‘Fallout’ Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: “The Profligate”

Man, Fallout is a killer show. I don’t know what else to say! When I press play on any given episode, I sit back secure in the knowledge that everything I see will be entertaining. Some of it will be funny in a nice way. Some of it will be funny in an extremely nasty way. There will be violence that makes you go “fuck yeah!” and violence that makes you go “oh fuck.” Practical effects and physical sets will prevail over CGI sludge. A bunch of actors you like — Macaulay Culkin! Jon Gries! Kumail Nanjiani! — will show up and do something rad or weird or awful or hilarious. Corporations and capitalism will be dragged in a way that would shock the non-existent conscience of Amazon overlord and Trump crony Jeff Bezos, our era’s answer to Robert House. (I know people will think Elon, but it’s always the quiet ones.) All on Amazon’s dime! Fallout has the giddy feeling of people getting away with something, and it’s infectious as fuck.

There is absolutely zero need for Fallout to look as good as it does now, for example. In this episode, director Liz Friedlander shoots one of the loveliest wide shots (the Ghoul and his dog on a sun-baked hill) and closeups (Cooper Howard examining a lighter given to him by his friend and secret comrade Charlie Whiteknife) of 2025. Right under the wire! The show has always been shot on film per the desire of producer/director Jonathan Nolan, but the absence of blue/orange color grading this season has suddenly made Fallout one of the most fun shows to look at in this side of Vince Gilligan’s painterly Pluribus.

Meanwhile, writer Chaz Hawkins’s script cleverly sets up a parallel pair of civil wars — both of which are kicked off because, ironically, one of our heroes did the right thing. (More or less.)

On the Lucy/Ghoul side of the ledger, our Vaultie heroine learns to her sorrow that the Ghoul was right about the Roman cosplayers known as the Legion. They’re real pieces of shit, who execute the woman Lucy rescued the moment she returns to their camp and crucify Lucy afterwards. As we learn from, of all people, Macaulay Culkin (not appearing as himself, to be fair), the Legion is embroiled in a war of succession, in which two Caesars (pronounced with a hard C) are vying for control of this wasteland faction. 

The side that grabbed Lucy has no use for her Golden Rule stuff. “Good is not a meaningful vector in history,” Culkin’s character says to her. “Only strength.” It’s reminiscent of a song that our fascist president Donald Trump had performed by children at a campaign rally during his first run for office, in which little girls sang the phrase “Deal from strength or get crushed every time” to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” At the time it was the most openly fascist thing I’d ever heard from a presidential campaign. Was I ever so young?

At any rate, the Ghoul recovers from the giant scorpion sting he received last episode by carving the venom-infected flesh out of his leg. He tells the faithful dog he picked up during Season 1 that while he dislikes Lucy, he needs her for his plans later on. But pay attention to that sentence: The Ghouls is talking to a dog. He’s even petting him lovingly! “It’s just been a while since I had someone worth talkin’ to, that’s all,” he explains to the happy animal. Really, he’s explaining it to himself. 

In order to free her, the Ghoul seeks help from the Legion’s fiercest foes, the remnants of the New California Republic. All he finds at their main base is an old robot friend of his named Victor (voiced by William Sadler, Die Hard 2’s main heavy) who can’t offer much help — and who seems a bit menacing there towards the end. The few active NCR soldiers he does find, Rodriguez (Barbara Eve Harris) and Biff (recurring White Lotus villain Jon Gries), are old and desperate for reinforcements. 

So the Ghoul devises a plan. At first it seems like he’s up to his old amoral tricks, selling out the location o the NCR holdouts in exchange for Lucy’s freedom. Instead, he rigs the Legion’s supply of dynamite to explode after they leave, destroying the fenced border between the two warring Legion camps and sparking an all-out battle among those who survived the explosion. It’s not clear that any Legion faction will emerge victorious — the Ghoul’s equivalent of doing a good deed for the world.

He wasn’t always so cynical, of course, as Victor the robot reminds him. In a series of flashback scenes, we see Cooper Howard, the Ghoul’s old human self, attending an award ceremony for his pal Charlie at a VFW hall. Charlie, who’s secretly part of Los Angeles’s anti-war underground, delivers a speech that drives home many inconvenient truths about war. He’s getting an award for saving a man’s life, but he had to kill three other men to do it. Those men believed in their cause as much as Americans like Charlie and Cooper did. They cared about each other just as much as Charlie and Cooper did. Now they’re dead because of what Charlie and Cooper did. 

Did the side that cares about safeguarding people’s lives and happiness prevail? You’d hope so. But Charlie knows they didn’t — that America’s capitalist cabal plans to initiate nuclear war, effectively winning a civil war for control of the country with a single barrage of A-bombs. Coop, meanwhile, watched his wife Barb pack things up for their life in a Vault, knowing that she was the one who proposed the nuclear war to begin with. And Charlie knows that Cooper has been asked to kill the man who’ll likely push the button, the billionaire industrialist Robert House. He gives Cooper the commemorative lighter (lol) that he received for his bravery, which the Ghoul still hangs on to today, to drive home how valuable this mission really is.

It appears that neither man knows that Robert House is right there in the VFW hall with them. The mustachioed dandy harasses Cooper in the men’s room, accusing both him and Charlie of being pinkos. But, he says, it’s a position he can sympathize with. All the billions of people on Earth have been backed into a corner, he says, and the solutions people propose are bound to get “messy messy.” Coop exits the encounter — but what does the presence of the man he’s supposed to assassinate right there in the same building with him and Charlie say about the opsec of the assassination plan to begin with?

Back in the future, Knight Maximus has reached a similar crossroads. With Lord Quintus’s plans for civil war jeopardized by the presence of Xander, the representative of the far more powerful Brotherhood chapter called the Commonwealth, Maximus proposes just killing the guy. After all, isn’t that what they do around here? Quintus angrily ridicules Maximus for the suggestion, calling him a mere “sword” to be wielded, not to be lectured by. 

Xander, meanwhile, seems like an alright dude. With none of the religious hangups endemic to Maximus’s faction, he’s a happy-go-lucky guy, and — hey, guess what — all he really needs is Maximus’s help in retrieving the cold fusion device Quintus controls so that they can stop the civil war before it starts. Flying around in a brotherhood chopper, shooting the shit with a fellow soldier with big ideas, brings a rare smile to Maximus’s face.

That smile fades when he sees what Xander is like in action. Sure, it’s cool to watch him use a rocket-powered Thor hammer to wallop a malfunctioning security robot. (Maximus gets in on the act by punching its TV-screen face in.) But when Xander takes aim at a gaggle of ghoul children who perform child labor at the soda factor operated by ne’er-do-well Brotherhood squire turned ghoul Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), Maximus sees he’s really no better than Quintus. Indeed, there’s a truly ghastly moment when Xander cheerfully separates Thaddeus’s human child laborers from the ghoul ones, the way labor-ready people were separated from those too old or young or infirm o work at Nazi extermination camps.

That’s quite enough for Maximus. He brings the rocket-powered hammer down hard on Xander’s helmeted noggin, killing him instantly. Maximus and Thaddues then catch up a bit — recall that they knew each other during Season 1 — before Maximus explains that he just started a civil war. (Thaddeus’s thoughtful reply is “Okay!”)

Now, this isn’t a particularly “spectacular” episode of Fallout. The Ghoul doesn’t go on the gun-toting killing spree among the Legion that you might have expected. The dynamite detonation and subsequent battle are viewed from a distance. Xander and Maximus rumble with a robot, but they’re smiling and chatting and having the time of their lives while they do it, so it’s not like it’s particularly tense. No one nukes anything.

Yet it’s still replete with vividly imagined moments. Lucy on the cross, watching crows peck at a dead man nearby, seeing one land on her own crosspiece, waiting for her to die. Michael Cristofer’s Quintus dismissing Maximus by prolcaiming “Behold, the dimness of the sword.” The execution of the woman Lucy rescued, right on the spot. Barb crying over leaving her old life behind when she herself decided to destroy it. The Ghoul getting humanized not by Lucy, but by a dog. Kevin McAllister and Uncle Rico. Xander’s inane catchprhase: “Hot dog!” Child laborers happily justifying their slavelike conditions by shouting, in unison, “Most kids are dead by this age!!!” A comic-relief congresswoman announcing “I don’t think America can afford any more corporate influence in Washington,” aired under an administration available for purchase by the highest bidder, which may well include the man who owns the streaming service on which this show is aired.

That’s a huge range of high points in an episode not meant to be a high point itself. Boy, that’s a meal I could eat any day of the week.

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.