‘Fallout’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: “The Wrangler”

To paraphrase Melle Mel from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, New Vegas, New Vegas, big city of dreams, and everything in New Vegas ain’t always what it seems. This episode of Fallout teaches us you can’t trust Fallout first and foremost, so take everything I’m about to say with a grain of salt. But it certainly appears that much of what we’ve learned about the origin and architects of the apocalypse has been a lie. And even in the current-day storyline, it’s best not to take the word of even your closest allies at face value.

In the segments of the episode that take place before the bombs dropped, Cooper Howard and his Vault-Tec higher-up wife, Barb, arrive in Las Vegas, already being governed as the private fiefdom of billionaire industrialist Robert House — who’s once again being played by actor Rafi Silver as he was during Season 1, not by Justin Theroux as he’s been so far in Season 2. 

Cooper knows that Barb’s task on this trip is to hand off cold fusion technology to House, in exchange for the weapons Vault-Tec needs to initiate nuclear annihilation. Over the objections of his underground contact, Kate Williams (known as Lee Moldaver in the post-apocalyptic world), Coop insists he can stop the handoff from happening without killing anyone. He is determined to leave that part of himself behind on the battlefield.

That battlefield concerns Robert House — the real Robert House, played by Theroux, as opposed to the body double and public face, played by Silver — a great deal, as it turns out. Whisking Coop away to his high-rise supervillain lair, House claims to have used mathematical analysis of global sociopolitical events to predict the future down to the exact date and time the end of the world will take place. (In Foundation, the brilliant show based on Isaac Asimov’s novels, this field of mathematics is called psychohistory.) His prediction: the birthday of Coop and Barb’s daughter, Janey.

This indicates two things. First, House really isn’t the man who’ll press the button. If he were, he’d know when doomsday would happen without needing to run complex calculations. Second, Coop and Barb are deeply, “mathematically intertwined” with the apocalypse. House believes Barb answers to the real power behind it all, a power even greater than of himself and his fellow titans of industry and their corporate behemoths, and it’s on this secret power’s behalf that she’s pursuing her apocalyptic ends. 

House thinks that the monster that Cooper saw run amok in Alaska last episode is part of Barb’s plan. House also says that Coop’s unexpected trip to Vegas to assassinate him — a plan he is well aware of, somehow — accelerated the doomsday clock’s countdown by a full month. In fact, he believes Cooper himself may be the man who pulls the trigger on the planet. Coop flees in a panic and gets rip-roarin’ drunk to forget what he’s heard, riding on a mechanical-bull-style missile like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove before his oh-so-concerned wife finds him. “We need to talk,” he tells her when he sobers up.

In the present, the exact kind of “demon in the snow” that Coop saw way back when proves easy enough to elude on the Vegas strip, as the Ghoul and Lucy quickly escape a whole pack of deathclaws. They wind up in Freeside, a ramshackle town on the outskirts of the gated-off strip, where the locals take situations like these — or invasions by the NCR, the Brotherhood, the Legion, the Khans, robots, whatever — in stride.

While the Ghoul heads off to get drunk and reminisce about the past, Lucy attempts to get clean with one of the wasteland’s many miracle drugs, addictol. This elixir purges her system of the drug she’s addicted to in roughly one extremely prolonged act of vomiting — but not before Lucy first shoots and kills the insane man who’s killed the drug store proprietor and is on the verge of killing Lucy too. The killing, which she’d only intended to be a wounding, is a shock to her system.

She’s about to get a worse one. Making it back to the Ghoul’s hotel room, she finds him strangely comforting and kind…because he feels bad about selling her out to her father. He’s been approached by the Snake-Oil Salesman (Jon Daly), the chicken-fucking degenerate from last season, who’s been captured and operated on by Hank. As the first successful human guinea pig for those brain-controlling implants, he’s been sent to make a deal: In exchange for his daughter, Hank will allow the Ghoul’s wife and child, whose frozen bodies he claims to control, to keep living in stasis. 

But before the Ghoul can head off to Hank with Lucy slung over his shoulder, she peps up from the knockout dart he hits her with and punches him clean out the window with one of those power-fist doodads, impaling him on a lamppost. Hank himself shows up to collect her afterwards, though that would rather seem to defeat the purpose of hiring the Ghoul to bring her to him in the first place.

The third living member of the MacLean family is in dire straits as well. Norm and his crew of thawed-out Vault-Tec managers make it to Vegas themselves, where they infiltrate the old Vault-Tec headquarters. They run into the old junk dealers Ma June and her pal Barv (Dale Dickey and Edythe Jason). Ma June does her best to bring Norm up to speed on the situation with his sister, but the long story short is that she believes there’s no way she’d still be alive out there. “You don’t know my sister,” he replies.

Norm befriends Claudia (Rachel Marsh), a thawed-out woman who was brand-new to the company when the bombs dropped and who’s having a much harder time coming to terms with the end of the world than everyone else. He even admits to her that he isn’t really supposed to be the man in charge. Unfortunately, Claudia knows very little about Future Enterprise Ventures, the late great Bud Askins’s big secret plan for Vaults 32 and 33.

However, Claudia does remember the location of the office where Barb Howard, Bud’s boss, used to work. (Janey’s gaze lingers for some time on an old photo of Barb and Coop’s daughter Janey while she’s in there, which seems worth noting.) Norm, who’s good with Vault-Tec computers, is just beginning to uncover that “Future Enterprise Ventures” is a code name for something called the Forced Evolutionary Virus when Ronnie (Adam Faison), Bud’s former assistant, gets the jump on him and chokes him unconscious. Ronnie’s been trying to contact “the investors” — could they be the puppet masters who pulled Barb’s strings and dropped the bombs?

It’s hard to watch this episode and not be troubled by just how close to a comically awful video-game dystopia our present reality in these United States has become. In order to demonstrate House’s dictatorial control over pre-apocalyptic Vegas, we see his private security guards rough up protestors and shove a congresswoman to the ground. Once upon a time that was the kind of behavior that would end a powerful person’s career. Today, the President of the United States of America, a billionaire surrounded and supported by billionaires, celebrates when his masked secret police kill his political opponents. We’re so far past shoving congresswomen.

On the other hand — and admittedly this is one hard-working “on the other hand” — Fallout is still fucking funny. Jon Daly’s Snake-Oil Salesman is so gleefully disgusting you practically need to wash your hands after looking at him; Hank catches him while he’s trying to seduce an ancient security robot he’s apparently had sex with before. Justin Theroux is a hoot as House, whose mid-Atlantic elocution makes it sound like he’s grilling Coop about his “hwife.” I also love the way he explains using secret access to American power armor to spy on Coop and see what happened with that monster on the battlefield: “I was there with you, in Alaska. Not physically, of course — I’m not insane.” As Ozzy once sang, guys like this leave battle for the poor.

What impresses me most about this episode is the amount of pathos Walton Goggins is able to generate under an inch of prosthetic makeup and with a digitally erased nose. The moment the Ghoul sits down at that bar, it’s like he’s a different person than the one we knew — ruminative, disappointed in himself, just plain sad about it all. Of course we learn later he’s wrestling with handing Lucy over to her insane father, which he reveals was the whole reason he stuck with her all this time: She wasn’t his friend or his ally, she was his bargaining chip. 

But her presence in his life is changing him, as surely as she’d never have killed someone before meeting him in turn. It may not seem like much, but being kind to that dog and feeling any kind of way at all about Lucy are huge steps for the subhuman piece of shit we met last season. Especially as the flashbacks draw us closer to…well, whatever happened with him and Barb and House and the bombs, who knows what kind of human being the Ghoul will turn out to be.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.