'Fallout' Recap, Episode 5: 'The Past'

One of the many challenges with an adaptation of a beloved property like Fallout is finding the balance between keeping fans happy and providing an interesting story for unfamiliar audiences. Season one of The Last of Us struck it well. While it was, narratively, essentially a beat-for-beat facsimile of the game, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann cannily fine-tuned the story by expanding on the most interesting plot beats and character arcs. The best example is episode three, “Long, Long Time,” which fleshed out the relationship of survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman) and his partner Frank (Murray Bartlett) into a deeply human, profoundly poignant love story. It was the season’s best.

But while Fallout tells a unique story — mostly; there are plot beats borrowed from the games — it is still statedly canon and exists in the Fallout universe as we know it. So, while it’s an adaptation, it’s also essentially a sequel, extending the story of the Fallout universe and building on its existing history. For all intents and purposes, it’s Fallout 5, just not interactive.

Such is why when the show was confirmed to return Fallout to the West Coast, fans’ ears pricked up, as it’s where one of the fan-favorite factions, the New California Republic, is based. Or … was based. The last time we see it is in Fallout: New Vegas, where it’s depicted as a functioning, albeit stretched-thin, military democracy vying for control over the Hoover Dam in a bloody war with Caesar’s Legion, a barbaric faction from Arizona cosplaying a new Roman Empire. But we haven’t been to the home territories or their capital of Shady Sands since Fallout 2.

It’s been strangely absent from the series up to this point, though we knew from set leaks — and an NCR flag spotted in the series’ trailer — that it’d show up.

Well, now we know why it’s taken so long to arrive at the party. As it turns out, the NCR is … pretty much gone. At least, as far as we know right now. As it’s revealed toward the end of the episode, at some point in the last few decades, Shady Sands was destroyed, ostensibly in a nuclear blast. It’s a decision that will undoubtedly prompt vociferous debate online. It’s also a pretty ballsy move that you have to respect, assuming it pays off.

We further learn that the childhood memory that has been haunting Maximus — a formative moment that led him to join the Brotherhood and aspire toward their projected heroism — was from Shady Sands. It’s where he grew up. He saw it destroyed.

Lucy, for her part, is just devastated that surface dwellers have (well, had) been able to restart civilization before Vault 33 could enact Reclamation Day, which is its entire purpose and reason to live. (Maximus has just revealed to her that an entire town’s worth of people were blown to smithereens and she cares more about Vault-Tec propaganda? Fuckin’ vault dwellers.)

The reveal of Shady Sands’ destruction is a mic-drop moment in what is, otherwise, the first episode of Fallout to feel distinctly filler. It begins with Maximus and Thaddeus cheersing their success over finding Wilzig’s head; they’ve become fast friends, to the point that Thaddeus wants Maximus — who he still thinks is Knight Titus — to brand him, to which Maximus happily obliges.

Of course, the whole “pretending to be Titus” thing is going to be an issue for Maximus if he and Thaddeus are to return Wilzig’s head to Brotherhood HQ. So he decides to reveal the truth, and it goes disastrously wrong. Thaddeus is just freaked the fuck out over Knight Titus’s disappearance and, as is soon made apparent, Titus’s death. Maximus decides the only thing for it is to kill Thaddeus, but only makes it to crushing his foot before Thaddeus steals his T-60’s fusion core, leaving Maximus trapped inside the armor.

Lucy happens upon Maximus’s predicament the next morning. After some mutual assurances and with the promise of RadAway to cure her radiation poisoning, Lucy agrees to free Maximus from the T-60. Trust is manifestly hard to come by in the wastes, and they’ve both been burned enough times to know that other people seldom have your best interests at heart. They’re united by necessity — Lucy has the tracker in Wilzig’s head, and Maximus can offer the Brotherhood’s gunmetal support in rescuing Hank — but also by their shared spirit of virtue. They both want to contribute to a better world. They’re kind of soul mates.

Trust is the main theme of this episode, both above the surface and below, as Norm continues his investigation into the mystery of the three vaults. It’s really starting to look like we’ve got a conspiracy on our hands. (An evil conspiracy and/or experiment, inside a vault? Groundbreaking.) A startling pattern emerges in Norm’s search of the vault records: Every single Vault 33 overseer has come from Vault 31. Maybe that’s hardly a surprise, with their higher education standards and allegedly better mashed potatoes.

The trend continues when Betty, another personnel transfer from Vault 31, is elected to be 33’s new overseer with a 98 percent majority. The first thing she announces in her new position is the repopulation of Vault 32, which has been miraculously repaired — and cleared of corpses — overnight. “The raiders destroyed so much, but not our spirits,” says Betty, who is very clearly hiding something. Can you ever really trust that the people you grow up with, even in a subterranean bomb shelter where incest is a favored pastime? Apparently not.

There’s even an insidious slogan: “When things look glum, vote 31.” It’s almost like the terrible events that befall the population of Vault 33 are manufactured to keep the populace in order. It’s not like the raider attack is the first terrible thing to happen to them in an election year. Davey says he ran against Hank but lost when “the weevil famine came.” Seems like these poor people do not have the real democratic franchise they think they do.

Lucy and Maximus find themselves in the middle of a trust exercise back on the surface. Walking for some time in the wastes, having a chat — Maximus reveals he thinks the bombs fell when he was a kid, which we’ll flag as important to keep in mind — they come across a pair of surface dwellers on the other end of a bridge. It’s a tense standoff, and Lucy’s solution is for both parties to cross with their hands up. Turns out the other guys are “fiends,” i.e., cannibals, and Maximus shoots them both, not before taking a bullet himself. Fortunately, it’s just a shoulder wound — it happens all the time, he says — and they keep on truckin’.

Later, the wound takes a turn of the “no, actually, this doesn’t happen all the time and you need to seek medical help” variety, so Lucy and Maximus seek the shelter of an intact office building, Hawthorne Medical Laboratories. They venture farther inside, but they’re gassed, knocked out, and seemingly captured.

When they wake, Lucy is pleased as punch. They’re in another vault. Whether or not they can trust the intentions of this one, though, is yet to be seen.

• I’ve said it before, but the supporting actors are really stepping up to the plate; the casting department has done a top-tier job. In this episode, MVP goes to Leer Leary, whose Davey awkwardly stammers his way through apologies for not voting for Woody or Reg. “I voted for Betty.” We know.

• So, what’s the deal with the NCR? Is it just Shady Sands that has fallen, or has the NCR ceased to exist in entirety? I imagine we’ll find out as the series progresses, but that’s one hell of a bold decision if the NCR are toast. What happened to them after New Vegas?

• In the credits sequence, we see a Shady Sands library book, which was last stamped in 2276. That’s a year before Fallout 3 and five years before the events of Fallout: New Vegas.

• Gotta say, Johnny Pemberton really knows how to scream.

• Lucy offers an apt breakdown of the Brotherhood of Steel’s absurd mission statement: “You guys use prewar technology to find and collect prewar technology, to make sure no one has prewar technology?” Well, when you put it like that …

• Calling the cannibalistic surface dwellers “fiends” seems like a little hat tip to Fallout: New Vegas, in which there are enemies who go by the same name. They’re drug-addled, sadistic raiders based out of a captured vault on the outskirts of Vegas.