Fallout Season 2 Episode 7 “The Other Player” finally answers the question as to Barb’s real feelings when it comes to Vault-Tec. And because of that, it is the strongest episode of the series as a whole. And I’m not saying this because I think Barb’s perspective is more important than those we’ve been on this journey with aka Lucy, Cooper/The Ghoul, and Maximus. Getting Barb’s perspective on how we ended up here in this nuclear wasteland feels like the final piece that makes everything make sense.
On the Lucy side of things, I also think that this is her strongest episode yet. I have consistently pointed out how I’m not satisfied with Lucy’s character development in Season 2. But Lucy is confronted with facets of her old life when she reunites with her dad. And it’s the eye opening moment that she needed to realize that she’s different. And on the Maximus side of things, he continued traveling with Thaddeus while trying to figure out his next step. What he doesn’t expect is how his next step leads him to The Ghoul, who has his own adventure this episode.
MORE: Need a refresher of last week’s episode? Read our review of Fallout Season 2 Episode 6 “The Wrangler.”
Finally Learning About Barb
When it comes to Fallout Seasons 1 and 2, we’ve come to know Barb through Cooper’s eyes. Barb is the wife, the mother, and the breadwinner while Cooper was off fighting or making movies. But by the end of Season 2, we were like Cooper, destroyed by the knowledge that Barb could take part in the destruction of most of the human race. Season 2 has in turn spent time dropping small hints of the frustration that Barb has felt. But personally, as a viewer, I thought that frustration was because of her marriage. I’m glad it’s not.
Barb doesn’t like what she’s doing at Vault-Tech.
But Barb is making the hard decision that Cooper can’t. And watching her try to express that to Cooper was heartbreaking because he still has hope. If we look into the future, Lucy has some facets of Cooper in the hope she carries in the face of the reality of this destroyed world. And I think that’s why he’s stuck with her for so long. But back to Cooper and Barb in the past. I would do the same thing that Barb did. Because she’s not a monster. She is a woman, a mother, and a wife in an impossible situation who knows that the end of the world is coming no matter what. So she’s making sure they have a spot for each of them at the end.
Knowing that someone at the center of Vault-Tec destroying the world was just a pawn in someone else’s game, makes everything that Barb went through, everything that Coop went through, incredibly sad. It’s people making the best with what they have. And I really love how Fallout has absolutely turned Barb from one of the most hated characters into what I feel like is the most interesting character of this show in its entirety. All it took was one episode.
By the end of “The Other Player,” I also love how the most unexpected thing happens when it comes to Barb and Cooper. She chooses to help him. She chooses to hope. And this is what I love about sci-fi. It’s always a story about humanity and love, whether that love be familial or romantic. And right now Barb is choosing to see if they can stop this thing. Because if Cooper can dream, maybe she can too. And they’ll do it all together.
This hope that Barb is now carrying makes it all the more tragic because we know they didn’t stop the bombs from falling, that Cooper and his daughter were out there when the bombs dropped, and that somehow they ended up getting separated for over 200 years. Basically, Fallout Season 2 “The Other Player” has gone on to create one of the most beautiful tragedies that I have seen on TV. And it all changed because the show finally decided to give us more information about Barb.
Lucy from the Vaults vs Lucy from the Wasteland
Entering into Season 2 of Fallout I was certain that we were going to get a different Lucy.
A Lucy who was changed by the news of what her father had done to Shady Sands and her own mother. But across multiple episodes Lucy made me frustrated enough that I felt like her character was being mishandled. I’m glad I stuck around until “The Other Player.” Because yes, it took too long to get to this point. But stories like this one are all about the journey, aren’t they? And Lucy has finally reached the point where the person she was in the vaults is clashing with the person she has become in the wasteland.
The moment in particular that sticks out to me as poignant when it comes to Lucy facing two different versions of herself, is when she has her dad in handcuffs and she comes across the mind controlled workers. At first Lucy is the same person we’ve known from day one. She believes in justice and she informs them that they are free to go. But it becomes clear that she is conflicted by what she’s seeing/hearing when they say they don’t want to go back to the surface. They want to stay there. And the way that Hank calmly orchestrated all of these responses by her side, it was manipulation at its finest because he’s trying to get Lucy on his side.
What follows is Lucy literally fighting between her past and her present. She doesn’t want these two “soldiers” to kill each other and believes in freedom. But that freedom right now is choking her out. And all the while her father is just there, hoping that she won’t make the right choice, per say. Hank is hoping that she’ll make the choice he made all those years ago when it came to Shady Sands and the choice he made to mind control all these people they’re facing. And when Lucy sees that she can’t stop the violence by being the person she was in the wasteland or in the vaults, she chooses a different path. She chooses control.
Now, I’m not disappointed in Lucy. Her father is testing her and trying to put her in a little box as if humanity is easily defined. It’s not. And as a viewer, I find the battle between who she was and who she is to be exactly the kind of progression her character needed on Fallout. As we move to the final episodes of Season 2, hopefully this show will continue to deliver when it comes to how you were raised clashing with what the world is really like. Because at its heart, that’s the purest lesson that anybody watching Fallout can understand. Is it nature? Or is it nurture? Or is control?
The Ghoul’s Struggle
I’ve always been a fan of The Ghoul because I like anti-heroes. Their morals aren’t as cookie cutter as heroes, their ambitions are vast, and they often get way more creative than the heroic lead when it comes to solving a problem. But I will admit that someone like The Ghoul does get a little stale when you don’t give him emotional depth. That’s why everything that happened in “The Other Player” only serves to make The Ghoul/Cooper more interesting. Because the anti-hero had to get here somehow. And that’s usually grounded in pain, betrayal, or loss. Cooper has experienced all of that to the point where he became The Ghoul.
Having Cooper confront his wife in the past and then showing The Ghoul struggling in the future to remember who he is, was just as tragic as everything that we learned about Barb. The memories of his wife were the one thing grounding him to this reality. And with all the new information that we now have, we can form a clearer picture as to how it’s not his hate for his wife that has kept him going. It’s Cooper’s love for his family that keeps him going. And there’s power in a story like that.
I do also want to take a tiny bit of this review to compare Cooper and Lucy in “The Other Player.” And this isn’t me shipping these two. I just wanted to take a moment to spotlight how that dreamer kind of person who wanted to save the world and thought monsters were easily spotted, that’s Lucy. But that’s also Cooper. That hope and gentleness was stripped away by the bombs dropping and him losing his family. That’s how he became The Ghoul. Lucy doesn’t have the same motivations as Cooper, a wife like Barb, or a kid. So how is she going to survive what comes next?
Additional thoughts about Fallout Season 2 Episode 6:
- Truly think that Maximus and Thaddeus are one of the most underrated friendships on this show.
- They’re both practical, kind in their own way, and survivors. But one was shaped in the boneyard and the other one was shaped in the greens of Shady Sands. Two different upbringings but similar values enough to stick together in this crazy world.
- Really glad to see that my faith in Dogmeat wasn’t wasted. He needed the hat to signal to the person he thought could help The Ghoul the most. Sucks for her owner that Dogmeat found Maximus, because he’s delightful and will help in the upcoming fight against Hank.
- Was that a giant Ron Perlman?
- Looking back at the trailer I thought that the person saying that there was a war coming was one of the soldiers in the armored suits. Now we know it isn’t. Apparently it’s another form of a ghoul that is super big, hasn’t transformed into a ghastly form of itself, and seems pretty smart.
- If these gigantic ghouls are the upcoming villain, people just need to run.
- Because we’ve all been under the impression that ghouls like our ghoul is an anomaly. But this hulking mass of a ghoul is intelligent and knows exactly who it is and what they need.
- Here’s hoping we see more of him sooner rather than later. Because I have questions!
Fallout premieres new episodes every Wednesday at 12am PT/3am ET on Prime Video.
