Episode Four of the Fallout TV series . . .
The title suggests that the Rules of the Magic concerning Fallout ghouls will be explained. In the game, feral ghouls are humans who were radiated into madness; civilized ghouls are humans who were radiated into immortality. The level of exposure is the difference between them. And the post-apocalypse generations mostly distrust ghouls, either because of their looks or their feral cousins. However, if you’re a ghoul, that’s it. The radiation levels set your identity and now you continue with normal life: love, commerce, and survival.
In the show, the Rules for ghouls are different. Let’s see how detailed their explanation gets.
This is a dark episode. Some gruesome details are going to be necessary for this breakdown.
ONE
Ghoul Coop and Lucy walk the dusty road. In some deserted town, they hear a voice in the Westside Medical Clinic. Coop pushes Lucy in first.
TWO
In a sand-filled exam room they find Roger, who continuously says his own name. He’s a ghoul in bad shape.
THREE
At his feet are empty vials. Coop eyes them. (We get a brief, solid look at them. They’re marked with a poison symbol and a nuclear mushroom cloud.)
FOUR
One moment Roger has a conversation with Coop, the next he’s snarling and twitching. “You’re turning,” Coop says. Roger agrees and asks for vials, but Coop’s out. Roger’s gone 28 years since he first started. (Becoming a ghoul? Turning feral? In the TV universe, this might mean the same thing.) He says that Coop has gone longer than anyone. “That’s a lot of vials,” Roger says. Coop asks him if he remembers how good food used to taste. While Roger smiles at Lucy, reminiscing about his mother’s delicious apple pie, Coop shoots him in the head. Lucy looks on in horror as Coop pulls Roger’s teeth. He cuts Roger open and starts eating him, explaining the wasteland isn’t “canned peaches and marmalade”. When he asks Lucy her name, he pauses at “MacLean”, giving her a look. It’s so repugnant to Lucy, she asks Coop how he can live like this? In response, he hands her the knife and sets her to work. “Ass jerky won’t make itself,” Coop tells her.
Roll title.
Reg and Woody in the vault hang posters for their overseer campaigns. Sharing two mugs of coffee, the men look in at one of the prisoners who curses at them.
Norm, alone, looks at a Pip Boy photo of his dad. Betty joins him, bringing rhubarb pie. (This is the delicious pie episode. Ew.) He knows he upset people at the assembly. She gives him a pep talk while telling him to “tread lightly”. (His anger, she possibly senses, could turn to rebellion.)
Back to Lucy, limping. Close on Coop’s back, where meat hangs off his pack, drying in the sun. Looking like death, Lucy gives in and drinks radiated water from a rusty tire rim. He teases her about the Golden Rule, and she asks, “What are you?” You, he answers; just give it time. His chortle, though, turns into a cough. As he doubles over, spittle hanging from his lip, Lucy dashes away. Rounding a corner, she’s stopped by a deep crater in the middle of town. Coop lassoes her. Dragging her close, he grabs her face. She bites off the tip of his finger. (It doesn’t take much effort.) Without hesitation he uses his knife to take off the tip of her finger. Their first “honest exchange”, he calls it. Fade to black.
Back to the vault. Chet, a sad look on his face, sits down to a meal. Steph, pregnant in her vault suit, knocks on his door. She’s brought him a box of her dead husband’s things. After chatting, she starts to dress Chet in the clothes. (He’s tall and strapping; Bert was small.) Then she calls him Bert, hugs him, and starts to kiss him. It’s awkward for him, but he responds. Her water breaks. Fade to black.
SWITCH
Coop leads a stumbling Lucy up to a Super Duper Mart. (YAY!) At the entrance intercom, Coop wants two months’ supply of vials in exchange for one female, “mint condition”. The doors unlock. At gunpoint Coop sends her inside for “evaluation”. With a cough, his eyes roll up and he passes out next to the intercom.
FIVE
Inside, Lucy walks past child mechanical rides, derelict. She’s greeted by a Mr. Handy robot. (YAY!!!) He immediately notices her missing finger and brings her for medical treatment. The break room kitchen is the surgery. Lucy takes a seat on the gurney while Mr. Handy searches a drawer full of fingers for one that will fit. As he cauterizes the finger onto her hand, she tries to tell him about her missing father. (She now has a working, dead-looking digit. Recall in Episode Two when Ma June scornfully told her she still had ten fingers? It’s a lovely echo.) Comforted by the Mr. Handy, Lucy tells him she thought she was being sold as a sex slave. He scoffs, then tells her she’s here so he can harvest her organs. One of his robot arms tranqs her. Fade to black.
At the vault, Norm pushes a cart of molded jello desserts for the prisoners. The guard at the door eyes the cakes, wishing she could have one. Norm, smiling, tells her to take the cart. He looks through the slot at a prisoner who taunts him: Vault 32 wasn’t as innocent as you think. Norm accesses a computer, but the records are denied to him.
He knocks on Chet’s door. Steph, attended by others, is on his couch in labor. Chet still wears Bert’s too-tight cardigan. Happy to leave, Chet follows Norm to the Vault 32 entrance. They clear rubble blocking the doorway and climb in. They hit their Pip Boy lights (YAY!) and explore until they reach the decimated cornfield. When they head into the residence section, they find the dead, mutilated bodies. Their Pip Boys indicate that these corpses have been here for two years. Chet, overwhelmed, stares at a still-broadcasting TV that talks of mouse overpopulation and how they eventually kill each other. (It’s unclear if this is an aside commentary or if the overseer at this vault actively followed a plan that treated the residents like a mouse experiment.) The men surmise that, when the raiders arrived, this vault was already defunct. Graffiti on the wall next to a skeleton says: We know the truth. Fade to black.
Mr. Handy wheels an unconscious Lucy on a gurney. As her eyes crack open, Lucy remembers a beautiful, smiling woman, her mother, Rose. The reality is that all the Mart’s refrigerator units have live people sitting in them. With price tags on the doors. One ghoul, meeting eyes with Lucy, repeats her name, Martha. Lucy is wheeled to meet two stoner dudes watching TV.
SIX
Mr. Handy tells them that the transaction cost is 60 vials for Lucy. Dudes count their stash in a case. They have enough to make the deal.
SEVEN
“Do her now, Snip Snip,” they say to the Mr. Handy.
EIGHT
In the “operating room”, Lucy struggles against her restraints while Snip Snip fires up his circular saw arm. When he says, “This won’t hurt a bit,” Lucy kicks away the saw arm, grabs the charging paddles, and zaps Snip Snip. He mumbles on the ground, fried. Grabbing a bottle of Abraxo (YAY!), Lucy heads back to the dudes.
She has a rope around Snip Snip, leading him along. She’s loaded cleaning fluid in his syringe arm. When the dudes agree to release her, she insists on including the people in the refrigerator units. Dude throws a switch and the doors open. Everyone leaves except Martha. Lucy fires a smoking syringe into the couch cushion. Dude hits a red button that opens a select set of doors. Three ferals come out and rush toward them. Dudes shoot at them, killing them, but not before they’re also killed. Only Lucy and Martha remain. Like Roger, Martha snarls and twitches, trying to hold onto her name and her humanity. When Martha leaps, Lucy shoots her in self-defense. Her face is blood-splattered. Snip Snip lays next to her in a pile, eyes blinking. Fade to black.
Norm and Chet, outside the overseer’s door, find three vault dwellers hanging from the ceiling like suicides. Inside, the overseer is a skeleton still sitting at the desk. Norm accesses the computer’s vault door logs: opened from the outside. With a Pip Boy. Whose? “My mom’s,” Norm says, reading the name Rose MacLean.
NINE
Transition to Lucy exiting the Super Duper Mart. The upper part of her suit is tied around her waist, exposing her undershirt. She wears leather armor (a bandolier strap that somehow grants resistance points in the game). (YAY!) Coop lies on the ground, gasping. Shaking a handful of vials, Lucy says, “If you don’t get these, you turn into one of those?” He nods, his cheek rubbing the pavement. Lucy eyes her gun, a 10mm (YAY!), then chooses to give him the vials. They shine like liquid sunshine next to his face. “Golden Rule,” Lucy says, walking away.
Pan through the carnage inside the Super Duper Mart. Coop stumbles in, hitting on his inhaler. He chugs alcohol and shoots a syringe of drugs into his mouth. He finally notices the case full of vials that the dudes used as their stash. He’s loading his hat with them, when he freezes on a videotape: The Man from Deadhorse. He sits on the couch and clicks on the TV. There’s pre-apocalypse Coop in his scene from the beginning of Episode Three, when he argued that his character was a good guy who would show mercy. In the released movie, his character shoots the villain. Ghoul Coop only stares.
Roll credits.
CRITICAL NOTES
Now we know the Rules. A ghoul must have this elixir or they turn feral. That means that in Episode One, the IV drip lines feeding into Coop’s grave are delivering this fluid. Whoever trapped Coop, they needed him still civilized. As a ghoul, he can stay buried forever, but he needs the juice. I think the show could’ve spelled this out earlier and clearer, especially for those of us who gamed Fallout. Different Rules become confusing.
Although structurally sound, this episode is a difficult watch. We want to know how movie-hero Coop became this ghastly version of himself, and this episode gives us some details. It’s necessary. That doesn’t make it pleasant. The game allows players to run a brutal path, so this choice is within the Fallout universe. I never wanted to play as a cannibal, though. I always put my points in Luck, which grants leprechauns who give you smiley bonuses. I’m really not the ideal audience for this episode, lol.
My only structural suggestion involves the Three/Six. These vials are vital to Coop’s existence. We get a paused, wonderful insert of their labels at the Three. The Six, though, is ambivalent. The money shot comes later, when Lucy deposits the shiny vials next to his head. We needed a better selection, a more meaningful Mirror than just a wooden box with glass bottles in it at the actual Six. How is this elixir made? I wanted more explanation, and I wanted a beautiful vial insert in the Super Duper Mart. Coop’s arc from cowboy actor to ruthless ghoul is essential to this series. It’s a great story. I think an episode this dark, though, needed a little more sympathy. The vials are the key. The Nine is so resonant, bringing Cowboy Coop’s dilemma into the present. A firmer Three/Six would’ve presaged that ending.