Fallout 2×03 Review: “Profligate”

With Lucy captive, Ghoul trying to decide who he is, and Maximus on a joy ride, Fallout season two brings us one of their all-time best episodes.

Reader, I promised myself I was going to be cool about this show. I was not going to explode into excitement over my favorite relationship, knowing that my favorite relationships never go canon. I like the weird stuff: heroines and villains, humans and monsters.

There’s still no certainty that the 200-year-old Ghoul and Lucy MacLean are going to have anything like a romance. But. Reader. I cannot be cool about even the suggestion of it. Especially after this episode.

Spoilers ahead, as usual.

Also, TRIGGER WARNING, as this review mentions sexual violence.

A lot of the episode’s best moments have nothing to do with this pairing. Knight Maximus is still with the Brotherhood of Steel, and civil war is looming. Another Knight, played by Kumail Nanjiani, takes him on a joy ride with their armor to talk about making peace and killing robots. Unfortunately, this other Knight also tries to kill a bunch of ghoul children (and Maximus’s season 1 frenemy Thaddeus). Nanjiani’s guest-starring role comes to an abrupt conclusion… which will most likely lead to the civil war they wanted to prevent.

Everything about this story is juicy. Seeing Thaddeus again – now becoming a ghoul himself – is absolutely hilarious, especially since he’s trying to parent his sweatshop worker children. Max looks like he might have found some joy in the Brotherhood until it’s abruptly taken from him by his pesky morals. It’s also great seeing that Max is still every inch the good guy. He was never going to let anything happen to those kids.

His parents would be proud of him. I typed that without tearing up, I swear.

I’m looking forward to Max reuniting with Lucy. In the meantime, her story has taken a direction I didn’t quite expect.

We knew from previews that Lucy was going to butt heads with the Legion, and we knew this could go badly in a lot of ways. (In the last episode, an enslaved woman ominously warned Lucy she shouldn’t be raped by “the wrong people.”)

The Legion hasn’t even spoken to her directly before trying to negotiate the sale of Lucy’s “prima noctis.” That would imply the opportunity to rape her first, and Lucy’s a former school teacher, so she knows exactly what they mean.

It turns out that denying your virginity largely on account of a lot of cousin stuff is a big turnoff for faux Romans. Lucy’s spirited verbal self-defense against the Legion spares her from sexual violence, thankfully.

But a cartoonishly snide Macauley Culkin just decides to lightly crucify her instead.

I did not have “Lucy gets crucified” on my bingo card.

This brings us back to the relationship between Lucy and the Ghoul. She had to abandon him to save the enslaved woman, and the Ghoul didn’t communicate the threat the Legion presented to Lucy before she left, on account of the whole “writhing in pain from radscorpion venom” thing. He knew that no amount of niceness was going to save Lucy from these monsters.

He has to cut out a wounded part of his leg to get moving again. His adorable dog, Dogmeat, keeps him company for this process and provides perky listening ears while the Ghoul monologues about the ship of Theseus. Clearly, the Ghoul is wondering if he’s still the would-be hero and good guy he was before the bombs dropped. Is he a ship, or a pile of planks?

The Ghoul’s story is consistently arresting in its complexity. On most shows, I hate flashbacks. I look forward to the Ghoul’s.

We see him in the past again here. As a veteran himself, he’s supporting a veteran friend in receiving an award, and a moving speech about going to war to save the people we love intercuts the Ghoul going to rescue Lucy.

Lucy’s not feeling well by the time he shows up. The crows are moving in to pick at her as she dehydrates. That means we get a hazy look at the Ghoul walking through the Legion camp to talk to one of two Caesars (pronounced wrongly, amusingly like “Kaiser”), and an equally dreamy look at him so backlit by sunlight that he almost looks like Cooper Howard again.

In the end, he’s chosen to save Lucy and bomb the Legion – although he let the Legion think he was giving them information on the flagging New California Republic.

Can you understand why I was dying over all of this, reader? The Ghoul is stepping back into a character he used to play as an actor, like a heroic cowboy in a Western saving the girl from mustache-twirling villains. He calls this kind of good guy behavior stupid, but the Ghoul’s choosing stupidity.

You could argue the speech about doing it for love is tied to the Ghoul’s search for his family, but it’s not edited like that. They’re talking about love while looking at Lucy in peril. And a radioactive ghoul has never looked more handsome than this one in this episode (with respect to Thaddeus).

Reader. I mean, come on.

Chances are still not great for the relationship of my heart. Lucy and the Ghoul still have conflicting motives and exist on different parts of the morality spectrum. Plus, in a Doyleist sense, I seldom see the age gap monster romances happen in major media. Even Phantom of the Opera had to surrender Christine to Raoul.

Still, I can hope, and count the minutes until episode four.

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