“Don’t think of them as human beings. Think of them as Americans.”
When the creators of the Fallout games forcibly annexed Canada into their dystopian-future United States, they did so when this was a parody of American imperialism. How could they have known that before too long, American imperialism would be beyond parody? The incorporation of Canada as “the 51st State” is now an explicit, stated policy goal of the American government, to the extent that any of the demented synapse-firings of our pedophile protector president and the psychosexual fixations of his cadre of mutant Nazi viziers can be considered “policy” as we have historically understood the term. We live, and in an increasing number of cases we die, under the exact same kind of rule by demented billionaires Fallout presented as a worst-case scenario. A cheery thought, isn’t it?
All of this gives this episode’s cold open, and its closing-credits animation of a hellish no-man’s-land along the American-Canadian border, the gravitas of a lingering nightmare. In the opening flashback, we learn that hard-hearted, one-eyed Steph was once an escapee from a Canadian internment camp. (Apparently “hoser” is the anti-Canadian racial slur of choice.) She escapes American tyranny with the help of a suicide bomber who takes out a power-suited Marine, but loses her fellow escapee (Natasha Henstridge) in the process.
The dying woman orders Steph to stop at nothing to survive the coming nuclear apocalypse, since Americans deserve no pity. Steph is slitting Yankee throats before the opening title screen appears. We catch up with her later in Coop’s flashback, believe it or not, as she soon becomes a waitress at Robert House’s Lucky 38 casino. She grills Coop on how to become a Vault-Tec employee so she can get in one of the Vaults; he tells her to ask the unconscious Hank MacLean, whom she carries off in a laundry cart. Presumably her conversation with Hank goes well, since she winds up in the special vault for management to be thawed out centuries later.
So now we have a different spin on her increasingly ruthless and punitive actions as Oveseer. Killing poor nebbishy Woody (goodbye, Zach Cherry, see you at Lumon HQ), allowing a drought in Vault 33, demanding that Betty turn over a secret briefcase Hank has filed away — it’s all part of a plan of vengeance.
I’m gonna take a wild guess and say it entails killing as many Americans as she can by unleashing the Forced Evolutionary Virus and turning them into deathclaws. I’m also going to guess was Vault-Tec’s plan for Vault 33 all along, as Norm keeps attempting to uncover while the thawed-out Vault managers keep knocking him unconscious. Sometimes, the actions of people who want to destroy America and the actions of people who claim to want to preserve it are indistinguishable from one another.
All of this, I assume, is why Steph is in such an all-fired hurry to marry Chet — such a union would make her American, more or less, which I assume is her ticket to long-term survival once she springs her trap. But Chet blows up her spot by outing her as Woody’s murderer (he found his glasses in the garbage disposal) and… dun dun DUNNNN…a Canadian!!!! As those gathered there today to witness their wedding go berserk, Steph, her empty eye socket protected by an eye-patch in bridal white, runs away, sealing herself into the Overseer’s office as all the angry Vault-dwellers pound on her door.
Back in Vault-Tec’s sanctum sanctorum beneath Lucky 38, Lucy MacLean rejects her dad’s Darth Vader–style proposal to bring order to the wasteland as father and daughter. After playing nice over a home-cooked meal — wearing a pretty yellow dress and everything — she handcuffs her dad to an oven. Apparently she’s not sold on his argument that the Legion (crucifixions, torture) and the New California Republic (high taxes) are equivalent threats, deserving of wholesale lobotomization. She careens off in the golf cart he just taught her to drive to the mainframe governing all of his brainwashing implants. Lucy discovers that it’s drawing all its power from a severed human head.
But we viewers know the head belongs to Congresswoman Welch, the taciturn but righteous-seeming representative Coop saw at the V.A. and again getting roughed up by Robert House’s security goons. He rather uncharacteristically spills every last bean about the plot to exchange cold fusion for nuclear weaponry and destroy the world so that RobCo and Vault-Tec can rule the ashes. In exchange, she facilitates a direct handover of the cold-fusion diode from Coop to the President (Clancy Brown), whom he trusts to make the right call.
We’ve seen how that works out, of course. The bombs drop. House lives on in digital form, as the Ghoul discovers when he infiltrates House’s command center. Welch winds up a nuclear-powered head in a jar. For god’s sake, the President is played by Clancy Brown, not known for his good-guy roles. As Maude Lebowski once put it, the whole thing stinks to high heaven. And if indeed Cooper Howard wound up giving away the world’s future to a real world-annihilating piece of shit, his subsequent cynicism isn’t so hard to understand. Perhaps that’s why he insists on holding onto the widget instead of Maximus, but I wouldn’t rule out a hidden motive.
And oh, while the Ghoul is sneaking into the casino, Maximus is rumbling with several deathclaws in an old suit of New California Republic power armor. The people of Freeside, who remember the NCR’s glory days, cheer him and the Ghoul and Thaddeus (whose arm falls off) as they approach the combat zone. But after the battle leaves Maximus on his back and the gates from the deathclaws’ hunting grounds to Freeside blown wide open, they’ll likely change their tune pretty quickly.
It’s weird to refer to a show as wild and woolly as Fallout as having done anything elegantly, but I really am impressed by how this penultimate episode of the season advanced all of its storylines without feeling scattershot. Lucy and Hank and the automated-man chips, the Ghoul and Maximus and Thaddeus and their attempt to infiltrate Vegas. Coop and Barb and Welch and the Vegas flashbacks. Steph and Betty and Chet and the power struggle for the Vaults. Robert House’s quest for immortality. The bitter-tasting backstory of oppression and annihilation. A knight in power armor doing battle with a horde of monstrous troll-orcs. It’s all there, achieved with a deftness and balance many similar shows (Preacher and Mrs. Davis to name two) have never touched.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
