Please note: major spoilers for Fallout Season 2 Episode 1!
I love my job—I just don't love it to the exclusion of everything else in my life, and people who put their work above all other concerns, like friends, family, and their physical and mental health, make me a bit uneasy.
Case in point: Hank MacLean, played by Kyle MacLachlan in Prime Video's Fallout series. Hank is the ultimate business zealot. Before the bombs fell, Hank was so dedicated to his work at Vault-Tec that he voluntarily had himself cryogenically frozen for a couple centuries. He got thawed out, married a Vault-dweller named Rose, had two kids, and then murdered 30,000 people with an A-bomb. All in the name of business.
And he was just getting started! In the final episode of Season 1, Hank saw his daughter learn what a monster he was, left her behind to mercy-kill her ghoulified mother, then stomped his way across the desert to reach New Vegas. As Season 2 begins we see that Hank has not been shattered by the consequences of his evil acts: he's actually invigorated and ready for more.
Discovering that the front desk at Vault-Tec has collected over 400,000 unread messages over the past two centuries actually brightens his mood. "Let's get to it!" he says with a determined grin.
Hank's business, in Fallout Season 2, Episode 1, "The Man Who Knew," is the continued development of some pretty horrifying pre-war tech: a mind-control device that can be plugged into the base of a person's skull. In the episode's pre-war cold open, Robert House—at least it seems to be House, played by Justin Theroux—demonstrates the device on a construction worker unhappy that laborers are being replaced by robots.
The scene is an easy bullseye for own modern concerns about the proliferation of AI, our fears of it both replacing jobs and doing a terrible job at the jobs its replacing, and how we're being forced to beta test technology for billionaires because it's been crammed, half-formed and malfunctioning, into all of our devices and software (and in Fallout's case, our brainstems) without our consent.
House mind-controls the worker to murder his pals, but then seems to lose control and cranks the device up to 11, which pops the worker's head like a corn kernel on a hot skillet. "The world may end but progress marches on," he says almost orgasmically while holding a hunk of the dead worker's skull still attached to the device. I'm glad this is just science-fiction: I'd hate to think what would happen if the wealthiest man in the country was batshit insane for real.
Back in the present, we learn that one Vault was experimenting with the mind-control device itself, while Vault-Tec's own vault (apparently, the company had a massive underground office building hidden below New Vegas) was working on miniaturizing the contraption so it's no bigger than a jelly bean.
A tiny mind-control device sounds like pretty bad news for a planet that's had a lot of bad news lately, and this tech isn't really all that different from Fallout 4's synths. The techniques vary, but the end result is the same: people that can be programmed like robots. Mind-controlling the world's population fits perfectly into Hank's philosophy—he nuked Shady Sands because he hates that the world had split into factions. Hank wants everyone united and working blissfully together as one big, artificially happy corporation. No competition means no fighting, even if that means no free will.
As Hank gets to work at Vault-Tec, Lucy and the Ghoul each have their reasons for tracking him down. Lucy wants to bring him back to her Vault to face justice, while The Ghoul wants answers as to where his family wound up when the bombs fell. We catch up with the duo in Novac, site of the Dino Dee-lite motel and Dinky the T-Rex, the dinosaur-shaped gift shop that served as Boone's sniper perch in Fallout: New Vegas.
Their collective quest has led to them a con straight out of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Lucy turns in the Ghoul to the Great Khans for a bounty in caps, then plans to free him once she's at a safe distance with the cash. Except Lucy decides instead on a Speech check to avoid bloodshed—which she critically flubs. In the ensuing combat, she only aims at non-lethal body parts, but the Ghoul isn't nearly as thoughtful and the Great Khans become a bit less great.
It's a location that appears in Fallout: New Vegas' game files but was cut from the final game
(Why did The Ghoul bother with this scheme instead of just killing the Khans and taking their caps? I dunno. Maybe in the past 200 years he never put any points into lockpicking, so he needed the Khans to voluntarily open their safe before they were all dead.)
Lucy and the Ghoul continue following Hank's bloody footsteps (literally: he appears to have stomped some poor man in half in the desert) and wind up at Vault 24. It's cool to finally see inside this Vault: it's a location that appears in Fallout: New Vegas' game files but was cut from the final game, meaning there's no pre-existing lore to be overwritten.
Vault 24 was being used for brainwashing experiments, turning patriotic Americans into communists by attaching House's devices to their heads and feeding them eyefuls of propaganda. Hank made a pit-stop there to pick up the experiment data and leave a message for Lucy in the form of a mind-controlled wastelander, who tells her to return home—just before his head explodes like a cherry. I think Hank is the worst version of "My dad went out to buy cigarettes and never came back."
Pre-War Cooper Howard (Goggins, again) isn't having such a great time, either. Having learned his wife is behind Vault-Tec's plan to A-bomb the entire planet ("There's a lot of earning potential with the end of the world," agrees Robert House in Season 1), Cooper grabs his daughter and makes a break for Bakersfield, but is stopped when a missile drill makes him realize nowhere is safe from a nuclear war.
She doesn't want him to spy on Robert House, but assassinate him.
Coop meets with Lee Moldaver, who has a pretty big ask: she doesn't want him to spy on Robert House, but assassinate him. If the US drops the bombs, Moldaver says, it'll be House pushing the button. Coop is like "naw" but then when he gets home and gives a big fake smile to his wife, we get the sense that he's like "maybe."
And let's not forget things are still happening back in Vaults 31-33! Poor Norm MacLean, having investigated the secret experiments of the Vaults, is now locked in a cryo chamber with a whole bunch of junior executives sleeping in their pods. Keeping him company is Bud, of Bud's Buds, another business zealot so dedicated to the management program he agreed to have his brain stuck in a Roomba.
Poor Norm is dying of thirst and malnutrition as Bud tries to convince him into going into cryosleep himself or accepting a lethal injection, but Norm goes with the nuclear option: snapping the syringe off Bud's stupid little robotic arm ("No, no, wait! I need that to threaten you!") and defrosts every single junior executive at once. I guess, at least, he'll have something to eat?
Whew. That's a heck of a lot going on in just the first episode of Fallout Season 2! I didn't even mention Chet's new life as a babysitter for Overseer Steph in Vault 31, or Reg McPhee starting a "Products Of In-Breeding Support Group" in Vault 32 because I don't know quite what to make of that yet. They have great snacks, though.
It's a great episode to kick off Season 2: some action, some intrigue, a few laughs, and plenty to suggest quality of writing and acting is completely on-par with the great first season. That's a big Vault-Boy thumbs up from me.
Speaking of fingers: I think it was the AV Club who started the trend of gathering individual thoughts in bullet points at the end of TV recaps, so I'm going to co-opt it with easter eggs and references that made me point at the screen, like our good friend Leo. I'll call this section:
Pip-Boy Pointers
🦖 Novac, obviously: the layout is a bit different (including a pool, classy!) but the Dino Dee-lite is there along with Dinky, used once more as a sniper's nest.
🏍️ Great Khans: The raider gang from New Vegas (and an offshoot of the New Khans from Fallout 2). The fight with them is soundtracked by Marty Robbins' Big Iron, also familiar from New Vegas.
🎯 VATS: Lucy targeting non-lethal body parts while sniping is totally VATS.
☢️ Rad heals: The Ghoul uses radiation to heal the wounds on his neck: if you're a ghoul character in Fallout 76, you can use radiation to heal, too.
🔒 Vault 24: It was cut from Fallout: New Vegas, so nice to see it finding its way into the Fallout universe with its own lore. There are a few Vault 24 mods, so maybe modders will add some of what we see in this episode into their vaults.
🍿 Starlight Drive-In: It's a location from Fallout 4, but it genuinely made me happy seeing it here (and no reason it couldn't be a franchise with locations all over the country). I know Fallout 4 is lacking in a lot of ways, but the settlement-building system (itself imperfect) meant I spent a ton of time at the Starlight Drive-In building and crafting and managing my little collection of NPCs. My cruddy, ugly little base felt like more of a home than most player housing does in RPGs because I spent so much time building it myself. Seeing the Drive-In on the show gave me some legit warm fuzzies.
🎩 Hats: Lucy finds a ushanka with a communist red star on it and doesn't even try it on. She just drops it! She's still got a ways to go before she's a real videogame character, huh? I have never found a hat in a game and not tried it on immediately.
❓ Darla? The Ghoul mentions a shopkeeper named Darla who sold him a soda 25 years ago in Novac, though the only Darla I can find is from Fallout 4. There was a Daisy and Dusty in Novac in New Vegas, but no Darla. Anyone know if this is a reference to someone specific?
☕ Twin Peaks: Hank sure enjoys that cup of coffee. A lovely little nod to his friend David Lynch, I thought.
🎰 Mr. House: OK, what's going on with House? We see the same actor from Season 1 playing him on TV, but here's Justin Theroux who is pretty clearly also House. Is one of them a body double? A clone that didn't bake all the way? A Jeeves and Wooster scenario where one is an idiot and the other is the secret brains of the operation? Unidentical twin brothers pulling a Prestige? Let me know your theories in the comments.
