The sixth episode of Fallout season 2 is out now on Prime Video, and before we get into any sort of recapping, let's get this out of the way up top: The Ghoul is alive! We'd assumed as much since he's, you know, a nigh-immortal ghoul, but at the same time you never can be too sure about a character who's impaled through the mid-section.
Despite clinging to life, The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) is in pretty rough shape in the sixth episode of Fallout season 2. He needs a helping hand in this episode, and he gets it from an unexpected newcomer. While he recovers from being power fisted out a window by Lucy in Episode 205, we finally see Cooper Howard and his wife Barb (Frances Turner) have a long-overdue heart-to-heart.
Meanwhile, things heat up in Vaults 32 and 33, while Maximus (Aaron Moten) and Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton) make their way across the Wasteland. And in the Vault-Tec management Vault in New Vegas, Lucy (Ella Purnell) gets a glimpse at what her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) been up to all this time, and finds herself more conflicted than she expected. Our idealistic Vaultdweller is being put through the ringer this season.
FULL SPOILERS ahead for Fallout season 2 Episode 6, "The Other Player."
Pitching the end of the world
"The Other Player" starts out in about as dystopian a way as possible: with Barb Howard listening to board room pitches from various companies for their respective roles in the apocalypse. From a duo explaining the finer points of mushroom clouds while rudely chewing burgers to the revelation that many of Vault-Tec's water chips were built faulty and knowingly installed in certain Vaults that way, these pitches are as awful as they are humdrum. Fallout always does a great job at portraying its theme of haves vs have-nots, and this is a very solid example.
Barb gets noticeably more uncomfortable as time goes on and she weathers pitch after pitch. Eventually, none other than Robert House's body double stops in to show off the brain-computer interface. But the twist is that Vault-Tec is not paying RobCo for this tech; it's the other way around, with Vault-Tec having already agreed to give House the cold fusion technology in exchange. That means that this particular flashback is set before Barb and Cooper's trip to New Vegas. We're going to be doing a bit of jumping around the timeline in this episode.
Hank's surrender is nothing like Lucy imagined
Before we get into the twisty plotline of Cooper Howard and The Ghoul, let's cover a few of the more straightforward stories in "The Other Player," starting with Lucy and Hank. After falling unconscious as her father entered her New Vegas hotel room in the previous episode, Lucy wakes up in the Vault-Tec management Vault. Hank has laid out clothes and a neat little card telling her to dial 0 for assistance once she's awake, but Lucy isn't playing that game. She promptly storms out of the room to find her father.
However, when she does confront Hank, he refuses to act as though anything is amiss. He tries to quiz her about a book they were reading together (All Quiet on the Western Front), then surrenders without a fight when she says she's taking him in to face justice at Vault 33 for the destruction of Shady Sands.
Thus begins Hank's mind games. By this point, Lucy has already gotten a glimpse at the work room where dozens of people have been brainwashed with the mind control device Hank perfected. Now, Hank brings Lucy there and begins extolling the virtues of the program, and how it's turned a bunch of murderers who were suffering in the Wasteland into productive office workers living in much better conditions. This is so Vault-Tec to the core, and it's both fun and chilling to see MacLachlan play this side of Hank so convincingly. He seems kind, and there is sense to some of what he says, but robbing so many of their autonomy is monstrous.
It all culminates with a Legion soldier and a member of the NCR being brought in, tied to chairs and ready to be mind-controlled with the push of a button. Lucy tries to resist this outcome, but when Hank orders them released since that's her will, the Legion soldier immediately starts trying to kill the one from the NCR. Lucy gets in the middle and gets thrown around, and is ultimately forced to push the button to prevent the Legion soldier from killing his counterpart.
Despite Lucy's insistence that she's nothing like the horrible men around her like The Ghoul and her father, she keeps finding herself in these situations that test her morals, and falling into the same traps. The way this season has tested Lucy has been one of its most compelling throughlines, and I'm really curious to see where it takes her in the final two episodes now that she's been forced into this uneasy agreement with Hank.
Vault 33
"The Other Player" also gives us some brief but important scenes in Vaults 33 and 32. In 33, Overseer Betty (Leslie Uggasm) finally decides she's had enough of Reg (Rodrigo Luzzi) wasting resources on the snack parties for the Inbreeding Support Group. After Reg daydreams about how great his parties are, imagining himself playing the piano to "Uranium Fever" by Elton Britt (a classic Fallout soundtrack song from the games), Betty's guards barge in and shut the group down.
Except it doesn't go exactly to plan, as Reg forces a confrontation with Betty and manages to stir the passions of all his fellow support group-goers to back him up. We leave them on an ambiguous note. Betty has tried to shut things down due to the water shortage, but Reg's insistence is building public unrest against her. I have a feeling this plotline is going to get bloody before the end.
Vault 32
Our time in Vault 32 is even briefer, and serves as a set up for confrontations to come. We only get one brief scene with Chet (Dave Register), however it delivers two important developments. The first is that Woody (Zach Cherry) has gone missing. Remember, in the last episode he tried to confront Steph (Annabel O'Hagan) about the fact that she was meeting Betty in secret against Vault protocol. Now, he's nowhere to be found. That doesn't bode well.
The other big development is that Steph has arranged a shotgun wedding for her and Chet, completely without Chet's knowledge. He only finds out because people tell him posters have already been hung for it, saying it will take place the following day. Chet has been trying to get out from under Steph's thumb all season, and she's been gradually forcing him to be more subservient so he takes care of her son. There's a very high chance that wedding is not going to go down how she thinks it is; I'm hoping Chet finally pulls it together and makes a big enough scene to force a split — and the pouring out of secrets about Steph's status as a Vault 31 management trainee besides.
Across the Wasteland
The last plotline before we dive into the main event that we have to touch on is Maximus and Thaddeus. As with the Vaults, they only get a few brief scenes that largely serve to set up where they'll be in the season's penultimate episode next week.
After escaping the Brotherhood of Steel, Maximus insists that they ditch his power armor, since the Brotherhood can track it down. When he says the armor is "more trouble than it's worth," there's a feeling he means more than just the tracker. I wouldn't be surprised to see Maximus return to the Brotherhood at some point, but this feels more like a real goodbye than I expected.
Despite Thaddeus trying to convince him that they should sell the cold fusion relic, Maximus insists they need to find a good person to give it to; someone like Lucy. They wander the desert, until they make camp for the night and are awoken by none other than The Ghoul's dog companion, leading into the final scene of the episode.
Now, let's circle back to Cooper Howard, and the episode's biggest revelations.
"My name is Cooper Howard"
The Ghoul's story picks off right where we left him in the last episode: impaled on a lamp post in the middle of Freeside. This is New Vegas, so of course, no one helps him, though his dog does at least try.
As The Ghoul struggles to keep from going feral, he slips in and out of memories from his life as Cooper Howard. There's a particularly strong moment where he tells himself his name to try and ground himself in his identity; I think this is the first time we've heard The Ghoul say Cooper Howard's name out loud, and it feels like a turning point. But even the knowledge that his daughter Janey is alive isn't enough to help him get off the post.
Fortunately, a big creature thumps up right as he loses consciousness, rips the post in half, and helps him out. We find out in short order that it's a supermutant — an utterly iconic monster from the games — and it's played by none other than Ron Perlman! The supermutant puts uranium in The Ghou's wound, helping him heal since uranium has a different effect on mutants. He claims that the Enclave are the ones responsible for setting the apocalypse in motion, and that a war is coming and he wants The Ghoul on the mutant side. But since The Ghoul is a perpetual loner, he refuses. The supermutant remains sympathetic, but knocks him out so that he can't see where their base is before dragging him off to a nearby abandoned town, where he ultimately crosses paths with Thaddeus and Maximus at the episode's end.
Cooper and Barb finally hash it out
Despite the appearance of the supermutant, The Ghoul's story doesn't make a whole lot of moment in this episode, on account of his wounds. But the same can't be said for the Cooper Howard flashbacks, which make good on the promise of Episode 205 and finally see him and Barb talk openly about the fact that Cooper overhead the terrifying board meeting at the end of the season 1 finale.
Both Goggins and Turner deliver great performances here, as Cooper tries to figure out exactly when Barb became a monster. But she insists that there's someone worse pulling the strings, and that she had no choice.
Later in the episode, we see Barb tell a young Betty to get her more information about how the cold fusion tech is stored. She's getting cold feet. And then when she gets in the elevator at her Vault-Tec office, we see none other than Doctor Wilzig, played by Lost's Michael Emmerson. In case you forgot, Wilzig was the Enclave scientist in season 1 who stole the cold fusion technology from that group, in hopes of bringing it to Moldaver. So now we know he and the Enclave were, in fact, active before the bombs dropped.
He threatens Barb in the elevator, saying that her family will die if she forgets her place, just like he will die if he doesn't deliver this threat. They're just small cogs in the machine, and the bombs are going to drop either way. The big reveal of this scene is that it's Wilzig who orders Barb to tell the assembled heads of the American corporations in the season 1 finale that they'll have to drop the bombs themselves. The Enclave has been pulling the strings all along.
Cooper doesn't fully buy into it, however, because he doesn't trust Barb. He leaves and finds a young Hank at the bar in New Vegas with the cold fusion briefcase cuffed to his wrist, and gets him drunk enough to take him back to his room and drug him to knock him out. Cooper opens the briefcase and finds a syringe, but before he can figure out what it does, Barb walks in. Without a word, she takes the syringe from Cooper and injects it into the unconscious Hank's neck, drawing out the cold fusion tech stored there. It seems like Barb is about to get a redemption arc here, but I wouldn't bank on things going smoothly to the end; after all, Wilzig has that relic by the start of Fallout season 1, so I imagine the Enclave will be claiming it sooner rather than later.
Verdict
"The Other Player" is an important episode of Fallout season 2 that has a few major developments, especially for Cooper Howard's flashback storyline and Lucy in the present, where she reunites with her father. The introduction of Ron Perlman's supermutant is also a very interesting turn of events, and I'm really hoping to see more of him before the season's over.
At the same time, this feels a little like a bridge episode. Maximus and Thaddeus mostly travel for a few scenes, the pair of scenes we get in the Vaults are set up for future storylines, and Norm doesn't appear at all. "The Other Player" serves mainly to set the stage for the final two episodes of the season, and while that does feel like the right play, it ultimately makes this just a little less thrilling than the previous entries, despite all the revelations in the flashbacks.
That said, it's still an excellently crafted episode of television. "The Other Player" is directed by Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan's wife and longtime creative partner. It's nice to see these two teaming up on Fallout after their work together on Westworld, and there are some truly inspired moments in this episode, like the cuts between The Ghoul's present and past, and when we see past Hank with the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, only to jump to the present where Lucy has him in handcuffs. It's a solid episode, but I have no doubt better ones lie ahead.