A world this bizarre and twisted should not feel so embarrassingly familiar.
While neither one is a perfect example, I do think Fallout is a more relevant satire than Amazon’s other current satirical sci-fi series. Even with a wacky, post-apocalyptic, retrofuture setting nearly 300 years beyond our own, it’s able to deliver far more biting critiques of America’s current age of senseless mediocrity than The Boys, a show that works hard to be a crude and shallow mirror image of modern American culture.
And the fact that it can pull off this kind of intelligent satire while still coming up with compelling scenarios for engaging characters and doing it in a way that satisfies needy video game fans earns the show high marks.
Lucy vs. The Legion
The way Caesar’s Legion is portrayed says it all.
Upon entering their camp, Lucy is given a brutally quick impression of what the Legion is: slavers, torturers, executioners, brutish thugs with big egos. They are a very organized but systemically vicious and self-limiting group, seeing themselves as sophisticated conquerors while dressing in football pads, taking their cues from the Roman Empire and embracing mankind’s most destructive instincts. The Wasteland is full of raider groups and other savage tribes, but the Caesar of Fallout: New Vegas built his Legion by disciplining multitudes of “savages” and consolidating them under one banner. And we see here how his cult of personality has been doing since he died.
I love that there are two virtually identical but opposing Legion camps right next to each other, with two different claimants to Caesar’s title. It’s the perfect representation of how fascist movements tend to implode from within if they aren’t destroyed from the outside.
This scenario also gives Lucy another lesson in the harsh realities of the Wasteland. Her perky good-naturedness quickly gets her tied to a cross and left to die.
Maximus Vs. The Brotherhood
Maximus’s arc continues to be the most simple yet also the most emotionally compelling. Like Lucy, he’s also trying to navigate a civil war brewing within a dangerous faction. It just happens to be his own.
This story arc escalates at its usual fast pace. And as usual, it’s largely driven by Maximus being both very impulsive and very impressionable. He starts out offering to kill Xander Harkness, the Commonwealth envoy who upends Quintus’s rebellion. It’s not clear if he’s serious, just being cynical (“That’s what we do here, isn’t it?”) or both, but it puts him back on his quasi-dad figure’s bad side. After which he’s immediately charmed by Xander, who is played by a jocular Kumail Nanjiani and seems like the coolest guy we’ve seen in the Brotherhood of Steel thus far.
Xander treats Max with respect, reasons with him on Quintus and the civil war, and lends him a suit of power armor so they can rock-em-sock some robots like a couple of man-children. Then they find a group of actual children, half of whom are ghouls or mutated, and Xander reminds us that the BoS is, predominately, a xenophobic cult as he prepares to slaughter the “abominations.” Naturally, Maximus chooses to do the right thing in the heat of the moment, killing Xander to save the children and all but ensuring the civil war he feared.
This all feels very in line with how Maximus’s storyline has gone before. Poor guy’s always making rash decisions and stumbling into big developments. I like his and Lucy’s segments here, but both feel a little too heavy on the exposition. There’s really no reason for Quintus to explain to his fellow BoS elders how the Brotherhood was founded, and it makes even less sense that a member of the Legion would just give a condemned profligate a helpful rundown of their faction.
Cooper Vs. The Past
The stuff with Cooper is what really ties this episode together. It’s not big on exposition and it doesn’t progress the greater narrative too much (in either his present-day or pre-war segments), but it is thematically rich and it builds upon what I feel is a pretty well-written character.
This episode is a lovely display of the light and dark dance of Cooper Howard/The Ghoul. While Cooper internally struggles with conflicting loyalties and wanting to do the right thing in the past, the Ghoul in the future has no issue working all the angles to do what he needs to do. In this case, he needs to get Lucy back for his unfinished business with her father. He meets with the NCR, the Legion and Mr. House by way of Victor the Securitron; we also see Cooper encounter Mr. House back when both were still regular humans.
Cooper’s Ghoul persona is a reflection of the world and its darkest, most cynical aspects. He’s all about outplaying everyone in the Wasteland, typically by being more violent and ruthless than the other guys. That unfettered approach is how he gets what he’s after here, selling out the stranded NCR rangers to the Legion in order to free Lucy.
The themes of the episode are all wrapped up into the speech Charlie Whiteknife delivers at the veterans event Cooper attends in the old world. It gets across a point Whiteknife was trying to make to Cooper about killing Mr. House, which is that doing the right thing is often a gamble that people can only hope will end in their favor. The choice to act may not always be practical or moral, but doing nothing could come at an even greater cost.
I think having this in the back of his head is what compels Cooper to sabotage the Legion on his way out of their camp, letting the divided faction fight among themselves rather than murder the downtrodden soldiers. Earlier in the episode – while carving out a chunk of rotten, venomous flesh from his thigh – Cooper likens himself to the Ship of Theseus, questioning what he’s become after being changed so much by the Wasteland. It’s maybe the most introspection we’ve seen from him in the present. I think his journey to find his family, along with lovable companions like Lucy and Dogmeat who let him take his guard down, is opening Cooper up to embrace parts of himself he left behind. Even if there's sure to be a downside to stoking the flames of war with the Legion (similar to Maximus killing Xander), this is still a pretty hopeful note to end on.
Caps and rads:
* This season is absolutely killing it with the live-action portrayal of all these Fallout: New Vegas locations. Even subtle ones like Primm being visible off in the distance when Cooper speaks with the NCR.
* I noticed pre-war Cooper was dressed like Jack Torrance in The Shining on my first watch of this episode. It occurred to me on a second watch that the reason is probably because of his tense bathroom chat with Mr. House, similar to Jack’s iconic bathroom chat with Delbert Grady. While not an actual ghost, House’s untouchable mystique, enigmatic nature and habit of just sort of appearing in places does lend him a ghostly air.
* Ghoul-Cooper passes by a large portrait of Mr. House in the NCR's abandoned stronghold at Camp Golf.
* I’m loving the casting in this show, particularly the actors they’re getting for the various factions. Macauley Culkin as a legate in Caesar’s Legion, Kumail Nanjiani as a Brotherhood of Steel Knight, Jon Gries as one of the NCR Rangers. Much like Michael Rappaport and Erik Estrada last season, it’s a clever way of quickly demystifying these scary groups and their deceptively fearsome costumes.
* Also, I’m reminded of it every time I see him in something, but Jon Gries playing an out-of-touch, desert-dwelling weirdo who desperately clings to past nostalgia to cope with his present-day woes is almost exactly like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite.
* The Securitrons look as cool as everything else in the show; wish we saw a bit more of the robots, to be honest. I especially like that Victor was included; like Mr. House, he’s a character from New Vegas.
* Not sure what the deal is with Thaddeus and those kids collecting bottle caps. The fact that they were being guarded by Securitrons leads me to assume Mr. House is behind it, but I’m not sure of why. Or how Thaddeus might have ended up in that role.
Quotes:
Thaddeus: “What do we always say? Most kids are dead by this age!”
Lucy: “If you don’t mind me saying, it seems like you guys might have lost your way out here.”
She still has a talent for understatement.
Lucy: “I may be able to help you. I have experience with family counseling, and sometimes conflict resolution… it’s easier than you think.” Cut to Lucy strung up on a cross.
Lucy: “This isn’t Rome, okay? This is America!”
Legate Lacerta: “Is it?”
Lucy: “Yeah, it is. At least, according to all the maps.”
Lacerta: “Maps drawn by the dead. All that remains of America is the overwhelming evidence of its failure. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have a war to win.”
Lucy: “You know, speaking as someone who’s seen upwards of 15 different movies, if you think everyone else is the bad guy, chances are, you’re the bad guy.”
Lacerta: “But ‘good’ is not a meaningful vector in history. Only strength.”
Victor: “H-Howdy, p-p-p-p-p-pardner!”
Cooper/The Ghoul: “Is that you, Victor?”
Victor: “V-V-Victor. That sure does sound familiar. Well, dagnabbit, spent the last ten years thinkin’ I was a soda machine.”
Victor: “But you know what they say in Vegas. Everyone’s a winner. Eventually.”
Xander Harkness: “I trust your judgement, Maximus. So should you.” Well.
Cooper/The Ghoul: “Little piece of advice that’s helped me sleep at night over the years. When something’s dead, it’s usually because it deserved to die.”
Securitron: (malfunctioning) “Intruder! Prepare to be neutralized. Relaxation imminent!”
Cooper/The Ghoul: “Ave. Or whatever the fuck y’all say to each other.”
Lacerta: “You claim to have information for Caesar.”
Cooper/The Ghoul: “Well, I understand that the Legion ain’t fans of the linear progression of time… or the soft 'C,' for that matter. But I bet you still understand cause and effect.”
Charlie Whiteknife: “At the end of the day, we just gotta hope that we bet on the right side. The side that protects the people we love. Because if it did… I guess that’s worth doing pretty much anything. Even something bad.”
Though it's a little heavy on the exposition and a little light on the action, I really enjoyed this episode. Four out of five commemorative lighters.
No comments:
Post a Comment
We love comments! Just note that we always moderate because of spam and trolls. It's never too late to comment on an old show, but please don’t spoil future episodes for newbies.