In Season One we learn that Shady Sands, a post-apocalypse, thriving community, is nuked by Hank. He wants only his controlled vaults, 31-33, to lead the world. Anyone not beholding to middle management should be stopped.
ONE
Episode Two of Season Two opens with the healthy Shady Sands. Boy Max lives here. His father invents a water purifier. The radiated water everyone’s been forced to accommodate is clean. Hope pervades the settlement.
A caravan man and his cart enter town. He robotically repeats the same phrase. Blood coming from his eyes, the man collapses in the center of town. People surround him, trying to help. When he curls over, the mind control device implanted at the base of his neck becomes visible. Max’s father quickly removes the tarp on the caravan cart. Underneath is a bomb.
(It’s an enlarged mini nuke design from the games with a Pip Boy interface. YAY!)
Joseph sends Max running for home and tries to dismantle the bomb’s timer. Closeup of the smiling Vault Boy as the Pip Boy screen informs him that by stopping the countdown Joseph has activated the fail safe. He runs.
TWO
Trying to convey calm and security, Joseph and his wife clear out their milk refrigerator and put Young Max into it. Everyone cries. Light bursts and the screen goes black. An exterior shot of Shady Sands with it’s cheerful sign shows the expanding fireball and mushroom cloud.
THREE
Water runs in a sink. It’s Hank (de-aged for this flashback) in his vault suit. He faces himself in the bathroom mirror, not completely at peace with what he did. His Pip Boy reports a Successful Detonation. Young Lucy, who wants Hank to read “Wind in the Willows” to her asks when Mommy will come home. (We know from Season One that her mother was in Shady Sands.)
Roll credits.
FOUR
Grown Max is in his power armor. He and other Knights clear a building of feral ghouls. Mission accomplished, they vertibird back to their airship. (As always, these shots are glorious fan service. So well done and beautiful.)
Cut to two nomads who install a fusion core into a machine inside a children’s playground relic.
On the airship, Quintus accepts the artifact that Max recovered on mission. It’s the “key to our new home”. He wants to unify the scattered factions of the Brotherhood. The nomads (who must be Squires) activate their machine on the airship’s signal. Pillars rise from the desert sand. The pillars unfold giant fans that blow away the sand, revealing Area 51. Quintus grips Max’s shoulder and calls him, “My son.” After a beat, Max smiles. Fade to black.
Ghoul Cooper and Lucy walk a dirt road through the desert. She thinks he should be more kind and tells him the story of Scrooge as an example. As they walk past a derelict building, Lucy hears a cry for help. Against Cooper’s advice, she goes to investigate.
On the ground is an injured woman wearing a linen wrap and turban. “Tunics,” Cooper says with dislike. Lucy searches her satchel for her last stimpak. A man in the corner groans. Reaching a hand to help him, Cooper instead slits his throat.
And then eats a piece of him.
But the meat doesn’t sit well. Cooper spits it out and examines the dead man. He has a poisoned puncture wound. Cooper readies his gun.
Radscorpions attack. Cooper uses the woman as a human shield, but the stinger tail still gets him in the thigh. He blows it up with a frag grenade and asks for the stimpak. Lucy injects it into the woman, instead. Without it, the woman would die and the ghoul won’t. She’ll lead the woman home and come back for Cooper. Fade to black.
The cryopods in Vault 31 thaw. The middle managers wake up. Norm lies that it’s Reclamation Day. They ask for Bud Askins, who’s supposed to be in charge. (We remember Bud, an oily man, from Season One.) Norm looks askance at the Brain-on-a-Roomba (Bud!) upside down in the mop bucket. Norm tries to get the thawed people to focus on finding a way out, but they all panic. Fade to black.
SWITCH
Hank in his suit happily motors through the levels of Vault-Tec headquarters. In the Cryogenic Biorepository he finds what he seeks: lab mice. He installs a micro mind control device on a mouse’s neck and places it in a cage. (Inside is a leetle tiny desk and computer monitor, lol. And a water cooler!) As the mouse eats from a bowl of cheese, Hank cranks the dial on the device. Splat. The mouse explodes.
Cut to a montage of Hank retrieving new mice and trying again. He jauntily strides the hallway, tossing his yo-yo. After many failures, a mouse finally climbs onto the desk chair before exploding.
FIVE
An airship is parked over Area 51. A vertibird lands and a group of Knights in power armor enter the facility. The Scribes, investigating all the tech, are in heaven. The Knights find a gorgeous, cherry car, push it outside, and blow it up with a minigun. (The Knights here are meatheads. Max has to tell them to stop playing with a grenade in the building.) The cold fusion vial is secured.
Max takes a moment to explain to a Young Aspirant why he washes his face. (It’s a way for the show to contrast him with the meathead Knights.) He cleans his power armor (which still has the yao guai claw mark over the breastplate). Dane comes in to tell him that Quintus called a meeting that doesn’t include the Commonwealth branch of the BoS. Outside, airships arrive and “park” over Area 51.
With cold fusion bubbling in the background, Quintus holds his meeting at a dinner table in the main hangar. He explains that the Commonwealth wasn’t invited because they’d “take the relic” for themselves. Max and the other members stand at parade rest and watch the meeting. (Again he must quietly reprimand the meathead Knights for fiddling with the pulse grenade. As the visiting Elders argue, it’s clear that the Knights aren’t the only meatheads. Quintus looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm.) The bickering stops when Scribes bring crates loaded with fusion cores. With cold fusion, the supply is limitless. The Elders, their minds changed, toast their new alliance. Max, who’s just explained to the Aspirant why the Brotherhood code matters, looks ill.
Lucy and the Tunic Lady walk together. When Lucy compliments her, Tunic Lady replies in Latin. (Anyone who’s gamed Fallout New Vegas begins to quake.)
In Vault 31, Norm tries to motivate the Thawed by lying. Bud chose them for a reason! They must continue Vault-Tec’s mission! It works. Suddenly the middle managers become creative problem solvers. They start climbing around the vault, figuring out an escape plan.
SIX
Meanwhile, Hank, toodling around the Vault-Tec headquarters, discovers a cryo chamber labeled Premium Elite Plus. He wakes someone and serves him champagne at the lab table. Still groggy, the man itches at the back of his neck. We see the freshly installed mind control device. After Kyle MacLachlan chews the scenery for a few moments (he’s so good), Steve’s head explodes. Fade to black.
SEVEN
Lucy discovers Tunic Lady’s home: a Legionnaire camp. She tells the group of hard-faced men surrounding her, “I am nice.” (This has been an important point for Lucy in her conversations with Ghoul Cooper. She believes that a nice person should be treated well. The Golden Rule. Cooper, who’s been in the Wasteland for 200 years, has no illusions. When he was a nice person, pre-apocalypse, the world was nuked and his family went missing.)
EIGHT
The Thawed, feeling the joy of discovery, form a human ladder to reach the Ventilation Access in the ceiling. When they open the hatch, Norm (“Boss”) is persuaded to lead the way. Up he climbs. (Remember, in Season One he wasn’t physical or brave.) He and everyone else clamber out the surface duct. They’re on the same ruined California beach Lucy found when she exited the vault. The Thawed are looking at a landscape they knew from 200 years ago. Norm, however, sees the outside world for the first time. “It’s beautiful,” he says.
Back in Area 51, two meathead Knights in power armor box each other while the rest of the Brotherhood cheers around them. Max is not impressed. A very large man challenges him to fight without armor, leaving him no choice but to accept. While Max removes his jacket the hulking guy sucker punches him. Bleeding, Max comes off the floor swinging. Hulk pulls a knife from his boot. When Max looks to Quintus for help, he only shrugs. Reversing the knife, Max ends up killing the Hulk. Dane leaves in disgust while the Young Aspirant cheers his head off.
NINE
However, everyone scatters when a vertibird lands in the hangar, throwing dust. A very stylish Knight jumps out (played by Kamail Nanjiani). He’s from the Commonwealth, the branch Quintus chose not to invite. He smirks at Max, who still stands over the Hulk’s dead body.
Roll credits.
CRITICAL NOTES
I’ve designated Hank’s scenes as the Three/Six and the Switch. It’s a good structure (with the most engaging content in this episode). Hank progresses from someone who will, with trepidation, eradicate an entire community, to someone who happily tortures others while pursuing a corporate strategy. He’s wonderfully insane.
At the Two, Young Max goes into the milk fridge and loses his family forever. At the Eight he must fight to the death against a hulking man who looks unbeatable. We know Max can win, though, because we know he’s a survivor. This is also a good structure.
My problem is with Norm and the Thawed. Structurally, they don’t belong in the Eight. We have no foundation established at the Two, which diminishes any satisfaction of seeing them escape the vault at the Eight. I would’ve preferred to see Norm’s difficulties in the Four and his solutions in the Five.
Hey, didn’t I have a complaint about Norm’s structure in the last episode, too?
Structurally, Lucy’s scenes are fine. Storywise, though, I was dissatisfied. In Season One, Lucy’s naivete was understandable. While traveling with Max, Lucy wanted to trust two strangers on a bridge. They turned out to be cannibals and Max’s caution and suspicion saved her life. Yet here she is, jumping into another dangerous situation with Tunic Lady. Did she learn nothing? Okay, Lucy’s the kind of person who would respond to a distress call. She shows no hesitation, though. No struggle to do good in a harsh world, which is this universe’s fascinating quandary for someone with a moral code. Her lack of a character arc annoys me.