the franchise altogether. That the Great War that ended the old world was deliberately triggered by Vault-Tec in a bid for control of mankind’s future that’s as insane as it is ruthlessly ambitious. As a bonus, they gave their biggest investors free reign to use the vast majority of the Vaults and the people sheltering in them as test subjects in a variety of experiments: social, psychological, biological, outright lethal, etc. It's the stuff of nightmares.

Vaults 31, 32 and 33 were an essential part of this. As Norm discovers, 31 is no more than a cryo-tube chamber containing "Bud's Buds," Vault-Tec personnel chosen by Bud Askins to see through their diabolical scheme to manage humanity. This is who Hank, Betty and Steph really are. Vaults 32 and 33 are breeding pools for the time-displaced executives. The idea was to "create a class of super managers" who would develop underground and eventually run the world after all other human factions have either killed each other or died out on the surface.

It's batshit crazy. But, honestly though, it's not all that far-fetched. We are currently living through an era in which cynical, megalomaniacal billionaires are actively undermining and reshaping world governments, down to the very institutions that keep our societies stable and healthy, to benefit themselves and disenfranchise most everyone else. Historically, the most powerful few have a habit of prioritizing their own wellbeing over the wellbeing of the many. The repetition of history is as consistent a pattern in Fallout as it is in reality.

The bombs did not bring about the end of the world, but merely ushered in a new Dark Age. Everyone is living in the most desperate of times, but societies are still built and wars still fought. Fallout stories tend to start micro only to evolve into something more macro. The fate of humanity — or, at least, its future — is always in jeopardy. Positioning Vault-Tec as the overarching antagonist greatly raises the stakes for the TV series, but I'm glad to see it's all still tethered to our three main characters.

My Echo, My Shadow and Me

From the first episode, Lucy, Maximus and Cooper were only really connected through their mutual pursuit of the show's MacGuffin: Wilzig's head containing the cold fusion material; and through the head, the nefarious Lee Moldaver. Now Moldaver is dead, and the head is irrelevant after she's succeeded in using her cold fusion power source to bring light back to the Wasteland.

But there's a new MacGuffin that unites the protagonists: Hank MacLean. Where before he was a victim in need of rescue, now he's a villain on the run. Where before the goal they were all after was hazy and material, now these three wanderers are all personally invested in hunting Hank down. Lucy, for committing genocide, betraying her mother and leaving her to become ghoulified in a nuclear blast, and lying to her and Norm all their lives. Maximus, for the destruction of his home and everyone he knew before the Brotherhood. And Cooper, for a possible chance to find his long-lost family and get revenge on Vault-Tec.

Circumstances have changed for all of them in light of this.

Lucy and Cooper put aside their mutual animosity, teaming up (along with Dogmeat) to follow Hank's trail; it's poetic, a father missing a daughter and a daughter missing a father. It'll be interesting to see how they do as allies rather than enemies.

Cooper is a very edgy ghoul, but it's obvious he's getting in touch with his old self. I don't think he will ever go back to being as nice as he was, but I can see him being a bit less of a scumbag. Having Lucy around might bring that out more.

Then again, that's a double-edged sword. Given the depressing place Lucy is at by the end of this episode, it could be just as likely that she starts to reflect Cooper's violent lifestyle. She's been trying hard to keep her kind nature, but has proven again and again that she's just as capable of being vicious. One of the last things we see her do is mercy-kill her poor mom.

Meanwhile, Maximus narrowly escaped execution by the Brotherhood in the morning only to find himself one of its heroes by the end of the day. With Elder Quintus's favor and the implication that he's got a real knighthood in his future, Max seems to have gotten everything he wanted at the start. But as his BoS fellows cheer his name in the end, he looks grimly toward the horizon. Because now what he really wants is to kill Hank and reunite with Lucy.

Against the three of them is the rest of the Wasteland. The Brotherhood's victory over the NCR here puts the cold fusion source in their hands, which could help a lot of people. If only the Brotherhood weren't so militantly backwards. Other factions will want to challenge them for this kind of power; it was stolen from the Enclave, so I'll bet they take aim at the BoS next season. And the now infamous Hank MacLean has fled to Nevada, with the final shot overlooking New Vegas. This was the central location of one of the games (Fallout: New Vegas), a sanctuary of sorts run by the reclusive Mr. House, who we see during the secret Vault-Tec meeting. This alone opens a whole new realm of freakiness the show can explore next season.

As well as the showrunners did with just making an entertaining and effective TV show for the average viewer, they went the extra mile by making something that was very faithful to the franchise, hyping up many a Fallout fan.

The hype is very real for me.

Caps and rads:

* The irony that satirical shows like this, The Boys and The Man in the High Castle are produced by a company run by a lame-brained billionaire who exploits his workers and rolls over for fascistic corporatists is not lost on me.

* I still find it funny that Michael Emerson has spent more time on this show as a decaying severed head than as an actual character.

* Vault-Tec investors: Julia Masters of REPCONN, Leon Von Feldon of West-Tek, Frederik Sinclair of Big Mountain (Big MT), Robert House of RobCo. This had to be exciting for many of the fans who followed the lore spread across the games. The majority of these figures have been dead for centuries, but the evidence of them, their companies and their crimes against humanity are littered throughout the Wasteland.

* The big room in which Vault-Tec hosts their secret meeting is clearly inspired by the War Room from Dr. Strangelove. It fits.

* Some people think that Barb is the mastermind behind Vault-Tec’s secret plan, alongside Bud. But before she makes her proposal to the other corporations, she receives a message on her Pip-Boy and we see a shadowed figure behind a window overlooking the meeting. Barb and Bud are high-ranking executives, but they are not the ones in charge. And while Bud can barely contain his egotistical delight over their world domination plot, Barb’s delivery was a bit more robotic, suggesting she may have mixed feelings. I get the sense that her motivation was simply protecting herself and her family, the rest of the world be damned.

* I love the scene of Cooper meeting "young Henry;" as well as young Betty. It's such a perfectly surreal moment. How Cooper wasn't even really considering him, as he was preoccupied listening to his wife condemn the world and break his heart... but because he met Hank in that moment, he never forgot him.

* The digital de-aging for Kyle MacLachlan's face felt off initially, but then was eerily convincing as the scene went on.

* I can't see a reunion between Cooper and his family being anything other than devastating.

* Surprisingly, it's Norm MacLean who ends up in the most precarious situation in this finale. Norm learns the secrets of Vault 31 and who his father really is from a disembodied Brain-on-a-Roomba; this was formerly Bud Askins, 31's Overseer for the last 200+ years. Bud-on-a-Roomba traps Norm inside 31 to keep him from exposing the truth. He's left with the choice of starving to death or using Hank's cryo-pod to survive until someone finds him. Whenever that will be. At least we can take solace in the fact that Bud Askins got a horrible fate, reduced to nothing but a brain that can never sleep or do anything but slowly roll around in the dark for generations. What's really rich is he probably did it to himself.

* Lee Moldaver is still a mystery to me. There's no explanation for how a blacklisted scientist/communist activist made it 200 years into the future and became one of the Wasteland's most feared people. I guess we can assume she found a different cryo-tube deal; Vault-Tec had to get it from somewhere. I should note she barely looks different in either 2077, Lucy's flashback to her childhood or the present. This might just be lazy makeup work. Or, considering she helped create this miraculous cold fusion power source, maybe Moldaver found a way to make herself immortal. Well, she's dead now, so we may never know.

* The Brotherhood of Steel now controls the Observatory and Moldaver's cold fusion. This could pose a unique dilemma in the future. The Brotherhood is all about hoarding and keeping advanced technology away from other wastelanders. The cold fusion thing, from what little we see, remotely powers every light source in the Los Angeles area. It's not clear how far its power extends, but if it can power up all those lights, maybe it can power any old electrical device. This new energy source could make the Brotherhood very powerful throughout the entire Wasteland, but could also make their fanatical mission a lot more difficult.

Music: “I Don’t Want to See Tomorrow” by Nat King Cole, and “We Three” by The Ink Spots.

Quotes:

Lucy MacLean: “Guess I was gonna walk in here and… blow everybody up. But it’s not really how I was raised. So… if you don’t mind, I’m gonna keep things civil.”

Brain-on-a-Roomba: (to Norm) “Don’t-don’t go in there. Don’t go in there! Don’t read anything in there! Or turn on the lights. Don’t access the info tree or look at the terminal.”

Bud Askins: “Time is the apex predator. And in the event of an incident, time is the weapon with which we will defeat all of our enemies. That is how we will win the great game of capitalism. Not by outfighting them, but outliving them.”
“Rob-Co”/Mr. House: “Even if you outlive all external threats, here’s my problem with the vaults. You confine a bunch of rats in a nest for a long time, they end up eating each other. So who’s to say your rats are gonna survive better than those animals on the surface?”

Bud-on-a-Roomba: “America outsourced the survival of this country to the private sector. But it would have been insane to keep a failed nation alive. So, we kept Vault-Tec alive instead. A well-trained staff of highly supervised junior executives from my own assistant training program. Because the future of humanity comes down to one word: Management.”

Barb Howard: “A nuclear event would be a tragedy… but also, an opportunity. Perhaps the greatest opportunity in history. Because when we are the only ones left, there will be no one to fight. A true monopoly… This is our chance to make war obsolete. Because in our current societal configuration, which took shape without intentional guidance, we have friction. We have conflict, and we have war. And war, well… war never changes.”

Henry "Hank" MacLean: "I'd hate to be that guy, but do you think I could get your autograph?"

Hank: “If the problem with the world is factions endlessly fighting, endlessly at war, then what is the solution but to get rid of the factions? To make the world us, only ours to shape.”

Cooper/The Ghoul: “Oh, you want another autograph, young Henry? Feo, fuerte y formal.”
Such a cool moment.

Cooper/The Ghoul: “Let’s just say that everything about your whole little world was decided over 200 years ago.”

I said it in my review for the first episode, but it bears repeating. This is easily one of the best video game adaptations I have seen. Four out of five wars in the wasteland.

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