About fifteen seconds into Fallout Episode 4 (“The Ghouls”), I finally hit my breaking point: This cheery 1940s-1950s Americana musical bullshit is too goddamn much already! Even when I looked up the lyrics to the first song, an inane ditty about how “Life’s worth living when nature’s giving,” and found out that the video game Fallout 3 sourced it from a 1950s nudist movie, its ebullience feels more oppressive than arousing. Any culture steeped in this kitsch for 200 years is lucky if its worst problems are noseless zombies and radioactive bears.
The Ghoul does not 100% work for me as a villain. I find his shock-value tough guy talk, the whole “I’m you, sweetie, you just give it a little time” business, to be the kind of stuff that makes “video game dialogue” an inherently pejorative phrase. I’m not sure what kind of lesson he’s trying to impart.
It was around the time he was calmly, methodically slicing off Lucy’s finger as payback for biting off one of his own that I realized this is the point: He’s not trying to teach Lucy anything. You want to believe he’s trying to toughen her up, shake her out of her naïveté, but you can’t square that with the way he pours his water out right in front of her, or gloats as she guzzles down radioactive animal piss or whatever the hell it is, or chops off her finger and then sells her to organ harvesters, presumably never to see her again.
He’s just being mean, because he’s a mean person. He’s a villain, as described by his old fully human self in a movie just prior to blowing a bad guy’s head off via “an old Mexican eulogy” about how a person “was ugly, strong, and he had dignity.” Cooper awards the baddie two out of three before putting one through his skull. But now, the Ghoul, too, is nothing more than ugly and strong. His dignity died out long ago, as his senseless cruelty to Lucy demonstrates.
Lucy doesn’t pay it back, though, despite being put through a sort of minigame in which she has to escape the film Hostel. In order to procure his precious life-preserving vials — the only thing keeping him from turning mindless and feral like the poor bastard he executes in the cold open — he trades Lucy in to an organ harvesting operation.
Located in an abandoned mega-mart, the outfit consists of two slackers and a chipper robot named Snip Snip, voiced by Matt Berry. (The man’s accent is James Mason/Michael York levels of Englishness.) It’s a darkly funny sequence in which things keep going from bad to worse for poor captive Lucy. The threat of sex slavery is replaced with the threat of vivisection! Humans and ghouls kept in tiny cages! Freezers full of dismembered body parts! Drawers full of severed fingers! Guys who order live organ donation without looking away from the boob tube! Lucy escapes, no thanks to herself when she orders the organ traffickers to free feral ghouls without realizing that’s what they are.
But even though she’s born-again hard and emerges kitted out for life in the Wasteland, she hasn’t succumbed to the violent vision of America embodied by the Ghoul. On an interpersonal level, that is: She’s still got a famous name in a society consisting exclusively of the descendants of people rich enough to flee the nuclear devastation and leave everyone else to fend for themselves. That aside, though, she doesn’t kill the Ghoul, nor leave him to die. She leaves him some vials, allowing him to revive himself and raid the entire stockpile, presumably setting him up for years to come. Lucy lives the Golden Rule, just as she’s been saying.
One last point: Fallout has an admirably dirty mind. I don’t know if it’s just the presence of actor Xelia Mendes-Jones on both shows, but the way Lucy finally submits to her own powerlessness and drinks radioactive water reminds me of the very similar — and very similarly kink-shaded — scene in which the magic-wielding prisoner Egwene gives in and pours water on behalf of her slave driver. I mean, maybe you had no such reaction to Ella Purnell guzzling water from a trough as a towering, black-clad, cadaverous Walton Goggins looks on approvingly while holding her leash, but all I can say is I’m not made of stone.
Ditto the situation down in the Vault, where the race to replace Hank as overseer is on and the quest to civilize the captured raiders proceeds. Taking a hint from a captured raider, Norm and his cousin Chet investigate the devastated Vault 32 and discover that its population committed collective murder-suicide fully two years before the raiders arrived. All the records involving that vault and its correspondence with their own have been sealed, bloody graffiti reading “WE KNOW THE TRUTH” and “DEATH TO MANAGEMENT” is their only clue, and the vault door was opened for the raiders using a code belonging to…Norm and Lucy’s long-lost mother?
The reason Chet goes on this excursion, though, is to get away from the scene at his house, where one-eyed murderous pregnant lady Steph is giving birth. Why there? Because she came over to try and inveigle Chet into acting against the raiders, gave her a bunch of her late husband’s stuff, dressed him up in it, jumped his bones, and had her water break almost immediately upon his fingers hitting her bathing suit area. (I dunno, I think any explicit reference to wetness as a marker of arousal demonstrates a willingness to be frank in the portrayal of sex that’s to be commended, even if in this case Chet was off the mark a bit.)
There’s no Maximus material in this episode, so it’s a little bit off model in that respect. Nevertheless, I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but gnarly violence, fun monsters, solid jokes, and a dirty mind seem to be a winning formula for Fallout. That’s even with director Daniel Gray Longino and writer Kieran Fitzgerald taking over from the initial team of Jonathan Nolan, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and Graham Wagner. Each episode feels like starting the beginning of a new level.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
