‘Fallout’ Episode 2 Recap: Grin and Bear It

Compared to incinerating the planet, incinerating a puppy is a pretty low-stakes way to open an episode. Nevertheless, it’s an attention-getter, and thus did the second episode of Fallout get my attention. Doubly so when it turned out to be actor Michael Emerson doing the incinerating. I’ll go to my grave arguing that his Ben Linus is the lifeblood of Lost; no other show of that magnitude relied so heavily on its antagonist, like how the X-Men are based as much on Magneto as on Professor X. Who better to burn a puppy?

Taking the baton from Kyle MacLachlan in a “former star of an obsessed-over supernatural mystery show on ABC lasts a total of one Fallout episode” relay race, Emerson guest stars as Wilzig, a scientist from some kind of well-maintained overground complex called the Enclave. After injecting himself with some kind of futuristic capsule, he gets caught by a fellow scientist harboring a pet dog he’d saved from the incinerator. The dog tears the guy’s throat out, and Wilzig flees for the wasteland. 

He’s far from alone out there. The fun of this episode (“The Target”) is seeing how much post-apocalyptic shit it can shove into its proverbial Junk Jet and fire at the viewer, counting on at least one aspect or other to deliver an entertainment killshot. 

For example, maybe you’re in it for Maximus’s story, which features a cave full of hazardous waste barrels, a knight in power armor who turns out to be an insufferable asshole played by Michael Rapaport (huge stretch!), and a gigantic irradiated mutant bear who knocks the living shit out of said knight, who screams a bunch of variations on “Fuck! Shit!” until Maximus finally shoots the beast dead. He takes his sweet time in large part because the knight basically tried to sacrifice him to the bear to save his own skin, something a worthy knight wouldn’t do. His dying complaints about the pointlessness of their mission to retrieve old pre-apocalyptic junk for their clerics only reinforce Maximus’s conviction to let the guy die and claim the armor as his own. 

His brief, quixotic tenure as a knight begins when he stops a man from punishing a theatrical charlatan (Jon Daly) who’d been fucking his chickens, and ends with him getting his ass absolutely whipped by the Ghoul. Turns out both men (well, “men”) are on the hunt for the same target: Wilzig. 

They find him — and in the Ghoul’s case, spectacularly maim him — in a ramshackle town straight out of a Mad Max movie, where he’s linked up with some kind of smuggler named Ma June (the formidable Dale Dickey). He’s also linked up with Lucy, quite coincidentally, after first saving her from a gigantic irradiated mutant cockroach earlier in the episode. (Not as gigantic as the bear, but still alarmingly big for a cockroach.) He somehow knows all about her and her Vault, much to her ongoing confusion.

A huge battle involving all the above parties ensues. The self-anointed knight Maximus does okay for himself for a bit, until he clumsily gets his foot stuck in a boardwalk; the Ghoul slices a hydraulic line and Maximus goes careening off through the air into the distance. 

In the meantime, a deal is made. Ma June reveals that she’s working with Moldaver, the leader of the raiders who kidnapped Lucy’s dad, and needs to transport the maimed Wilzig across the wasteland to her somehow. (She replaces his foot with a prosthetic that looks like it was designed by the Cenobites.) If Lucy can do it, she can orchestrate a trade. Little does she know that Maximus is in just as urgent need of Wilzig as Lucy is, since bringing him back is the only way he can save his own life after letting knight Titus die. 

It’s not really Wilzig who Moldaver needs, though, he explains to Lucy after staggering to a halt next to a crashed USSR satellite. It’s just his head. So he takes a cyanide pill and hands her a neat little chainsaw — a way to spare her the extra effort of lugging his whole corpse behind her for another 20 miles of desert. She’ll still need to be wary of the Ghoul, who resurrects Wilzig’s wounded dog using a power-up of some sort and will presumably use the unwitting critter to track down his master. What’s left of him, anyway.

The best way to sum up this episode is this: It has a gigantic mutant irradiated bear, a gigantic mutant irradiated cockroach, and a fight between a guy in mecha armor and a bulletproof zombie cowboy. If you saw those words on paper, some of you would go “hell yeah,” and some of you would roll your eyes. I get either response. Yet somehow, this doesn’t feel like a tryhard “OMG ninja zombie pirate awesomesauce epic bacon” throwback, even though Fallout’s aesthetic meshes with that ’00s cultural moment with little difficulty. (The puppy-incinerating thing is a borderline case, but it comes and goes so quickly and so early in the episode that it stings less.) Each bit had a special twist to make it a little bit more interesting than it had to be: the extreme gore of the shootout, the over-the-top red firelight of the cockroach scene, the sheer size and power of the bear versus the whiny terrified swearing of the suddenly not-so-unstoppable knight. 

Like Guy Ritchie’s recent Netflix surprise The Gentlemen, this is (so far) good solid genre storytelling in an over-the-top mode. with no pretensions of profundity beyond its welcome, intelligent mean streak. Let’s hope the streak continues.

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.