‘Fallout’ Season 2, Episode 1 Recap – What Happens In Vegas…

Back in the Wasteland, heading to New Vegas, and it feels like there’s a lot on the line for Fallout Season 2. As one of Prime Video’s most beloved original shows – a live-action adaptation of a video game, no less – it would have a lot to live up to anyway, but stepping into the territory of the most beloved game in the franchise, trying to recapture the same alchemy that characterised the first outing… it’s a lot. Luckily, Episode 1, “The Innovator”, gets off to a pretty solid start. It’s a bit of a mess, pinging between timelines and viewpoints, and we’re clearly in the build-up phase rather than the payoff bit, but that’s just how things work.

Following the end of the first season – if you need a refresher on the whole thing, which you might, given it has been 18 months, we covered the whole show in microscopic detail – Lucy and the Ghoul are still in an uneasy alliance on the trail of the former’s father, Hank. But a lot of the premiere’s runtime is devoted instead to setting up Robert House, the wealthiest man in America (before the bombs fell), who has a kind of cult of personality around him that predates the apocalypse – but has survived well into it.

House, the founder of RobCo industries, was one of those Musk-style tech moguls who occupied a loftier position of power than even elected officials, one voted for by American dollars and buttressed by the endless march of technological progress. An opening flashback clarifies this pretty adroitly by introducing House, the real version played by Justin Theroux and not the body double glimpsed in the first season finale played by Rafi Silver, who fits a construction worker named Bill with a device that allows him to control Bill like a puppet. It has a violent climax, which involves Bill beating down his friends on House’s instruction and then House turning up the device to such an unstable frequency that Bill’s head messily explodes, and you should probably keep both of these things in mind as we go.

In the ruined present, we finally catch up with Lucy and the Ghoul, the latter of whom has been captured by a wasteland gang and is on the cusp of being hanged. Again, basics are being established here. Lucy is still looking for non-violent solutions to problems that the Ghoul is jaded enough to know can only be solved by violence, often in its extremes. This essential interplay between the characters, highlighting Lucy’s naiveté after having been raised in a Vault and the Ghoul’s cynicism after two centuries of trying to find out what happened to his family and receiving nothing but bad news, remains the core of Fallout Season 2, at least here in Episode 1. The show speaks in the Ghoul’s voice, but it has Lucy’s bumbling demeanour.

Anyway, Vegas. Sin City is less ravaged than most of America since, according to the Ghoul, they were able to shoot away most of the bombs on account of Robert House, a statement clarified by flashbacks showing how the Ghoul’s OG self, Cooper, overheard his wife, Barb, telling House about Vault-Tec’s plans to bomb America. These flashbacks also reveal through Lee Moldaver that, in response, House built a private missile system to follow through on that promise by essentially pushing the button himself, which Moldaver would like Cooper to prevent. House, the first major named character from the games to take on a prominent role in the show, is already becoming the nucleus around which all of the show’s plot elements orbit, which is a new direction for a story that has existed in the same universe as those games but, thus far, had nothing to do with any established storylines. All of this – House, the missile system, and so on – is cribbed directly from New Vegas, though it’s set a while after, despite claims of not intending to canonize any of the game’s endings, which will be difficult given House doesn’t survive all of them.

Lucy and the Ghoul don’t make it to New Vegas in Fallout Season 2, Episode 1, which is to be expected, and I imagine it’ll take them a couple of episodes of side questing to finally make it. Case in point: They’re distracted here by the discovery of Vault 24, hidden by a drive-in theatre still advertising an old Cooper Howard movie. There’s also evidence that Hank visited here in his stolen power armour, though for what purpose remains mysterious. Evidence quickly mounts that the Vault was used to brainwash Americans into communists and treat them as lab rats for the “brain-computer interface” introduced in the opening flashbacks. Hank seems to have had plenty to do with this, and thus with House, bringing the villainous plot elements together.

We also check in on Vaults 31, 32, and 33, though I’ll grant you that the things happening in them are considerably less interesting than what’s afoot above-ground. In reverse order: Reg, on Betty’s suggestion and with the promise of snacks, starts a “Products of In-Breeding Support Group”; Stephanie, now Overseer, is using Chet as a babysitter for her baby, whom his neighbours have taken to calling “Chet Jr.”; and Norm, trapped in Vault 31 by Bud’s brain, rejects the rational solution of getting into Hank’s pod and waiting things out until Reclamation Day, and instead decides to defrost all the dwellers currently cryogenically frozen in the vault.

“The Innovator” ends by more concretely establishing – or at least very, very strongly suggesting – an overt connection between Hank, who arrives at Vault-Tec’s offices in his power armour, which he trades for a suit, and House, whom he seems to be communicating with over a radio. Either way, he’s going to be continuing some rather unsavoury work on the brain-computer interface, and one assumes that a lot more people are going to die.

Should be fun.