ONE
Lucy and Ghoul Coop stare at the deathclaw emerging from the Gomorrah casino. Two more deathclaws approach from opposite ends of the street. Lucy and Coop dodge behind a car. Looking like Jurassic Park’s T-Rex, the deathclaw sniffs for them as it climbs on the roof.
Dogmeat runs away; Coop and Lucy follow, sliding under the security gate just out of reach of the (slowly) chasing deathclaw.
Roll title card.
TWO
Lucy and Ghoul Coop stand in Freeside looking at the boarded up section of Vegas. She wonders why her dad would go in there. Coop explains that a special vault, one for management is in there. His wife and daughter are in that vault. Of the handful of management vaults spread around the Wasteland, Coop has found them all and each one was empty.
THREE
Still running on addiction, Lucy wants to shoot deathclaws in the face. Coop gives her money to buy addictol, the instant cure, and heads for a saloon.
FOUR
The bartender doesn’t care who’s in charge of the Strip — Legion, NCR, robots, deathclaws. It’s all the same. Coop tells him to leave the whiskey bottle and shut up. This gives him a clear view of himself in the mirror behind the bar. Goggins takes a painful, silent beat: what would his family think of him now with this face?
A black-and-white newsreel announces that the captains of industry will meet in Las Vegas to decide the fate of the communist threat.
Young Hank MacLean meets Cooper and Barb Howard at the airport. Coop notices that Hank has a Vault-Tec case chained to his wrist. Sending them on ahead, Coop uses the airport payphone to “call his agent”. The Woman-Who-Becomes-Moldaver answers. In the coin return is a vial of poison for Coop to use on Robert House. If RobCo gets cold fusion, Vault-Tec gets the bombs. Coop, reluctant to kill anyone, notices Hank and says, “I’ll get your cold fusion back.” He leaves the poison behind.
An exterior shot of this world’s Vegas Strip in its heyday. The Lucky 38 with its penthouse tower dominates the other casinos. Barb and Cooper arrive. The Congresswoman — Welch — is dragged with other protesters from the building. Security tosses her down the stairs and Coop helps her up.
Inside, Barb talks with the corporate executives while Coop goes for a drink. (A Nukatini. Brilliant name!) He follows Hank, eyeing the handcuffed case. Robert House enters the bar, though, and whispers to Coop: “Mr. House would like to see you.” Coop goes with him up the elevator.
A Securitron (“Howdy, pardner!”) greets Coop when the elevator doors open. Behind it is a panoramic view of Vegas from the top of the tower. At an expansive bank of video monitors sits our Maybe-Mr.- House, who’s obviously the real, reclusive Robert House. Coop recognizes him from their meeting in the toilet, lol. House confronts him: “I know you came to kill me.” Fade to black.
Skipping down a barren road is our degenerate Snake Oil Salesman who turned Thaddeus into a ghoul. He smooches the fusion core Thaddeus used as payment for his foot repair. Cue a montage of his eccentric trip to Vegas until Hank finds him in a bar flirting with a Protectron. Hank whacks him on the head with a tire iron.
Dissolve to Hank and his golf cart in the Biorepository. As he drives past cryopod storage, the camera focuses on one of the tank’s nameplates: Barbara Howard. Above her in a smaller tank is Janey. Cut to Snake Man with a control device in the back of his neck as he comes to consciousness. Hank asks if he’d like to forget everything he’s ever done, and Snake Man enthusiastically says yes. Not looking completely confident, Hank begins turning the dial. The camera pans to a familiar angle: only the glass wall and not the head that will soon explode. It stays clean, though. Hank has succeeded. Fade to black.
Bud’s Buds, hiking through what’s left of California, come upon a damaged Vault-Tec corporate highrise. They pull off the boards over the door and enter. Norm looks slightly ill. Something rattles behind a locked elevator door. Enter Ma June and her partner. This is their roach farm. Norm is able to learn that Ma June met Lucy, although she thinks Lucy is probably dead at this point.
SWITCH
Fade to black.
FIVE
Lucy strolls through the streets of Freeside, looking for the Sundry store. The price for addictol has been recently jacked beyond Lucy’s budget, though. She walks on, noticing the open back door to the shop. Sneaking in, she grabs an addictol and, in the spur of the moment, the Powerfist on display in the window. The shop owner catches her sneaking back out. However, his clothes don’t fit, and a dead man is stuffed into a garbage can by the exit. When the fake shopkeep reaches for a gun, Lucy shoots him. He’s dead, and Lucy doesn’t recognize herself anymore.
Back in the saloon, Ghoul Coop grabs his bottle of whiskey and remembers. Flashback to Cooper’s meeting with the genuine Robert House in his tower apartment. He believes their destinies are “mathematically entwined”. Using software he installed in the T-45 power armor, House was with Coop in Alaska. He saw the deathclaw. “I know everything.”
Hitting a big red button on his console display, House reveals a secret room under the staircase. Inside is cold fusion. He intends to use it to stay alive indefinitely in robot form. (Okay, lol.) House knows everything about Barb because he listened in, via Coop, on the corporate meeting. Using mathematical probabilities, House can predict when the world will end. The evidence “coalesced” on Janey’s birthday. When Coop bought his ticket to Vegas, unexpectedly joining Barb, the date for the end of the world jumped one month earlier. Coop is an unknown variable, something House dislikes. Contrary to what Coop believes, House knows that neither he nor Vault-Tec will be the ones to drop the bomb. An unknown entity, responsible for the deathclaw in Alaska, is a player at the table, and House has no idea who it is. And then House puts on some crazy-looking tinfoil helmet with tubes and wires. Coop, who’s had enough of the lunatic, leaves while House yells at him: What if you’re the one who ends the world? Coop starts drinking while Ghoul Coop remembers. Fade to black.
(I hope I’ve transcribed a respectable summary of what was an extensive dump of exposition and character development. Yikes, that scene was a quagmire.)
Back to the Vaulties in the highrise. Ronnie takes charge, ordering the others to get the comms system up and running. Norm, distrustful of Ronnie’s gung-ho corporate attitude, finds Claudia weeping in a side office. Everyone she knew is now dead. While sympathetic and kind toward her, Norm also questions her about Vault-Tec’s plans. They go looking for the office of Bud’s boss, Barbara Howard. Norm powers up Barb’s computer. Claudia sits nearby and guesses that, because Norm isn’t completely nuts, he’s not Bud’s successor. Listening in the hallway is Ronnie. He hides when Claudia leaves to find a drink. Meanwhile, Norm is pursuing his computer search for F.E.V.’s. (We who’ve played the game know what Forced Evolutionary Virus means. Spoiler: it’s Super Mutants.) He’s too engrossed to notice Ronnie entering the office and yanking the power cord. Ronnie, a large and angry brute, strangles Norm until he passes out. Fade to black.
SIX
Lucy takes a hit of the addictol and immediately pukes into the street. (None of the pedestrians notice or care.) After, she joins Ghoul Coop above the saloon.
SEVEN
When she’s done with a second bout of vomiting out the window, Coop sits her in a chair, preparing her.
EIGHT
In the doorway is Snake Man. “I was sent here by your father,” he says. He cheerfully threatens Coop about Hank’s power over Barb and Janey, who will remain safely in stasis if Coop will return Lucy to her vault. Although Coop looks like he regrets it, he admits he brought Lucy here to bargain. He shoots her with a tranq gun. Drinking his whiskey, Ghoul Coop crosscuts with Cooper in Robert House’s elevator, drinking from his flask. He wanders the casino floor, blasted. Crosscut him, riding a mechanical rocket, with Lucy waking on the carpet. She uses her Powerfist to knock Ghoul Coop out the window. He’s impaled on a post. Lucy, passing out, crosscuts with drunk Cooper passing out.
NINE
Barb helps him up to their room. As she presses a compress to his head, Coop gently says, “We need to talk.” Fade to black.
Footsteps approach Lucy and she fights for consciousness. Closeup of Hank kneeling beside her and caressing her face.
Roll credits.
CRITICAL NOTES
Finally, this episode gives us a really solid structure. The Three/Six Mirror — addictol in/addictol out, basically — is tight. At the Three, Coop gives her the money, but we’re not even sure she’ll take the medicine. At the Six, the addiction is over, cured. Her journey between those beats leads to sneaking, stealing, and killing. That’s a consequential Three/Six!
The Seven is bittersweet. Coop decided to choose his family over Lucy a long time ago, before we see the beat onscreen. This episode plants the information in the Four that Hank has control over Barb and Janey’s fate. We understand Coop’s decision because the show has prepared us.
I’m also a fan of the Switch, even though it’s only a fade. On the Four side of it, we hear Ma June state with certainty that Lucy won’t survive in the Wasteland. Norm, though, has faith in his sister. On the Five side, we immediately see Lucy thriving in the Wasteland. Ma June is wrong. However, so is Norm, in a way. His sister has become someone else. The juxtaposition of those two scenes, separated by the fade, is a concise commentary on Lucy’s arc from the beginning of her exit from the vault until now.
The Eight gives me pause. The Two establishes that Coop knows where his family is. It’s probably the most difficult and dangerous location in the Wasteland, a place Coop hasn’t been able to access in 200 years. From this Two we can expect a consequential Eight. We believe that Coop would trade Lucy for a chance at his family. And we believe that Lucy, who thought she and Coop were building a team together, would react violently to his betrayal.
It’s the Stanley Kubrick Coop riding the mechanical rocket, blind drunk, that feels weird. His actions aren’t a response to the Two; they reflect the Five and Coop’s meeting with the real Robert House. Because I’m busy trying to piece together the craziness of House, it is easy to overlook his information: Coop, somehow, will cause the world to end sooner. That would send anyone to drink. If you look at the Enneagram diagram, the Five and Eight are connected. Their relationship is rarely used for storytelling, though. The structure here is legitimate; it’s just unsettling. The showrunners’ intention is valid. I don’t want to see the pre-war Cooper behave so unhinged, though, even if it is supported by the plot.
Finally, who’s “The Wrangler” of the episode’s title? Is it Hank with his control devices? Is it Robert House watching his video monitors from on high? Or, is it Coop riding a bomb?