Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 “The Innovator” is the perfect follow-up to Season 1 and the precursor to lots of chaos in Season 2. Chaos in the wasteland, chaos in Las Vegas, and chaos in the vaults. Chaos everywhere. And it’s exactly what this show needed.
Season 1 took a woman who lived in a world of perfection and threw her into a chaotic shadow of the past. Within all that, Lucy remained who she was even though the world tore at her at every turn. But there comes a point where we have to ask ourselves something important. What happens if Lucy doesn’t come home and the parts of the outside world start seeping into her? That’s what’s going to be at the core of Lucy and her journey in Season 2.
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“The Innovator” also peels back more of the layers that set the stage as to how The Ghoul and Hank end up where they are 200 years later. Because this isn’t something of fate. This beginning of Season 2 screams everything is by design, even for someone like Cooper Howard. So get ready, because betrayals are coming and we’re about to get a heaping load of information now that a new player has stepped into the arena.
One thing’s for sure, it’s not going to be what it seems in Fallout Season 2. It never is.
Lucy and The Ghoul Are Changing Each Other
When we last left off with Lucy and The Ghoul, she had just learned some really devastating things about what her father had done to her mother and humanity as a whole. So entering Season 2, I was a little bit afraid for Lucy. Pain sometimes opens the doorways to new emotions that are not us on the day to day. And I thought that the pain Lucy experienced would combine with The Ghoul’s dark view of the world, and give birth to a new version of Lucy. That’s not what happened in Season 2. So far.
Lucy is still the optimistic woman that she was in Vault 33. And The Ghoul is still a dark spot in her life. The difference between Fallout Season 1 and Season 2 is that they have a common goal; capturing her father and getting some answers. When they finally get there, narrative wise neither of them are going to be the same person or want the same justice/answers they have declared in Episode 1. But right now, we’re smackdab in the beginning aka the precipice of where their personalities and ways of being start coming together.
For Lucy, I think it’s happening to her a little bit more obviously than The Ghoul. For example, during the Dinky the T-Rex scene where The Ghoul was in a bit of a tight spot. She didn’t want to do it The Ghoul’s way so she did it her way by shooting them in the butt or arm. But she still did it. She still participated in this scheme. That willingness speaks to something shifting in Lucy, without erasing who she is at her core. Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 is the birth of someone new when it comes to Lucy.
As for The Ghoul, I’m not saying he’s becoming more like Lucy as if I were romanticizing him as a character. The Ghoul earned his name and isn’t the hero of the story at the present moment. But is it just me or was he a little bit more open this episode? He could be letting his guard down a little bit more because he trusts Lucy. He could also be doing it to give her perspective on the monster that they’re hunting aka her dad. Either way, I don’t believe that someone like The Ghoul is unaffected by someone who still believes in the good of this world aka Lucy. And that’s a positive point for the future of whatever their relationship transforms into.
Welcome Robert Edwin House
Having never really played the games, this whole brain control thing that’s happening in Fallout Season 2 is really trippy. But it gives you perspective on the hands of power that made the nuclear apocalypse happen. It’s not The Ghoul’s wife or Lucy’s dad. They’re just pawns in a greater plan. And a part of that plan is Robert Edwin House, a man who has no problem offering random guys millions of dollars to just end up killing two of them and the other one blowing up. Of course, he was going to participate in the apocalypse.
A nuclear wasteland with no regulations is a dream for someone like Robert Edwin House. And his villain is built as one of those characters who doesn’t care for morality, human connection, or ethics. He’s here for the love of the game. That game just happens to be science. So when a corporation like Vault-Tec offers him an opportunity to be part of a plan or design that makes it so he can do his experiments without any problem, of course he’s going to jump on that. And of course Vault-Tec is going to jump on the opportunity to control the masses once they “clean the slate.”
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Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 paints a clear picture as to how the apocalypse happened. And it wasn’t truly because of money or war. It happened because of control. People who wanted a specific kind of people to survive and thrive came together and fooled those with money or for the love of science that this world ending event was the answer. Or at least I think this is what’s happening. Again, I haven’t played the games. So I have a multitude of questions as to how we got to this point in Fallout.
Most importantly, I want to know what happened to the rest of the world and who those shadowy figures hiding in Vault-Tec meetings are. Because a show like Fallout doesn’t have people hidden unless we’re going to do a big reveal. And I’m excited for when the curtain is drawn back and this particular secret is spilled.
What We Think is Coming Next
The best part of Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 is that they dived right in. Yes, we didn’t see Maximus, so that part of the story hasn’t come into play yet. But everything else, it’s front and center, creating a terrifying picture as to what the vaults are and how there’s a lot about this world that we don’t know. And as a viewer, who feels like TV has gotten unbearably boring, Fallout is fresh, intriguing, and makes me ache for more of this show’s world building.
A central part of the upcoming world building is everything that’s happening in Vegas. It’s smart of Fallout as a show to give us an opportunity to see some semblance of what that city was like before the apocalypse and how facets of it still remain in New Vegas. Because all we’ve experienced so far when it comes to the past remaining in the present have been little posts in the middle of the wasteland that sell things like flea soup to survive. There’s an opportunity for the show to present something surviving at the end of the world with some of the glitz and glam of Las Vegas as it was.
The other part that is central to how we’re going to experience this Season 2 in a new way, is everything that’s happening with Norm. I love when a show takes a smaller character, someone who isn’t considered a threat, and gives them an opportunity to shine. Right now Norm is about to cause chaos unlike any of these Vault-Tec people have seen before. Because they might be educated and part of this bigger plan. But they’re still humans. And what do you do when all of the people that are part of this master plan are woken up at the same time? They’re not going to want to go back into their pods. They’re going to fight to make sure that they survive and thrive in a world that hasn’t gone according to plan.
Additional thoughts about Fallout Season 2 Episode 1:
- Even though we didn’t see Maximus in the Season 2 premiere, that teaser for Episode 2 says a lot. Maximus is going to shake the entire Brotherhood and world as we know it. And good. It’s currently a mess.
- Someone tell me what happened to the rest of the world when it comes to the Fallout games. Because surely everywhere isn’t like this, right?
- Because Hank is speaking to someone on that radio at the end. But that office looked old and dusty like no one had been there for a really long time. So who is running the world and is the world even still there?
- I’m also thinking about The Ghoul’s wife Barb Howard. She loves her family. Or I think she does. So is she doing all of this to make sure that they end up on top and survive whatever is coming? She could be. But how did Cooper and his daughter end up outside when the first bombs dropped? Wouldn’t she have known? Wouldn’t she have wanted them in a vault even if he didn’t?
- Questions questions.
- Reg is proof that fools without purpose are dangerous. That’s going to come back for sure.
- Chet becomes an unwilling father while Stephanie tries to run things and lose it. That’s another disaster waiting to happen.
Fallout premieres new episodes every Wednesday at 12am PT/3am ET on Prime Video.
