We're officially more than halfway through Fallout season 2, and things are starting to heat up. "The Wrangler" finally sees Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) arrive in the New Vegas neighborhood of Freeside, where their burgeoning friendship is put to the ultimate test. Meanwhile, Norm's (Moisés Arias) deception with the Vault 31 dwellers hits a major snag, and Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) has a breakthrough in his attempt to fix the brain-computer interface device.
There's a lot to discuss in this week's excellent episode of Fallout, so let's get right into it! FULL SPOILERS for Fallout season 2 Episode 5 beyond this point.
Deathclaws attack!
Thankfully, "The Wrangler" begins right where the previous episode left off: with Lucy and The Ghoul facing down a menacing Deathclaw. Except it's not just one Deathclaw; it turns out there are three of them prowling around the main strip of New Vegas. Despite Lucy's drug-addled enthusiasm for fighting them off, The Ghoul follows their dog companion's lead and the group escapes under a chained off gate in the nick of time.
This episode gives us our best look yet at the Deathclaws, and they remain a really strong part of the show. These are iconic monsters from the games, and Fallout did them total justice by combining digital with practical effects, recalling classic sci-fi movies like Jurassic Park. I loved every second of the confrontation. Here's hoping we see more Deathclaws before the season's over, but even if we don't, I'm pretty satisfied with how Fallout season 2 has handled them.
Welcome to Freeside
The scene then cuts to the neighborhood of Freeside, just beyond the main strip of New Vegas, a location anyone who's played Fallout: New Vegas should be very well acquainted with. A small detail I loved in the introduction to this new setting is that as the camera pans down toward the gate, you can still see a Deathclaw lurking about beyond even though it's daytime out. The people of Freeside are really just living right next to a nest of Deathclaws, and still going about their business. Real estate is sparse in the Wasteland, I guess.
As Lucy and The Ghoul process their narrow escape from the monsters, The Ghoul finally shares more of his motivation for coming to New Vegas. He's searching for a special Vault for management, where he hopes to find his wife and daughter. We already knew that, but we didn't know the specifics: he's already tracked down several of these management Vaults in different states, but has never found one in Vegas, despite it being home to the wealthiest man in the former United States, Robert House. Surely, there are secrets here to be found.
But if they're going to find those secrets, Lucy and The Ghoul will need to gear up. They head into Freeside, where we get some fun pans around at the various locals, including a guy wearing a sign that says "Beat Me Up 4 Caps." Ah, Fallout.
Despite how raucous drug-addicted Lucy has been, The Ghoul decides to help her get it out of her system by sending her to a nearby store where she can purchase Addictol. This is exactly how you cure drug addiction in the Fallout video game, and it's inclusion in the show is pretty hilarious.
Lucy finds that the price has been jacked way up on it to an unreasonable degree...but as she goes to walk by, she notices an open back door in the shop. She proceeds to go in, sneak around, and steal a bunch of stuff before she's caught by someone posing as the shop owner...who isn't the shop owner at all, but someone else who went in, killed the original shop owner, and posed as them in too-small clothing sometime before Lucy appeared. She takes the Addictol, as well as a power fist that catches her eye, and accidentally kills the shopkeep when he draws a gun on her. The slow breakdown of Lucy as an idealistic character has been one of the more interesting character journeys this season, and Purnell is doing a great job selling the conflict.
After she takes the Addictol and barfs everywhere, Lucy heads back to the hotel where The Ghoul is camped out. There, she's confronted by the Snake Oil Salesman (Jon Daly) from season 1, who we see Hank successfully assert mind control over with his brain-interface earlier in the episode. He's now wearing a suit and talking totally differently than his outrageous Wasteland persona, and presents an ultimatum from Hank. The Ghoul's wife and daughter are still in cryo in the Vault in New Vegas; if The Ghoul takes Lucy back to the safety of her own Vault, Hank won't harm them. Little does Hank know that Vault 33 is imploding anyway due to lack of water.
The Ghoul takes the deal, tranquilizes Lucy. This is a schism moment for them, where he begrudgingly agrees because he'll do anything for his wife and daughter. He says he brought her there to bargain with, and that this is the bargain. But after it seems like Lucy is captured, she stumbles back to her feet and punches him with her new power fist, launching him out the window where he gets impaled on a street post.
Afterward, Lucy collapses in the room, only to be woken by her father Hank. The set up for the next episode is great, and the break between Lucy and The Ghoul hurts. It's a testament to how well the show has developed them as a pair that I'm sad to see them part ways here.
The House always wins
There's a robust flashback section in this episode, which has a few major revelations. After heading to Las Vegas on orders from Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), Cooper Howard (Goggins) decides that assassinating House is not his style. Instead, House's body double comes to fetch him, revealing for the first time the true nature of the dual Mr. Houses.
The real House, as played incredibly by Justin Theroux, says his and Cooper's destinies are mathematically intertwined. House reveals he had a piece of software that let him see through Cooper's T-45 power armor during his mission to Alaska that we saw in the previous episode, and he saw the Deathclaw. And this is when things start to get very interesting.
Despite that boardroom meeting Cooper overheard in the season 1 finale, House actually doesn't think that Cooper's wife Barb (Frances Turner) and Vault-Tec will be the ones to drop the bombs. The mad genius has even predicted the date the world will end with his equations: April 14, 2065, the same day as Cooper's daughter's birthday. But when Cooper bought his ticket to Vegas, the date moved up a month; clearly he's connected to the end of everything somehow.
House is strongly committed to the idea that the bombs will not be dropped him or anyone else in that boardroom meeting, which is an interesting subversion of the end of season 1. He believes there's another player at the table, the same one responsible for the Deathclaw. Here's hoping we learn more about that soon, because it's very intriguing.
Also, a shoutout is needed for Mr. House's helmet that he puts on: that's straight out of Fallout: New Vegas, where players can find the still-living Robert House wearing that very device. I'm all about how much the Fallout TV show is wearing its love of the games on its sleeve even more this season.
The surreal cut back to The Ghoul as House shouts that Cooper is a killer is a great touch as well. We come back to the flashback sequence one more time at the end of the episode, where we see Cooper get drunk at the bar before Barb helps him back to their room. There, he finally confronts her, saying they need to talk. Considering it's been half a season since he overheard her boardroom declaration to destroy the world, this is long overdue. I'm very much looking forward to it in Episode 6.
Hank's experiment succeeds
We only get a brief few scenes with Hank in "The Wrangler," all of which center around tweaking his brain-computer interface to actually work by testing it on the Snake Oil Salesman. There's not too much to cover here, aside from the fact that this sequence does confirm that The Ghoul's wife and child really are in this Vault. Oh, and it also deserves a shout out for the fakeout with the glass. Previously, we saw Hank's experiments go wrong via camera pans to windows or tanks in the room he was working in, which were then splattered with gore when the experiment subject's head exploded. There's a fun fakeout here where the camera pans away as it takes hold of the Snake Oil Salesman, only to then cut back to the room where the experiment was successful. I enjoyed the sleight of hand,
Norm's cover is blown
The final section of this episode follows Norm and the Vault 31 management trainees as they head to the Vault-Tec headquarters. They run into Ma June (Dale Dickey) and her wife from season 1, which was an unexpected guest appearance.. June tells Norm that Lucy is dead, because she has no confidence she could have survived the Wasteland. June feels like a character you'd meet in the game, and I do like that the show brought her back for a brief appearance here.
While Bud's personal assistant Ronnie (Adam Faison) tries to take over the group and get communications up in a vain attempt to contact "the investors," Norm comforts Claudia (Rachel Marsh), who was only just hired by Vault-Tec a week before the bombs dropped and she was put in cryo. She clues Norm in to the fact that Bud had a boss with more information, who was none other than Barb Howard. When they go to Barb's office and Norm starts snooping on her computer, Claudia finally reveals she knows that Norm isn't one of Bud Askins' management trainees. It's a sweet moment for the two of them, which is unfortunately overheard by Ronnie.
Claudia goes to get them a drink right as Norm stumbles on something important: "F.E.V." research on the computer, which stands for "Forced Evolutionary Virus." According to the computer, that's "the gene-altering agent for organism supercharging. Sounds like super mutants are coming to me! But we don't get too much time to dwell on it, because Ronnie promptly charges in, overpowers Norm, and nearly strangles him to death with a computer power cable before taking him captive. It's cliffhangers all around this week.
Verdict
"The Wrangler" is a great episode of Fallout that pushes several plotlines out of their comfortable groove, and into unknown territory. Lucy and The Ghoul are now split up and at odds, with The Ghoul horrifically wounded and Lucy back in her father's clutches. Hank has gotten his mind control device to work, while Norm is no longer able to hide in plain sight from the Vault 31 management trainees. We didn't get any time with Maximus (Aaron Moten) or Vauls 32 and 33 this time around, but the pacing of that feels just right to me. I'm sure we'll check in with them, and hopefully resolve a few of the episode's other cliffhangers, next week.
Fallout season 2 Episode 6 also does some very interesting things with the timeline of the series, connecting its past to the franchises future by exploring versions of New Vegas that existed both before and after the video game. We see what Vegas was like in this world before the war, as well as how it has changed since the events of the game. Throw in a few epic Deathclaws, and it's a recipe for an all-around solid hour of TV that stands in fascinating conversation with it source material.