Is it possible to be a good person when you\u2019re stuck living through the end of the world? It\u2019s a question Fallout has wrestled with, in one form or another, in every episode since its first, with pretty much every single person\/robot\/mutant abomination that Lucy MacLean has met during her trip across the Wastes attempting to disabuse her of her bone-deep positivity about the moral viability of the human race. \u201cThe Profligate,\u201d the third episode of the show\u2019s second season, assays a great many answers to this fundamental question\u2014often involving at least one big-name guest star, for some reason. But they\u2019re mostly here to give us some sterling examples of what decent behavior isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
It says something, for instance, that the best moral exemplar we run into in this episode is probably the recovering fascist lackey working his child labor force for a measly 22 hours a day. That\u2019s right: Our old pal (and Maximus\u2019 former squire) Thaddeus is back, with Johnny Pemberton returning to take center stage in tonight\u2019s cold open, now with a fresh dose of ghoul prosthetics glued to his face. Pemberton\u2019s talent for soft-spoken absurdity remains a perfect fit for Fallout\u2019s joke-telling styles, as he settles comfortably into the role of a sort of sweatshop-owning Mr. Rogers, cheerfully doling out life advice to the children in his charge\/servitude and leading them through a sing-song chorus that reminds them that they should be happy to spend their lives peeling bottlecaps off of sarsaparilla bottles for him because \u201cMost kids are dead by this age!\u201d Fallout\u2019s pitch-black comedy can sometimes sit ill at ease with its forays into Big Moral Seriousness, but Pemberton comes off as so fundamentally well-meaning, despite the hideous things he\u2019s saying, that he serves as the perfect guy to bridge that divide.<\/p>\n
The same cannot, unfortunately, be said for fellow guest star Macaulay Culkin, whose reveal a few minutes later\u2014as the Roman cosplayer who handles Lucy\u2019s intake by the dog-helmeted goons of Caesar\u2019s Legion, after she blundered into their blatant idiot trap last episode\u2014literally seems to drag the episode to a halt, presumably so viewers can take a second to turn to their partners and go \u201cYeah, really?\u201d Soft-spoken, smirking, and just a tad stilted, Culkin\u2019s presence here works as a signifier that we\u2019re not meant to take the legionaries entirely seriously\u2014in case the fact that they\u2019re trapped in the military version of the old sitcom plot where two siblings divide their bedroom down the middle with tape didn\u2019t make that obvious enough. But his performance lacks weight in a way that essentially strands Ella Purnell, who\u2019s forced to handle the comedic heavy lifting of these scenes all by herself. (Ably, as it happens: Lucy\u2019s in fine form tonight, pointing out the dopey anachronisms of the Legion\u2019s theme park centurions and shooting down their ambitions of primae noctis by noting that she\u2019s not a virgin even if you don\u2019t count the \u201cpage-and-a-half\u201d of \u201ccousin stuff\u201d she got up to down in the vault.) The best you can say about Culkin\u2019s appearance in these scenes is that he gives some workable \u201cpetulant prince\u201d vibes, and doesn\u2019t actively trip Purnell up, while also doing his small part to set up one of the episode\u2019s best gags: the jump cut from Lucy offering to handle \u201cconflict resolution\u201d for the brewing Legion civil war to her subsequent crucifixion. (\u201cAw jeez,\u201d she remarks in the kind of joke I immediately felt bad for laughing at.)<\/p>\n
Speaking of civil wars, we spend a decent chunk of \u201cThe Profligate\u201d watching Maximus bumble his way straight into one, as his impromptu playdate with\/bromantic seduction by Kumail Nanjiani\u2019s Paladin Xander winds up escalating in drastically apocalyptic fashion. Xander\u2014who showed up in the last minute of \u201cThe Golden Rule\u201d<\/a> to try to smarm Elder Quintus\u2019 brewing insurrection out of existence\u2014has, smartly, identified Maximus as a weak point in the West Coast Brotherhood\u2019s armor. One that only opens up further after Quintus unwisely plays the Mean Dad in a council meeting, ridiculing his young hero for suggesting they stop screwing around and just murder the Commonwealth representative before he can bring the full force of the main Brotherhood down on their heads. (\u201cWell, that\u2019s what we do here, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Maximus asks, Aaron Moten injecting some chilling weariness into the young knight\u2019s voice.) Nanjiani, for his part, understands the assignment he\u2019s got here with crystal clarity, as Xander gives the younger man the full-court \u201cWe\u2019re all just frat bros in this together, right?\u201d press, asking if the pair can go \u201chard-dick\u201d while talking seriously about the prospect of war, tossing fist bumps with reckless abandon, and leading Maximus off on a little off-the-books abomination hunt. Delivered with a healthy stink of machismo, the extended seduction is fun, if also maybe a little rote\u2014at least, until we realize that the facility the pair have invaded for their little bonding sesh is actually Thaddeus\u2019 soda factory from the cold open. And, more importantly, that even a Brotherhood member rocking Kingo levels of charisma<\/a> is still just putting a charming face on a fundamental willingness to gun down children if they don\u2019t have the right kind of skin. Maximus can\u2019t abide it, and, quick as you can say \u201cShort-term moral good potentially leading to a continent-destroying superwar!\u201d he ends up fatally smashing Xander with his own fancy rocket hammer.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a lot of extremes of moral behavior to chart in a short amount of time, and I still haven\u2019t gotten to the most wobbly ethical vessel of all: a rotting, semi-human ship of Theseus known far and wide as The Ghoul. \u201cThe Profligate\u201d is the first chance Walton Goggins has gotten this season to do much more than look convincingly badass from beneath his mountain of prosthetics, and he\u2019s in fine form here\u2014both in the present day and in the hefty chunk of pre-war flashbacks that show Cooper Howard wrestling with his unwanted mission to assassinate Robert House. Who really is The Man Who Knows, apparently, popping up incognito at a VFW awards banquet for Cooper\u2019s old buddy\/recruiter Charlie in order to subtly needle his would-be killer. The scene, shared between old buddies Goggins and Justin Theroux, is easily the best two-hander of the episode, with House lobbing implications of menace at an increasingly irritated Cooper and looming over his shoulder like some kind of bowling-shirted bathroom attendant Dracula. (Among other things, the opening of \u201cThe Innovator<\/a>\u201d has me primed to get extremely nervous any time this dude is hovering behind anybody\u2019s neck.) House is interested in goodness too, as it turns out, noting that he doesn\u2019t quibble with \u201cthe pinkos\u2019\u201d grievances with the U.S. government\u2014only their chosen solutions. With Theroux slightly overplaying in the face of Goggins\u2019 deadpan, the scene as a whole is a firm reminder that, beyond the jokes and the makeup and the explosions and the mutants, Fallout really can just be a damn fine drama when it wants to buckle down and be one.\u00a0<\/p>\n See, also, the sequence of The Ghoul performing a little philosophical monologuing\/impromptu surgery on himself in that hospital he got abandoned in last episode, before embarking on a mission to get Lucy down off her cross (non-figurative variety). Said sidequest, it turns out, mostly involve a little tour through a series of Fallout: New Vegas Easter eggs and one that leaves me scratching my head, not for the first time, at the show\u2019s weird lack of scope when it comes to depicting these ostensibly large groups like Caesar\u2019s Legion or the New California Republic. Bear with me here for a second: Are we meant to think that the two holdout Rangers that The Ghoul stumbles across in the Nevada hills are the only remnants of the NCR\u2019s military force in the area, just as the destroyed Shady Sands represented the bulk of its civilian members? (While the two small camps of Legion members, also seen here, represent the vast majority of the Roman wannabes?) I can cope just fine with deviations from video game canon, which depicted Caesar\u2019s Legion as a massive army just a few years earlier and the NCR as having civilized most of California. But the show keeps seeming to want to have things both ways, leaning on these groups for the symbolic meaning and weight they carried in the games, without actually depicting them as anything near as large. The NCR, especially, continues to be held up as some tarnished last bastion of decency, while not seeming, in practice, to be much bigger than a single small city and its local militia. The difference between what we\u2019ve been shown, and what we\u2019re apparently meant to feel, remains hard for me to square.<\/p>\n Admittedly, these are also just the kinds of digressions my brain wanders off on when a TV show starts indulging in what I have down, in my notes, as \u201cExposition Overload.\u201d That is, the long and not especially point-y middle stretch of this episode where The Ghoul wanders from place to place, getting peppered relentlessly by various people and robots who\u2019d like us to know (in suitably vague fashion) about his long, deliberately obscured history with House, the NCR, the Legion, etc. I have a pretty low tolerance for this kind of unnecessarily tease-y tell-don\u2019t-show in any case, but it only gets worse when we damn well know most of this material will be coming to us soon in far-more-enjoyable flashback form. As is, it\u2019s a lot of allusion, and very little information, with the upshot being that The Ghoul decides to not only rescue Lucy, but save the wayward Rangers by inciting the fractured Legion to start killing itself. It\u2019s the most selflessness we\u2019ve seen from him to date, with Goggins capturing the unease of a long-unused conscience rattling back to life.<\/p>\n So, a few minor performance and script quibbles aside, \u201cThe Profligate\u201d is easily the most focused episode that Fallout has posted in its second season to date, following just two plotlines, which manage to meaningfully rhyme with each other in genuinely interesting ways. (I\u2019m starting to be firmly convinced, among other things, that the show all-but-needs at least one solid pre-war flashback scene per episode, just to keep Goggins in fighting shape.) It\u2019s a little worrying that the series still hasn\u2019t managed to put up a really great episode in its second outing yet, but this is definitely a step in the right direction: funny and fairly quick-moving, with a great turn from Pemberton and (shock of shocks!) all three of our principal leads getting at least a moment in the spotlight to shine. If it still feels like we\u2019re waiting for Fallout to actually get somewhere this season\u2014and slightly dangerous that the most interesting plot stuff is still mostly happening in the distant past\u2014at least it now feels like we\u2019ve reached an acceptable cruising speed. Nobody ever said the pursuit of goodness in the wreckage of humanity\u2019s mass grave was going to be easy, after all; at least now it feels like we\u2019re somewhere on the right track.<\/p>\n Stray observations\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022 As far as I can tell, Thaddeus\u2019 whole operation is taking the bottlecaps\u2014which, as a reminder, Wastelanders use as currency\u2014off of bottles that somehow arrive on the factory floor pre-capped. Your guess is as good as mine how they get that way in the first place. William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is it possible to be a good person when you\u2019re stuck living through the end of the world?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-379813","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u2022 Pemberton nails pretty much every line in that opening, including comforting a crying child with, \u201cTrudy, why aren\u2019t you making money for me?\u201d
\n\u2022 The tunic-wearing lady from last episode gets herself dispatched here with a quickness.
\n\u2022 At the risk of becoming so nerdy that I\u2019ll have to go turn in my wedding ring to the proper authorities, Lucy\u2019s actually wrong in her correction of the \u201cKaisar\u201d pronunciation here. That was, in fact, how Caesar was pronounced in the original Latin, and the guy who founded the Legion (in the video game, at least) was both a linguist, and enough of a (highly violent) pedant, that he got very insistent about it.\u00a0
\n\u2022 She\u2019s dead-on about primae noctis, though, including the fact that the people trying to float it \u201cwere just nasty people borrowing a Latin phrase.\u201d
\n\u2022 Was anyone else hoping The Ghoul would put his hat on Dogmeat?
\n\u2022 \u201cIt\u2019s just been a while since I had someone worth talking to.\u201d
\n\u2022 I feel like if you\u2019re going to cast someone as funny as Martha Kelly in a bit part like the congressperson speaking at the VFW event, you should at least give her a couple of actual jokes.
\n\u2022 \u201cYou back billions of bodies into a corner\u2026tsk.\u201d
\n\u2022 \u201cI take it you\u2019re not a vet.\u201d \u201cWhat gave me away?\u201d \u201cBecause a vet would know better than to talk politics when a man has his dick in his hand.\u201d
\n\u2022 Both Camp Golf and Victor The Securitron are taken straight from Fallout: New Vegas; the former is a big NCR camp from just before their big war with the Legion, while the latter drags the main character out of a shallow grave (at House\u2019s request, no less).
\n\u2022 Even for a show that likes its weird needle drops, the combat scene scored to the mega-bombastic cover of \u201cThe Star-Spangled Banner\u201d felt like a lot.
\n\u2022 Hey, The Ghoul! If I were entirely dependent on little vials to not turn into a zombie, I\u2019d probably make sure not to drop one on the ground when a nice Ranger lady hands me a box of them.
\n\u2022 \u201cWhen something\u2019s dead, it\u2019s usually because it deserved to die.\u201d
\n\u2022 Nanjiani stays in the lane he\u2019s asked to for most of the episode, but Xander\u2019s glee at cutting down the ghoul kids is a nice, nasty little touch; his private smile right before he pulls the trigger helps sell how fucked even the \u201cnicest\u201d orthodox Brotherhood member is, deep down.
\n\u2022 After ragging on Culkin\u2019s performance here, I\u2019d be remiss not to note how good he was\u2014opposite Goggins, as it happens\u2014in his episode of The Righteous Gemstones from a few years back<\/a>.
\n\u2022 No Hank or Norm this week. I missed a bit of that wild MacLachlan energy.
\n\u2022 \u201cHey, man!\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n