Fallout Recap With Spoilers: Episodes 3 and 4

WARNING: This article contains FULL SPOILERS for Fallout Episodes 3 and 4… “The Beginning” flashes across the screen and we go back to Cooper’s life as a prominent Western movie star, long before he became the Ghoul we’ve come to know. A discussion on the set of his latest picture breaks down some of the big societal changes of the times, as the kind of hero he normally plays has less appeal in the ever-graying world. He’s informed that his writer friend was fired by the studio for “being a communist.”  Outside on the studio lot, Cooper flirts with a woman who is soon revealed to be his beloved wife, Barb. She tells him she’s got a new job for him that will require a bit of a wardrobe change and he heads to his trailer to try the the mysterious costume on.

Back in the “present day” of the series, the Ghoul discovers Wilzig’s headless body. He inhales some drugs that seemingly keep his body from shutting down and turning completely feral. He and the dog leave Wilzig’s body behind to “go find the rest of him.”

Lucy’s journey continues and she carries Wilzig’s decapitated head in a canvas wrap at her side. She notices the spark that comes from the place where he injected that glowing object but has no idea what it could be. Just to be safe, she sticks a tracker deep into his nose so she can find him with her Pip-Boy if he somehow gets lost. Talking to the head, Lucy shares that she’s thinking about the Brotherhood Knight that impressed her so much. “I wonder who he was.”

Outside of Filly, Maximus stands up his power armor suit and attempts to fix what the Ghoul broke. A radio call comes in for Titus and Maximus pretends to be the fallen Knight, saying instead that his Squire was the one who was killed. The Brotherhood say that they’ll be sending a replacement Squire shortly, so he wants to get out of town before they arrive. A vendor in town says it will cost five caps to repair the broken part and Maximus sells one of his teeth to get the money. When he gets back to his armor, a group of raiders are trying to take it apart. They start to beat him, but he eventually makes his way back into the armor and powers it up. Squishing one of their heads shows the others how powerful he is in the suit. A Brotherhood helicopter arrives over Filly and drops a new Squire to the ground; it’s Thaddeus, the guy who rallied the other recruits to beat up Maximus when he was back at camp. Maximus discovers quickly he’s going to enjoy making Thaddeus do his bidding. Thaddeus brings new orders from the Elder Cleric, saying that other factions are after the target and that they’re to kill whoever gets in their way. 

“Whoever gets the target will control the wasteland.”

Lucy’s navigation takes her to a section of Los Angeles near where Hollywood Boulevard used to be, but much of it is now underwater. The swampy area has dangers of its own, as a gulper leaps out of the water to snatch a young deer that Lucy was trying to feed. It grabs her next. While she manages to escape, the gulper takes Wilzig’s head and swims back out into the middle of the water. As Lucy prepares to go after it, the Ghoul appears and holds her at gunpoint. She lies about now knowing where the head is and he’s able to guess that a gulper took it under the irradiated water.

Back in Vault 33, Chet and Norm are meeting with the council to receive their punishments for helping Lucy. Chet is removed from the role of gatekeeper and gets reassigned, and he says he “isn’t sure” who he is anymore. The council has a hard time punishing Norm with a demotion because he hasn’t liked any job he’s been assigned to. He makes a comment about wanting the council to deliver a just punishment to the raiders who were taken prisoner in Vault 33 after the attack. As punishment, Norm is assigned a new job taking food to the violent raiders, who are all imprisoned together in an old common room.

Maximus tells Thaddeus the story of his encounter with Lucy and the Ghoul in Filly and they start tracking the Ghoul’s elevated radiation signature. Their search takes them past Wilzig’s decaying body and they realize his head is valuable, so they have to keep tracking. 

At the swamp, the Ghoul has Lucy tied to an anchor on the edge of a pulley system overlooking the water. Her radiation levels continue to rise and she believes he’s torturing her. As it turns out, he’s using her as bait to get the gulper to return to the surface. While fighting the gulper, Lucy uses the Ghoul’s pack as a weapon, causing every vial of his chems to shatter. He needs more or he’ll turn feral, plain and simple. 

Lucy gives the Ghoul a speech about why he can’t treat people the way he does, bringing up the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” The Ghoul, now on a quest for medicine and knowing gulpers take a long time to digest what they eat, leads Lucy away from the water and sets out to replace his chems. On the way out, he shares some knowledge about the wasteland that also doubles as a hilarious meta joke about the Fallout video games.

“The wasteland’s got its own Golden Rule,” the Ghoul says. “Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time.”

Thaddeus still has no idea that the Knight he’s working with is really Maximus, and the two start talking about Titus’ “former Squire.” Thaddeus shares that he actually thinks Maximus is a good guy, and he only beat him up because that’s what the previous recruits did to him. “I just wish he lived long enough to find someone else to beat up, only seems fair…I feel bad.” 

The dwellers of Vault 33 debate what to do about the 16 raiders they’re keeping captive. The consensus, led by a highly rehearsed speech from council members Reg and Woody, is to rehabilitate the prisoners and eventually integrate them into the Vault society. The third council member, Betty, asks for “real ideas” to be presented. Norm is the only one to step up and say the Raiders deserve to be punished for what they did. “We can do what they would’ve done to us.” They are then informed that the water chip in the Vault has been destroyed and they only have enough water to keep them alive for another two months — and that’s before the prisoners are taken into account. After the meeting, Steph tells Norm she thinks he’s right, and that his father would “do the right thing” if he were still there.

Max and Thaddeus follows the radiation to the water and they encounter Wilzig’s dog, as well as the gulper. Unlike the real Titus, Maximus protects his Squire and takes the fight to the gulper himself. Thaddeus is nearly swallowed by the gulper but Max manages to save him by killing it. He finds Lucy’s boot inside the gulper, along with Wilzig’s head. 

Walking through the desert, the Ghoul stops for a drink but refuses to give Lucy any from his canteen. He shows her a pool of water and tells her “not much up here stays clean.” As they pass a billboard for Vault-Tec, with the Vault Boy cartoon mascot giving a thumbs up, the Ghoul shoots a hole clean through the character’s face. He’s got an issue with the mascot and we’re about to find out why.

The outfit that Barb gave Cooper in the flashback at the start of the episode turns out to be a blue Vault-Tec jumpsuit. The new job she mentioned is being the spokesperson for a new ad campaign designed to get people to purchase spots in the Vaults as the threat of nuclear war looms over the entire country. At the end of that first photoshoot, he suggests to the Vault-Tec people that he do a thumbs up pose. 

Cooper was the inspiration for the Vault Boy.

Fallout Episode 4

The Ghoul and Lucy continue their trek for more chems. They pass an old clinic and hear shouts and feral sounds coming from inside. The man the find is an old acquaintance of the Ghoul’s, Roger, who shows what happens when one of their kind doesn’t get the drugs they need. He’s a ghoul that’s starting to turn feral and Cooper doesn’t have any chems to offer him. He’s been living as a ghoul for 28 years, which is a long time but not nearly as long as Cooper. As Roger talks, the Ghoul shoots and kills him, knowing what would happen if he lived much longer. Not one to waste anything, the Ghoul cuts some strips of meat off Roger to turn into jerky. When Lucy says her full name, “MacLean” gives the Ghoul pause. He casts some doubt about the motives and actions of her father.

Chet and Woody are campaigning against one another to become the next Overseer of Vault 33 and neither of them are getting anywhere with trying to rehabilitate the raiders. Betty finds Norm and tells him he’s not the only one hurting over the attack. She tells him his voice is more influential than he thinks and he admits that he hid during the attack. She explains that “clever boys” like Norm can do dangerous and devastating things when they get angry and are pushed to it. “Just tread lightly,” she tells him. “That’s all I ask.”

Lucy is getting dehydrated walking through the desert with the Ghoul and the come upon a tank full of dirty, irradiated water. She can’t help but drink from it. When she asks him what he is, he replies, “Oh I’m you, sweetie. You just give it a little time.” The Ghoul starts having a coughing fit, clearly in serious need of drugs. Lucy makes a break for it but gets stopped at a giant crater where a city used to be. The Ghoul stops her and she bites off his finger to try and get free.

“There you are,” he tells her, “you little killer.” After she spits his finger out he lifts her up and slices her finger off in return.

Chet is eating alone in his home inside Vault 33 until he gets a visit from Steph. She has a box of her late husband’s things with her. She thought Chet might want some of Burt’s old stuff. She loved him but doesn’t seem to have liked him very much. Steph tells Chet it would mean a lot if he took some of Burt’s things. After putting his sweater and scarf on Chet, she starts crying and calling him Burt before beginning to kiss him. As they start to get a little more involved, Steph’s water breaks.

The Ghoul and Lucy approach an old Super Duper Mart and speak to someone inside on an intercom. He offers to trade Lucy for a bunch of chems and sends her in through the door. Not long after she leaves, the Ghoul passes out. Inside the old store, Lucy is greeted by a Mr. Handy robot who says he needs to replace her missing finger. He finds a new one in a drawer full of loose appendages. The color may not totally match hers, but the finger is the right size and she’s able to move it after he attaches it to her hand. She finally starts to relax before being informed that Mr. Handy is going to be harvesting her organs. He knocks her out with a tranquilizer dart.

Talking to one of the raiders during a food drop off, Norm is essentially told that something crazy was going on Vault 32 long before the raiders arrived. He attempts to access Vault 32 records at a terminal but access to those files has been shut down. Looking for help he heads to Chet’s where Steph is inside with doctors giving birth. More than happy to have an excuse to leave, Chet accompanies Norm to the Vault 32 gate. They dig through the rubble caused by Muldaver’s explosion and create a path into the abandoned Vault. The people of that Vault have been dead for a long time, and most of the folks in Vault 33 had no idea. Throughout the Vault they find bodies of people who were killed in horrifying ways. A scan of one body’s Pip-Boy reveals that signs of life haven’t been detected for two years. The TV playing in front of one of the bodies shows lab rats trapped in a maze, alluding to the people in the Vault. The members of 32 killed one another but there’s no telling why. On a wall, written in blood, is the message, “We know the truth.”

When Lucy wakes up from the tranquilizer she’s on a gurney, being wheeled by the Mr. Handy model (who is called Snip-Snip). There are people in holding cells all along the walls, many of which are ghouls. The guy running the operation, who does nothing but watch TV from a couch in the middle of the store, tells Snip-Snip that he agrees to pay 60 vials of chems to the Ghoul in exchange for Lucy. Snip-Snip gets ready to cut her open but Lucy is able to fight her way off the gurney and take out the robot by hitting it with defibrillator paddles. The finds a jug of the toxic Abraxo Cleaner chemical and loads it into Snip-Snip’s needle gun. She threatens to use it on the men on the coach unless they free the ghouls being held in the wall. She makes them let the feral ghouls loose as well, still naive to the danger they pose. The ghouls attack the drug dealers while Lucy hides. The one remaining ghoul is a woman named Martha, who is in the process of turning feral, just as Roger was. Lucy tries as hard as she can to get through to the human still left inside Martha, but the woman is too far gone. She attacks, forcing Lucy to kill her.

Norm and Chet continue their exploration of Vault 32 and find the former Overseer dead in his office. “Death to Management” is written in blood on the office wall. Norm uses the Overseeer’s terminal to see the gate logs and find out how the raiders got inside. The gate out opened from the outside, using a Pip-Boy registered to Norm and Lucy’s late mother, Rose.

Lucy leaves the Super Duper Mart with a new look, donning some leather armor and a new pistol. She finds the Ghoul outside, lying on the ground and unable to move much. She adheres to the Golden Rule he made fun of her for, and drops a few vials of chems in front of his face. He later heads inside the store to take the rest of the drugs. There’s an entire chest full of the specific drug that helps keep him alive, ensuring he’ll be taken care of for some time. He notices the TV and examines the tape beside it. “The Man From Deadhorse,” which we learn is the movie that Cooper was filming in the flashback in Episode 3. He sees himself acting out the scene and delivering the line that he initially had issues with all those years ago.

“I hope you like the taste of lead, you commie son of a bitch.”