This review contains spoilers for Fallout Season 2, Episode 8, “The Strip,” which is available to stream now on Prime Video.
“You bet on hope and you lost,” says a digital, wrist-mounted Robert House as The Ghoul peers into the empty cryopods he believed his wife and daughter would be contained in. That may be true for the irradiated Cooper Howard, but it’s not for us: we bet our hopes on Season 2 of Fallout finding a way to bring all of its wild ideas together. And it did. Well, mostly. As credits roll and our attention turns to what awaits us beyond the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, a few errant threads are left dangling without satisfying conclusions. Was the entire Vault 31 story just set up for a third season? And what became of the warring Brotherhood of Steel clans? Yet, despite not offering the true sense of closure that the very best season finales offer, “The Strip” remains a great episode of Fallout that creates connections, answers questions, and caps off all the most important aspects of this eccentric trip to New Vegas.
Stetson hats off to showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, who really did make it through the entire season without ever confirming a canon ending to Fallout: New Vegas. There is a cheeky nod – “Over the years my body became a target for wandering travellers with something to prove” does suggest that House’s withered husk of a body that survived through the centuries of apocalypse may have been killed by the Courier, but I’m pleased the show stops short of invalidating any individual playthrough. However, I do think House’s return feels thinly examined. We know he’s a genius, but how exactly did he achieve this artificial form that’s dependent on Cold Fusion? I’m surprised that the game’s Platinum Chip didn’t come into play here, retconned into some kind of AI survival data drive. Perhaps answers await in Season 3, as that flicking screen in the episode’s final moments certainly suggests we haven’t seen the last of Robert House…
While House’s return is a significant moment for Fallout lore, his role in this finale is more or less as a navigation tool for The Ghoul, who’s finally given access to Vault-Tec’s management vault. I expect some viewers will be frustrated that the journey to find The Ghoul’s family, which has been unfolding for two whole seasons now, ends in nothing but a postcard pointing to Colorado. But that line – “You bet on hope and you lost” – really does make clear that The Ghoul is now closer to reclaiming his identity as Cooper Howard than ever before. Hope is a symptom of humanity, and even this setback can’t break it. Barb and Janey may not be in Vegas, but they are alive. Where? Well, that’s hopefully a question Season 3 will answer.
Much of The Ghoul’s share of this episode examines his more emotional side, including the flashbacks, which show how Cooper took the fall for his and Barb’s involvement in “un-American activities” in an effort to keep his family safe. It’s a shame, then, that very little is made of his reunion with Lucy, who has been so responsible for restoring his humanity. While he saves her from being brainwashed by Hank, the pair are given no real space to reconcile earlier events. Regardless of how they feel – guilty or validated – the finale passes by the opportunity for an emotionally challenging conversation.
Thankfully, Lucy does get her emotional moment, but it’s with her actual father, not her surrogate one. After triggering his own brainwashing to prevent himself from spilling the beans on what his mind-control project has really been about, Hank becomes the parent Lucy always thought he was: kind, gentle, loving. There’s a Black Mirror quality to this; a bittersweet moment made possible only via a sinister technology. Both Kyle MacLachlan and Ella Purnell have been wonderful throughout this season, but these precious few seconds are among their best turns on the show so far.
Such a sad moment is instantly contrasted by the arrival of Maximus. His and Lucy’s embrace is truly genuine; a healing antidote to the synthetic love that Hank offered in all his forms. The hug is equally important to Maximus, who by this point has spent most of the episode being beaten to a pulp by deathclaws in a battle that lives up to the promise made by that tease in the credits of Season 1’s finale. After numerous false starts, we got there in the end.
Missiles rupture flesh and jaws are torn from skulls in a gory fight that successfully communicates the exhaustion and overwhelming odds of going toe-to-toe with the wasteland’s biggest bruisers. It’s seeing Maximus out of the armour, though, armed with nothing but a pole and wielding a roulette table as a shield, that really showcases his growth. He doesn’t need steel plating to defend the needy, because he’s finally become the good man his dad said he would. Of course, a pole is no match for a deathclaw, so thankfully the NCR turns up, Avengers: Endgame style, to save the day. While it’s satisfying to see Maximus reunited with his people, decades after the Shady Sands bombing tore them apart, the real joy here is the recreation of the slow-motion sniper shot from Fallout: New Vegas’s opening cinematic – it’s pure fan service, but I can’t deny that I genuinely gasped with glee.
Beyond the Strip, we catch up with Caesar’s Legion, which hasn’t been seen since the season’s third episode. Releasing a long-held pause button, we finally get to see the aftermath of the battle The Ghoul initiated between the Legion’s rival groups. Macaulay Culkin’s Lacerta Legate, now falsely crowned the one true Caesar, gets to make an incredibly good joke about taking control of Vegas and building Caesar’s Palace atop it. The NCR may have rid the strip of the deathclaws, but it seems like an even meaner beast is on the way.
You’ll have noticed by now that several paragraphs of this review have ended by looking ahead to Season 3. This is a very forward-facing finale, and while it does a lot of good work to establish groundwork for the future, it often does so at the expense of closure. After playing important roles early in the season, the NCR and Legion were largely pushed to the sides, and so a conflict that should have been key to this region of Fallout’s world was held on ice. Now, at a point where our characters’ missions in Vegas are complete – Lucy has dealt with her father, The Ghoul has “found” his family – that war is only just gearing up again, which will either keep us shackled to the Strip, or see its violence spill out into the wider wasteland. I’d like to be proven wrong, but I feel like what happens in New Vegas should stay contained to the season about New Vegas.
The biggest offender, though, is the story of the Vaults, which have effectively been a multi-episode tease for what awaits next season. There have been no consequences for Reg’s ridiculous, snack-happy Inbreeding Support Group. No resolution for Norm’s discovery of the Forced Evolutionary Virus. No link between Steph’s Canadian roots and her plans for the Vaults. None of the characters have undergone any meaningful growth, and none of them have arrived at an exciting destination. While there have definitely been interesting revelations – Hank’s connections to the Enclave and Steph’s triggering of the shadowy faction’s mystery “Phase Two” certainly make it clear that this story hasn’t been worthless – it’s been the most frustrating material to watch, and suffers greatly from having limited definition and no conclusion.
It could also be said that the Brotherhood of Steel’s story has been left without any kind of closure, as the show completely abandoned the faction’s civil war just as it ignited. I’m less concerned about this, as the Brotherhood’s actions were always complimentary to Maximus’ journey rather than a key plot in their own right, and the complete breakdown of Quintus’ alliance ultimately felt like a conclusion to simmering tensions rather than the start of something bigger. However, this season’s post-credits scene does promise Quintus will be back with a bang: The reveal that he’s in possession of the blueprints to Liberty Prime no doubt had an army of Fallout fans leaping from their seats. Considering the show’s track record in bringing the games’ icons to life, I can’t wait to see this gargantuan robot stride across the battlefields of Season 3.
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