Episode Five of the Fallout TV series . . .
ONE
Over a brazier, Thaddeus recounts their fight with the gulper. Inside the power armor helmet Maximus laughs, enjoying himself. It’s a friendly moment of camaraderie.
Inspired, Thaddeus asks for Knight Titus to brand him. Maximus is horrified but agrees. He heats his gauntlet in the fire.
Thaddeus screams as he’s branded. Maximus says, “Told you. It hurts.”
Immediately rebounding, Thaddeus exults about their success in finding the target and how popular they’ll be back at base. There, on a board behind him, sits Wilzig’s head, just another companion around the campfire. Maximus, feeling guilty or worried, prepares to confess that he isn’t Titus. As a squire, Thaddeus is ready to hear any secret, he says.
TWO
The camera holds on the inscrutable power armor helmet, and then Maximus opens the faceplate.
Shock. Maximus, nervous, wants to get their story straight. Thaddeus, an honest and enthusiastic fellow, only sees that protocol hasn’t been followed. The camera holds on Maximus’ face as it hardens.
THREE
The faceplate closes, presenting the ruthless power armor helmet.
FOUR
Thaddeus, clutching a squire’s key, ducks through Maximus’ legs. When he turns, Maximus steps on Thaddeus’ foot accidentally, injuring it. Thaddeus rises, though, gets behind the suit, and jettisons the power core. Limping, he walks away, leaving Maximus stuck in the powerless armor. Maximus begs. Loading the head into the golf bag and dragging the pack behind him, Thaddeus leaves. The dog, Four, trots after him. Inside the helmet, Maximus screams.
Roll title.
Time has passed and Maximus sweats in his frozen power armor. Radroaches begin to crawl over the suit, working into the crevices.
A radroach explodes, shot. Through the mess of guts on the faceplate, Maximus sees Lucy approaching. She opens the helmet. He asks her to let him out. Although she recognizes him from Filly, Lucy is cautious. She begins to explain about Wilzig’s head, but is overcome by nausea. You have radiation sickness, Maximus says. I have Radaway (YAY!) in my suit. He introduces himself as Knight Titus. She releases him.
With the suit open, Lucy admires the T-60, brought into service after the Battle of Anchorage. (YAY!) However, she passes out. Maximus catches her. Fade to black.
We’re with Norm and Chet in the dead vault. Norm is fired up, wondering how the raiders used his mom’s Pip Boy. Chet just wants to go home. At the door to Vault 31, a pile of skeletons in vault uniforms reach for the exit. Graffiti says: We know what’s in there. They run back home to their clean and shiny cornfield in Vault 33. When Betty stops them, they lie.
Lucy rests, attached to a Radaway IV. Maximus hides his power armor behind oil barrels while they talk. He nods to her and starts leaving, chasing after his Squire who stole something vital. (He doesn’t admit that it’s the head Lucy also seeks. She guesses, though.) I have a tracker on that head, she says, stopping him. She suggests they take the head to the Brotherhood, and, in exchange, some knights help her rescue her father. After some persuasion, he agrees.
(It’s a great character moment for Maximus and Moten is superb. Only with his face, he leads us to remember the boy in the milk refrigerator, the man bullied at base and left by Thaddeus, and to see that he’s never been safe to trust anyone before. This is a turning point for Maximus.)
They shake hands and set out together. Fade to black.
It’s voting day at Vault 33. Betty, on the loudspeaker, asks for their vote for overseer. (We didn’t know she was running until now.) In the ballot queue we learn that Betty has been overseer before. Even Reg votes for her rather than himself.
Back to the head tracker. Lucy and Maximus make good time. She asks about history after the bombs fell. (It’s mostly a chance for them to build rapport. Also, life in a vault is unknown and appealing to Maximus.) Lucy reminisces about her mother. We see a limned shot of Rose smiling like a Madonna in the cornfield.
SWITCH
Cut to Norm on the computer. He sees that every overseer at Vault 33 had traded in from Vault 31. Even his own father. Crosscut with a gathering in the cornfield. Betty, with a 98% approval, is elected overseer. On the computer screen Norm sees that she, too, was traded in from 31. Betty cuts her celebratory jello cake.
Walking the tracks, Lucy and Maximus approach a bridge and pause. On the other side is another couple preparing to cross. Maximus, while proclaiming they’re unarmed, asks for Lucy’s gun. She resists and finally calls out, suggesting that both couples walks on opposite sides, arms upraised as assurance. (Behind her, Maximus has a stoic face. Moten is heartbreaking as someone who knows trust is misplaced, even as Lucy tries to be a diplomat.)
Everyone puts their hands in the air. (Lucy’s include her dead finger, which is great continuity.) When they reach an even level with each other, time slows. The woman has drug-addled eye circles. The man is rough-looking. They see Lucy’s Pip Boy and smile with rotten teeth. Close-up on Maximus. When the other couple goes for their guns, he pulls Lucy’s 10mm and shoots them. In the exchange, he’s winged in the left shoulder.
FIVE
Lucy tears up. (Illusions were shattered.) Maximus shows her the filet knife in the dead woman’s pocket. The couple were fiends. Cannibals. Maximus presses a rag to his wound, and they walk onward. Fade to black.
In the Vault, Woody looks at his losing campaign flier for overseer. Davey congratulates him on a great effort: He hung so many posters! But the saying is, “When things look glum, vote for somebody from Vault 31.”
Chet robotically shakes a rattle over a cooing newborn in a bassinet while Norm watches. Steph sings from the shower. Norm tells Chet that the other vault, 32, also only elected Vault 31 overseers. (Chet looks overwhelmed and defeated by life’s events. Somehow he’s become a father to a dead man’s baby.) Defending the system, Chet says that Steph is from 31 as she steps into the room in her shower cap, robe, and eyepatch. When Norm asks her how Vault 31 is different from theirs, she says, smiling, the mashed potatoes were better. “That’s what my father used to say, too,” Norm responds.
Cut to mashed potatoes on an aluminum tray. (YAY! A seemingly innocuous piece of junk, the TV tray is an in-game treasure.) Norm delivers food to the prisoners. On the loudspeaker, Betty announces a meeting tomorrow to discuss the vault’s future.
Lucy and Maximus enter the remains of a city. A billboard says, Welcome to Shady Sands, first capital of the New California Republic. (YAY! I never played the early games, but this, I’m told, is a key location.) Established in 2142, the city had a population of over 30,000. This shocks Lucy. She’s been taught that no one could survive on the surface, and that the vaults would save humanity by repopulating on Reclamation Day. Comforting her, Maximus touches her arm and says that this attempt at civilization “didn’t work out”. He leads her through town to the giant crater at its center. Lucy wonders if anyone survived. “I did,” Maximus says.
SIX
Flashback to the boy coming from the milk refrigerator and the knight stepping through the debris. Maximus fights back emotion.
SEVEN
Lucy notices that his wound still bleeds and insists they find help.
EIGHT
Transition to them walking at dusk. They find Hawthorne Medical Laboratories, a Division of Vault-Tec. Maximus, looking fatigued, warns Lucy to be careful. She walks in, gun ready. After a beat, he follows. Inside is a lobby with desks and computers but no Lucy. Fluorescent lighting pulses, pointing toward closed double doors. Going through, he finds a door labeled Medical Supplies. Inside is a small foyer. The door on the other side has no handle and the one he came through locks behind him. Alarms blare and mist comes from the ceiling. Maximus falls through a floor trap. Fade to black.
A Vault 33 door with blood smeared on it opens. Betty leads the rest of the vault into the holding area between their vault and 32. She and the overseer of 31 have agreed that 32 shouldn’t remain empty. Half of 33 will resettle in and repopulate 32. Everything is clean and shiny. Norm looks at a functioning toaster that used to hold a fork and a skeletal hand. Fresh paint covers the blood stains. Norm remembers all the horror, now washed away.
NINE
Betty comes up behind Norm as he stares at the now-tidy overseer’s office. He asks her what happened to his mother’s Pip Boy. “It was buried with her,” Betty replies. She knows because she and Hank buried it themselves.
Transition to Maximus and Lucy looking like corpses on stretchers. She wakes and rises. Her gun is gone. His shoulder is bandaged. Startled, he wakes and joins her at the window. She smiles. Reveal a bustling vault on the other side of the window. Fade to black.
Roll credits.
CRITICAL NOTES
I feel a little like I’ve randomly created the Story Enneagram beats for this episode. The show itself didn’t leave a strong road map. What’s important, what stands out, is Maximus’ interior battle to trust someone and to hope. I recently read a review of the first season that didn’t mention his character at all. Only Lucy and Coop were discussed. If you’re not paying attention to Maximus, you’re missing this show’s heart. Moton is killing it here, and the showrunners know it. Many shots just linger on his face while a thousand things run through his mind. I’m willing to react gently to the attempted Enneagram in this episode because it’s done a great job of chronicling his emotional journey.
In that regard, I’ve chosen the Two as the moment Maximus risks himself. He tells Thaddeus the truth. It doesn’t go over well, mostly because Thaddeus is a rule-follower. The Three becomes Maximus’ reaction. He closes up, literally.
The Fallout universe, though, won’t let Maximus stay closed. A comedy of errors leads him to Lucy again. She is so trusting that it almost mesmerizes him. Probably the post-apocalyptic world has never presented him with such a naive and cheerful attitude.
At the Switch, Lucy learns caution. It’s as if she and Maximus are crossing into each other’s mental territory.
The Six, at least in my concoction of an Enneagram, is beautiful. (I hope the showrunners recognized the potential.) Maximus locks up at the Three. His trusting little boy self unlocks at the Six by emerging from the milk refrigerator. He sees the knight as a savior. For adult Maximus, all of that is being deconstructed. The Brotherhood is not the heroic place he expected. Lucy and her vault-driven enthusiasm shows him a different potential.
Lucy’s infectious personality is poignant because we the audience know that Vault-Tec is poison. Norm’s parallel storyline shows us that everything Lucy believes out in the world is based on something very suspicious. The healthy vault we see at the Nine is the culmination of the episode: all is not what it seems.