'Fallout' Episode 3 Recap: Head, Swallowing (2024)

Ideologically, this episode of a video game adaptation makes some provocative points. That’s probably not a sentence you’d have read until very recently, given the track record of video game adaptations.

But that’s a historical fluke, not a reflection of limitations in the source material. When I was awakened to the artistic potential of video games in the 1990s first Myst, then Quake, then Super Mario 64, then The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — I’ve never seen any reason a movie or TV show based on one couldn’t also be thoughtful, beautiful, powerful in its own right. Even if we’re not quite there yet, it’s only a matter of time.

At any rate, Fallout Episode 3 (“The Head”) is, indeed, an interesting political text. It starts early, in a flashback to the Ghoul’s days as horse-opera movie star Cooper Howard. On set one day, Cooper balks at executing a wounded villain in cold blood after a cool monologue. He’s told by the director that the original writer has been fired for being a Commie, that the new script reflects “the power of the individual when the chips are down, the new America,” and that “out here, it’s just you, your gun, and your personal code, bringing order to the Wild Wild West.”

That’s fascism. You get that that’s fascism, right? Persecuted Communists, patriotic übermenschen, the wide world tamed by the master race and the beauty of its weapons: plain old American fascism, ladies and germs! That’s the America that went up in smoke when the bombs dropped: a fascist state in Donna Reed dresses and Ward Cleaver cardigans. That it’s also the America one of our two major political parties is frantically scrambling to recreate…I leave it to you to decide if the filmmakers had that in mind.

The next ideological marker laid down is one that, frankly, I never expected to hear on an American television show of any kind, ever: the fact that torture doesn’t work. You get that it doesn’t, right? f*ck someone up bad enough and they’ll sing any tune you ask for. As the Ghoul puts it while repeatedly dunking the captive Lucy into a poison river to attract a huge mutant axolotl with giant human fingers in lieu of teeth (eww), someone you’re actively hurting has no incentive to actually help the person doing the hurting. It’s common sense, right? They’ll say whatever is required to get the hurting to stop.

Brother, I’ve watched 40,000 television shows in which people get tortured — by gangsters, by nobles, by cops, by deep-cover Russian spies, by government agents racing against a ticking time bomb — and I don’t think I’ve ever heard this plain fact actually put plainly. Good for the Ghoul, and good for Fallout.

The third point is one I’m not sure if the show is making deliberately or not, given my admitted unfamiliarity with the source-text video game series. But isn’t it interesting how a future America and its subterranean remnant, modeled so closely after the politics and aesthetics of the Korean War and the Eisenhower era…isn’t also extremely racist?

Cooper Howard’s wife-ager, Barb (Frances Turner), is Black. The committee running things down in Vault 32, and shutting down the proposal of Lucy’s loser brother Norm (Moisés Arias) to execute their surface-dweller prisoners, are all people of color. Is this a deliberate argument that even America’s racial divide can be subsumed under the total war of Capitalism against Marxism, or is it just contemporary race-blind casting doing something to the worldbuilding by accident?

At any rate, some regular plot stuff happens too. A big monster called a Gulper, which looks like an amphibian made from human meat, gulps down Wilzig’s head to slowly digest it. The Ghoul and Lucy fail in their collective attempt to retrieve it, smashing the Ghoul’s supply of life-preserving vials in the process; he leads her away from the water after, presumably on the hunt for another fix.

Maximus has more luck, through no work of his own. He barely preserves his power armor from scavengers (he scares them off by using the armor’s hand to squish the ringleader’s skull while they’re in the middle of beating the sh*t out of him). He’s nearly discovered when, since he’s posing as knight Titus, the clerics send him a new squire to replace his ostensibly slain one: Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), his chief bully back at the base.

For a while, Maximus has fun bossing Thaddeus around and scaring the piss out of him. But he soon learns that Thaddeus is not only pretty on the ball — he figures out they can track the head by tracking the Ghoul’s radiation signature, an idea for which Maximus promptly takes credit — but also an alright guy. Thaddeus tells “Titus” that he only picked on Maximus because he himself had been bullied mercilessly, and he just wanted to deflect attention to a new target. He now feels bad about the whole thing, and wishes Maximus had lived long enough to pass the bullying on to someone else. This story cures Maximus of his vindictiveness — which, I suppose, is an ideological point of its own.

In the end, team work makes the dream work. Each saves the other in the process of defeating the monster — and, quite unexpectedly, retrieving the head as a result.

And back in the vault, one-eyed pregnant widow Steph encourages Norm on his vindictive path, while Lucy’s cousin-slash-f*ckbuddy Chet (Dave Register) gets reassigned away from gatekeeper duty and thus loses his purpose in life. It’s hard times all over.

Ian Fleming once wrote that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times it’s enemy action — that is to say, it’s a pattern. The pattern for Fallout after three episodes is that any given 50-minute installment will feature disgusting violence, sick jokes, and a monster of the week, based on the premise that America ain’t sh*t because its ruling class would rather live in holes in the ground than improve the world we live in. Sure, I’ll eat it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York Times, andanyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.