Fallout 2×07 Review: “The Handoff”

New perspectives on villainous (?) women propel us toward the upcoming high-octane conclusion to Fallout‘s second season.

Last week, I was surprised to get a BARB title card. She’s been an assumed villain haunting the show since the first season, when we learned Barb suggested that Vault-Tec drop the bombs to protect their future profits.

With most of Barb’s behavior and motivations otherwise a mystery, we’d been left to guess a lot of what’s happening behind her (gorgeous, flawless) face.

We’re getting more Barb now. This week, we actually see her team up with her future ex-husband to deliver the cold fusion diode to a third party, but I’ll get to that later. The point is that, as we see more from Barb, I feel even less confident I can guess what she’s doing or why.

Stephanie Harper was another surprise POV added this week. Steph has been positioned as a villain, forcefully turning Chet into her baby-carrying wifey while denying water access to Vault 32. We’d learned she came from Canada, but it wasn’t until this week that we saw exactly how militant that has made her.

I haven’t played very much of the games, so I didn’t know that Canada was annexed by America until recently. I also didn’t realize that meant America was putting Canadians into concentration camps to make it easier to steal resources.

Steph escaped one of these concentration camps before the war, then made it her singular goal to survive. Her mother’s final instructions were, to paraphrase: “A flood is coming. Keep your head above water. Don’t think of them as humans, but Americans.”

This warning led Stephanie to kill her way to the heart of Vault-Tec until she ended up, much later, an Overseer for a Vault.

It’s still not clear what she planned to do in that position. Revenge? Chet stymied her efforts by revealing her as a Canadian sleeper agent, so it’s not going to plan. I have no doubt Steph is going to survive, though–and probably thrive. She’s scrappy.

As much as I love getting more context on Stephanie, it highlights the ongoing problem for this show: Eight episodes a season is not enough. We are required to make a lot of leaps, as an audience, to keep up with the flow of the plot.

I don’t necessarily mind leaps in logic (we can guess Barb and Cooper came to terms off-screen in order to cooperate about the cold fusion diode), but we’re being deprived of great potential character moments.

I lament how little we see of the interactions between the Ghoul, Max, and Thaddeus this week. Obviously, they’ve been catching each other up on events, but there’s so much nuance we’re missing. What exactly has Ghoul told Max about traveling with Lucy? How much does Ghoul know about Max’s backstory? We can’t know!

Instead, we have to cling to wonderful moments happening on actors’ faces–like Maximus seeing armor labeled NCR, or flashes of The Ghoul showing respect for Maximus–and just keep trucking.

We get about thirty whole seconds with Norm’s subplot this week, for instance. I might be exaggerating — but not by much.

What we do have happening is wonderful. The way the show is edited at critical times, like Lucy finding the mainframe while The Ghoul takes the diode to Mr. House, is absolutely gorgeous. The music was outstanding.

The producers seem to feel that Lucy confronting Hank deserves the most screentime, which is probably true. Fooling her dad is as important for character as much as plot. Hank taking the time to teach Lucy to drive is upsettingly bittersweet. Lucy’s moral arc has been central to the entire season–perhaps only secondary to Cooper Howard’s arc, which is a clear foil to Lucy’s.

Speaking of which, Barb and Coop spend the episode (in flashbacks) deciding what to do with the cold fusion diode in the past. The Ghoul has described himself-as-Cooper as being very stupid, as a way to compare to Lucy’s stupidity.

But this is when we finally see exactly how stupid Cooper Howard was. It’s even worse than I expected.

He decides to give cold fusion to the American president (via Diane Welch), believing it will be given to the public and used for altruism.

If you’re not groaning with me, then you might not exist in reality where America is… you know.

Turns out Cooper Howard was really stupid. Everything we learn about his life makes his bleak, kill-em-all attitude as the Ghoul seem increasingly like a black hole of self-loathing and less like a noble mission to save his daughter. I suppose it can be both.

This is a great episode with a little too much happening in it. I would rather they have another 2 or 4 episodes rather than cut any element (like Norm), but it’s frustrating when we do get such tantalizing moments with more minor characters (like Steph), knowing they aren’t going to get deserved screentime.

It’s good to have a show where my main complaint is that there isn’t enough. Fallout season 2 ends next week, and I have no doubt it’s going to leave me with some horrible, wonderful cliffhanger for season 3.

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