ONE
Pre-apocalypse. Barb sits through different Vault-Tec presentations, each more ridiculous. She looks like she’s about to lose her mind.
Title card: Barb
Young Hank enters the meeting between Barb and Fake Robert House to take notes. Opening a briefcase, House shows the remote mind-control device. “The automated man”, he calls it. Hank leans in for a better look. Barb tells House he has a number of vaults for his experiments, but House responds that Vault-Tec is trading him cold fusion for this.
When the meetings are over and Barb is alone, she closes the blinds so she can have a nervous breakdown. She looks at a photo of her family and weeps.
Roll title card.
TWO
Ghoul Coop, impaled on a street pole, reaches desperately for his spilled drug vials on the ground. It’s too far. Pedestrians ignore him. Dogmeat grabs his hat and runs away. Coop has a ghoul seizure. Crosscut an overhead shot of Ghoul Coop helplessly stretched over the pole with pre-war Cooper stretched out on his hotel bed.
Barb is half-dressed. Coop sits up, leading with a romantic memory, and then asks if she’s always been a monster. He knows about the board meeting, he says. Fade to black.
Lucy wakes in a clean vault-style bedroom. Her yellow dress from Season One hangs beside a mirror. It’s a small shock for Lucy to see her bloodstained, crusty shirt and a world-weary look on her face.
THREE
She sidles out of her room into the Vault-Tec hallway. Two Legionnaires approach. Grabbing a fire extinguisher, Lucy’s ready to fight. However, they smile and greet her pleasantly, two buddies having a stroll.
FOUR
She comes upon an office environment where the workers cheerfully pass parts from desk to desk, like a syncopated dance. (They’re building remote mind-control devices.) Freaked out, Lucy continues until she finds Hank cooking dinner in a simulated vault apartment. He’s ready for a pleasant meal and a book discussion. When Hank’s back is turned, Lucy grabs him in a chokehold and presses scissors to his neck. She’s bringing him back to their vault to face justice for Shady Sands.
This pleases Hank. The Wasteland hasn’t changed his little girl. He offers her a pair of handcuffs so she can better restrain him. (It’s hard to tell if Hank is insane or a master manipulator.)
In the desert, the Area 51 explosion far in the background, Max has Thaddeus abandon the power armor. It has a tracker in it. Now they must decide what to do with the cold fusion container. Thaddeus suggests they sell it, which Max vehemently rejects. Dissolve to later, Thaddeus still arguing they should sell it. Max will give it to a good person: Lucy. It’s easy to be a good person when you live in a safe place and have plenty of food, Thaddeus says. If we sell it and become rich, then I can be a good person, too. Because Max grew up in Shady Sands, he knows that good people can exist. Thaddeus, we remember, grew up providing excrement for a fly farm.
Now it’s nighttime in Vegas, and the street is deserted. Ghoul Coop writhes on his pole, reciting his name to keep away the feral seizure. Renewed by thoughts of his daughter, Coop pulls himself up the pole. (Can you use stomach muscles when they’re impaled by a pole? Heh.) At the top he has a seizure and falls all the way to the bottom again. Fade to black.
SWITCH
In the blackness, we hear growling and heavy footsteps. Something approaches Coop on his pike. It swipes the pole in half and lifts Coop free. The creature drags Coop on a travois. Over a fire pit we see a Super Mutant meatbag. The creature heads for a derelict church. Fade to black.
FIVE
Vault 33’s “Inbreeding Support Group” is very popular. Reg is so happy and proud. He sits at the piano to plunk out some notes, and he suddenly becomes a virtuoso. The aspect ratio narrows (losing the widescreen), and the meeting jumps into a musical dance extravaganza. Crosscut with Betty approaching down the hallway. The Busby Berkeley show ends, leaving Reg playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with his index finger. No one at the meeting pays attention to him. In come Betty’s security guards to dissolve Reg’s group, but he won’t back down. This is America, and the inbred have a right to salty snacks! Betty can’t understand, Reg accuses, because she’s from Vault 31. (He has a point there. Betty’s parents lived in pre-war times and they weren’t first cousins.)
Meanwhile, in Vault 32, no one’s seen Woody. Chet, cradling the baby in a sling, tries once again to tell Davey that he’s not married to Steph. Surprise, though. The Vault, without Chet’s knowledge, prepares for his wedding to her. Fade to black.
Ghoul Coop awakes, still roped onto the travois. The scene is very dark, so whoever rescued him is in shadow. Bringing a hunk of uranium, the creature approaches Coop from the back and inserts it in his belly wound, which goes all the way through his torso. Coop grimaces, but the uranium is healing him. The creature, a Super Mutant, feels a kinship with Ghoul Coop — they’re both abominations, products of the Enclave. The Super Mutant steps into the light, revealing his green face. Coop refuses his offer of allyship, though. He works alone and has done so for 200 years, searching for his family. The Mutant knocks him on the head. Fade to black.
Barb argues with Cooper, continuing the fight in the hotel room. She’s still a bomb-dropping monster to him. But Barb remembers back to her breakdown in the Vault-Tec office. She asks a Young Betty, her assistant, to get her all the information she can find about the cold fusion diode. In the elevator, a stranger confronts Barb. (We recognize Dr. Wilzig’s head — in the timeline, it’s before Lucy removed it from his body, lol — as he gives her advice.) “If you forget your place in the company, you’ll die. And so will your family.” Later, at the infamous corporate meeting, Barb, as Wilzig instructed, tells the CEOs that Vault-Tec should drop the bomb first. Closeup of her frozen face at the meeting, and then cut back to her shocked face in the elevator.
All of the backstory ends with Barb and Coop in the hotel room as she tells him. She has no idea who controls Vault-Tec, and she wants him to stay out of it. Cooper walks away, still estranged from Barb.
In the casino of the Lucky 38, Coop sees Young Hank drinking at the bar, the case still chained to his wrist. Fade to black.
Happy office workers continue to pass Hank’s remote control devices from desk to desk. (The scene isn’t an overhead Busby Berkeley shot, but the parallel to Vault 33 and Reg’s happy snack meeting feels intentional.) Hank, with Lucy holding scissors to his back, enters. All the office workers freeze in dismay. No worries, Hank tells them. We’re just pursuing justice.
SIX
He introduces Lucy to some of the workers; they all used to be horrible murderers. Now they make tasty trail mix and sharpen pencils.
SEVEN
When Lucy declares they can all freely return to the surface, they blanch. Do we have to?
Before Lucy can leave with Hank, Snake Man pushes two arguing, restrained men in chairs. One is a Legionnaire, the other is the slightly crazy NCR man who treated Lucy’s wounds. Hank cheerfully looks to Lucy to decide: push a button and activate their devices, or set them free?
EIGHT
She votes for freedom, and they immediately go for each other’s throats. Lucy tries to rescue the NCR man, wheeling his chair around the desks, but the Legionnaire catches her by the throat. (Hank watches with some concern, but he won’t overrule her.) As the Legionnaire starts stapling the NCR man’s head, Lucy pushes the button. The violence immediately stops. Closeup of Lucy’s disgusted face. “Kumbaya,” Hank responds with some irony. Fade to black.
Ghoul Coop awakens, again on the dragged travois. He flashes back to his pre-war self as he helps a drunken Young Hank into his hotel room. Cooper pours two drinks, drugging Hank’s. Jump cut to Hank passed out in the hotel chair. Coop opens the case. Inside isn’t the vial of cold fusion, though. It’s some kind of gun with a needle. Barb enters, giving Coop a dirty look. We think she might chastise him, but she grabs the gun from him and inserts the needle in Hank’s neck. She extracts the cold fusion diode from behind his ear. (We remember the end of Season One when Wilzig’s head held the same.) Fade to black.
NINE
Dogmeat barks, waking Thaddeus and Max, who sleep around a campfire. He carries Ghoul Coop’s hat. Recognizing it, they follow the dog. Dissolve to daytime and a small, deserted outpost. In a garage, battered and recovering, is Coop. He and Max, seeing each other with mixed feelings, drop F-bombs.
Roll credits.
CRITICAL NOTES
The structure here isn’t straightforward. As always when a plot won’t easily reveal itself, work backwards.
The Nine is easy. We will have a new team in the next episode. This scene gives us a delicious anticipation.
The Eight makes sense. On the one hand, we have the tension between Coop and Barb, as well as their cold fusion problem. Nothing is resolved here, but the groundwork is laid. On the other hand, we have Lucy’s dilemma. Horrible people with their free will stolen are now gentle, productive members of society. Which value — freedom or social cohesion and safety — should take precedence? We also have a brief, implied resolution to Ghoul Coop’s impaling. He’s been healed and removed from the Super Mutant’s sanctuary.
Prior to this, we have an obvious Seven. Lucy must decide what to do with the warring factions, represented by these two men in chairs. This is her first crack at this question, with the Eight telling us that the question will recur. (Rightfully so. It’s a tough problem.)
Now we’re at the point where we say: the beat before the Seven will be the Six. It’s not always a great structural indicator. If the Six doesn’t immediately set off a bulb over our heads — hey! wasn’t there something like this in a Three position? — we’re in trouble. According to working backwards through the plot, the Six should be a charming moment about a Legionnaire cannibal becoming a peanut and pretzel chef. A Three doesn’t immediately suggest itself to me.
So, let’s look from the beginning. Barb’s terrible Vault-Tec job is a suitable One. This is the state of this story’s world. Vault-Tec is responsible for everything bad that happens. We don’t know how complicit Barb is as their manager. This scene gives us more context. She mostly hates her job.
From there, the Two is easy to spot, especially since we’ve already looked at its companion beat, the Eight. We should find: Tension between Coop and Barb over Vault-Tec, Ghoul Coop’s stomach wound, and Lucy’s introduction to Hank’s plans and expectations. All three of these problems come to fruition in this episode’s Eight. Are they properly initiated in the Two? Yes, if I include Lucy’s waking moment in the simulated vault.
That gives us a Three that does thematically mirror with the Six. Bad people surprise Lucy with their good actions. Obviously, that mirror is not immediately clear, and certainly it has no visual clue. The Three is subsumed by Lucy’s quest to find her father, understand what’s happening in this surreal place, and bring Hank to justice. In my opinion, it’s a mistake to use these two Legionnaires in the hall as the Three. The office workers — someone not so obviously threatening to Lucy — would be a better choice. At first glance they seem innocuous. Like the Inbreeding Group in the vault, these people are a punchline rather than characters. It’s only at the Six that we learn the history of these happy, simple office workers. Without the mind control devices they would be monsters. If we had a hapless, almost silly meeting with them at Lucy’s Three, her Six would’ve been more impactful for the overall story.
By the way, the Switch is lovely. Before it, Coop is impaled. After, he’s free. It’s almost a deus ex machina solution. Who is this Super Mutant, where does he come from, and why is he willing to save Coop? We get only a hint of the answers, which is perfect. (On my first viewing, I didn’t recognize Ron Perlman as the Mutant. It’s an exciting casting. I assume and hope he returns in a future storyline.)