This review contains spoilers for Fallout Season 2, Episode 6, “The Other Player,” which is available to stream now on Prime Video.
After Mr. House boldly predicted that there was “another player at the table” last week, it was inevitable that this week’s sixth episode of Fallout Season 2 – titled “The Other Player” – would lift the veil on who that mystery agent is. Naturally, fans had already put together an accurate guess: The Enclave, the faction of scientists that have been a major antagonist force across the Fallout games. But while that’s an exciting reveal, it arrives as part of a scattershot chapter that rapidly runs between storylines in an effort to re-spin this season’s many plates, add new pieces to the board, and shift the gears. It’s a transition episode that demands a little extra patience, and while it certainly achieves the heavy lifting it needs to, it does feel like a minor stumble after last week’s dramatic stunner.
Frances Turner was promoted to series regular this year, but across the first five episodes of the season there was no significant change to Barb’s position in the show, despite her direct involvement with Vault-Tec’s plans. That changes this week – she even gets her own title card! – with an episode that reveals why a dedicated family woman would be so keen to see her child’s future go up in a mushroom cloud. The pivotal scene, in which Michael Emerson returns as Dr. Wilzig, is an uncomfortable, claustrophobic minute. Trapped in an elevator, her family at metaphorical gunpoint, Barb has no choice but to agree to The Enclave’s demands and put the apocalypse into motion at that fateful board meeting. Turner, who conducts the scene almost entirely in silence, communicates Barb’s fear and reluctant submission through her eyes alone. It’s the true highlight of her tenure on the show so far.
I will admit that I’m slightly disappointed that Barb and Vault-Tec aren’t behind the bombs, if only because her villainous turn was so unexpected. The Enclave, on the other hand, is a predictable shadowy figure, but I’m willing to concede considering the faction’s fascist, power-hungry, destroy-everything-that’s-not-us nature makes it a more logical option. And this reveal doesn’t override Vault-Tec’s “annihilation in search of profit” plan, a perfect skewer of American capitalism, as for all we know the company will still go through with it, even if the strings are being pulled from elsewhere.
But what of Barb’s Cold Fusion deal with Mr. House? She pulls the diode out of a drugged Hank’s neck and, considering the episode’s big reveal, it would seem that she and Cooper could now work together to foil those who want to tear them (and the world) apart. But we know House will eventually get his hands on Cold Fusion, if only because Vault-Tec has The Automated Man mind-control devices in its New Vegas vault, the tech that House offered in exchange for it. I expect there’s still more than a few twists left in Barb’s tale, and I’m excited to see how her actions will usher both House and The Enclave into the bigger picture.
Talking of The Automated Man devices, the curtain is finally pulled back on Hank’s “civillization” project: using House’s microchips to turn the wasteland’s entire population into polite, courteous, productive citizens – the very picture of an idealised Vault-Tec commercial. While this is an amusingly creepy and undeniably sinister agenda, it is a little… soft as far as this season’s reveals go. It’s certainly fitting that chirpy, family-first Hank’s evil plan would be to turn everyone as nice as all-American apple pie, but it’s too straightforward to be genuinely interesting. Perhaps all that will change when we learn just who Hank is truly working with – that thread from all the way back in Episode 1 is yet to be connected.
Much more fascinating in these scenes is Lucy. Holding Hank at knifepoint, she decides to take him back to Vault 33 to stand trial. In the face of all the violence she’s witnessed in the wasteland, she still abides by the rules of the society she was born into. Lucy has, of course, struggled to hold onto herself during her travels with The Ghoul, but it’s unclear if her reluctance to impose a harsher punishment on Hank is a case of her reclaiming her own morals, or emotional trauma causing her to default to Vault-Tec’s facsimile of pre-war societal norms. It’s most likely a bit of both – when faced with the NCR and Legion troopers who threaten to tear each other to pieces, she opts to turn on their control chips to halt the violence, despite understanding the technology is a fate more sinister than death. It’s clear that she struggles to do the right thing in a world that doesn’t abide by the simple rules of her vault.
It could be argued that Lucy’s actions here show a lack of growth. Despite all her new experiences, she’s still the naive woman from Vault 33. But that would be to ignore the emotional complexity of dealing with her own father. I expect there’s more to come here, and that, in time, Lucy will make the right choices. She did, of course, make the surprising decision to punch The Ghoul through a window after he betrayed her, and that was after she’d been cured of her drug addiction.
On the other side of that punch and now impaled on a lampost, The Ghoul once again uses a period of incapacitation to reflect on his own humanity, which is rapidly slipping away from him now he’s unable to take the drugs that prevent him from turning feral. The memory of his family is the only thing that anchors him to Cooper Howard, and it’s tragic to see him muttering the name of his daughter as he succumbs. Thankfully he has a savior in an unnamed hulking super mutant, yet another Fallout icon that fans have been waiting to see, voiced by none other than the games’ narrator, Ron Perlman.
The super mutant’s arrival is undeniably cool in concept, but there’s unfortunately not much to celebrate – he’s little more than a big green face atop a hulking mass of rags, and so isn’t a triumph of CGI and practical filmmaking in the same way as the deathclaws were. Nor is he particularly interesting, merely a prophetical mouthpiece announcing that a war with The Enclave is on the horizon. More interesting is the information we’re denied; the mutant is keen to work with The Ghoul – does he know our gunslinger by reputation, or did they know each other in former, more human lives? And with The Ghoul’s refusal to be recruited, what is the consequence for both himself and the wasteland’s upcoming conflict? I suspect The Ghoul will eventually have no choice to make a stand, but as to if Perlman’s mutant returns in a more satisfying role, that remains to be seen.
Finally, another disappointment: after interesting questions were finally posed about Vaults 32 and 33 in the previous two episodes, this week’s return to Reg’s Inbreeding Social Club and their reckless water guzzling feels like time wasted on a joke wearing thin rather than a funny catalyst for something bigger. That feeling may be eventually proven wrong as there are some breadcrumbs – Barb’s flashback reveals that Vault-Tec knew the water chips would fail, and so it seems like Vault 33 is at the mercy of an experiment. But breadcrumbs are not building blocks, and this storyline has greatly suffered from both not providing new bricks each week, and failing to build atop the very few it has delivered. Is this water shortage and the inevitable rioting it will cause connected to the Forced Evolutionary Virus experiment that Norm discovered last week? There’s no evidence of that this week, and there’s just two episodes left to do anything with that knowledge. I’m all for a slow burn, but the structure of this storyline is more akin to the showrunners constantly blowing out and relighting the fire, rather than letting it gently crackle.
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