‘Fallout’ Episode 6 Recap: Everything You Know Is Wrong

Preemptive surrender is the thing they always warn you about with fascism. The danger becomes acute when people decide it’s gonna happen one way or the other, so they may as well show they’re on the side they expect to emerge victorious. In so doing, they help ensure that victory. 

Cooper Howard starts Fallout Episode 6 (“The Trap”) having preemptively surrendered. He’s the celebrity spokesman for Vault-Tec now, starring in a pitch-perfect recreation of mid-century American “the wonders of science and industry” infomercials. It’s where his beautiful wife Barb works, after all, and now, as she puts it, it’s practically “the family business.”

Some things don’t sit right about it all, though. He’s working for a company run in part by people who provided shoddy power armor to troops on the front lines during the war in which Cooper served. He’s started losing both jobs and friends over what many regard is shilling for the end of the world. Maybe he can write this last bit off as a Commie conspiracy for a while, as his actor buddy Sebastian Leslie (Matt Berry) does. Leslie’s perfectly happy to have sold his voice to that robot company, and thinks there’s nothing wrong with selling out, since everything — people, the apocalypse, you name it — is a product at bottom.

But what really gets him in the end is the dog thing. There’s no dogs allowed in the Vaults, Barb tells him over dinner one night. Says who, he asks, and asks, and asks again, never getting a straight answer. This isn’t just an idle question for him, but something fundamental. Cooper’s a real “Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam” kinda guy, a man who fought for capital-F Freedom. What if he wants a dog? What if he wants a different color jumpsuit? If he’s not making these decisions for himself, who is?

This is when Barb lets the secret out. The more trouble he causes, the less likely they’ll be to land in “one of the good Vaults.” Again, Coop’s hackles raise, since this doesn’t seem very “all men are created equal.” But Barb assures him she just wants their family to wind up in a management position, helping to run the other Vaults. 

Despite his anger at the table, he doesn’t fully give into his doubts until he has a rendezvous with Charlie Whiteknife (Dallas Goldtooth), an actor pal who blew off Barb’s big party in honor of Coop’s Vault-Tec ad. (It’s interesting: Charlie complains about how much of his career involves playing a stereotypical movie Indian, yet racism doesn’t seem to be a major factor in any other aspect of pre- and post-apocalyptic life in the show’s world.)

Charlie makes a simple point to Coop. The government has outsourced preserving humanity’s future to Vault-Tec, a corporation. As a corporation, they’re obligated to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. If fears of the end of the world are eased, they’ll make less money. Therefore, they’re using their power over the government to thwart peace negotiations and keep the doomsday clock at one second to midnight. 

Putting this all in capitalist terms seems to be what Coop needed to hear. (Ideology beyond “God Bless America” may escape him, but as an actor, he knows how to make money from an audience.) He winds up attending a meeting of fellow travelers…led, somehow, by Moldaver, the warlord who kidnapped Lucy’s dad Hank. So I guess becoming a ghoul isn’t necessary to become immortal?

Moldaver’s a very popular gal, actually. In addition to leading a left-wing Hollywood group in the past, she’s a wanted woman in the future, where both the Ghoul and his fat-cat frenemy Sorrel (the marvelous Glenn Fleshler) are hunting her down. Lucy, of course, wants to bring Wilzig’s head to her so she can exchange it for Hank.

But Lucy has more immediate concerns. Vault 4 is a weird, weird place, as it turns out. It’s full of mutants with extra or missing facial features, for one thing — such as Overseer Benjamin (Chris Parnell), an officious chucklehead who cracks racist jokes about the Vault’s surface-dweller refugee residents when they’re not around, and who, oh yeah, is a cyclops. 

Mutants are par for the course, I suppose, but more suspicious is that everyone there is a shiny happy person. It’s a perpetually smiling vibe that Maximus immediately pegs as cult-like. He ought to know: When Lucy propositions him for sex with her characteristic (and very hot) frankness, he declines out of concern that his penis might accidentally stiffen and explode, shooting out white stuff “like a pimple.” This is what passes for sex education among the Brotherhood of Steel, I guess. Lucy reassures him that this is not a problem; in fact it happens every time, “ideally.”

Maximus’s concerns are assuaged when he arrives at his apartment and finds it to be luxurious beyond his wildest surface-dweller dreams. Lucy, however, changes her mind about the safety of the Vault less because of the weird mutants and more because the surface people like to gather around a hundred candles, take off their tops, and chant about spilling blood for “the Flame Mother.” The Flame Mother is none other than Moldaver. Like I said, she’s been busy.

Blown off by Maximus and shut down by Overseer Benjamin, Lucy continues digging. (She’s a lot like her brother in this way, which is a cute touch.) She travels to the forbidden Level 12 and watches a video of a pregnant woman giving birth to a school of mutant fish that promptly eat her alive; kudos to writer Karey Dornetto for coming up with something so fucked up it had never even occurred to me before. The whole place is stuffed to the gills with flayed faces in jars, huge dead Gulpers floating around in tanks, and a whole row of pregnant women in stasis chambers. 

But Lucy gets caught by Birdie (a striking Cherien Dabis), the leader of the surface-dweller refugee cult. Whatever’s going on down there, apparently it’s integral to the cult’s quest to “bring back Shady Sands as we remember,” and if Lucy’s is the blood they have to spill to do it, so be it.

While far from a perfect episode of television — if I never see that goddamn blue-orange color scheme on a TV screen again it’ll be too soon — this is a very well-structured one. Both Coop in the past and Lucy in the present go through the same slow journey of terrified disillusionment. They’re both realizing that the society that made them the people they are, in which they believe, for which they’ve worked and fought and even killed, is a sick society, not a healthy one. What does that make them? 

We can gather from the premiere, in which Cooper is divorced, that he makes some changes to his life based on what he learns at that “Hollywood Forever” meeting with Moldaver. Will Lucy live long enough to learn lessons of her own? Tune in next episode, Fallout fans — same Vault-time, same Vault-channel!

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.