Fallout Season 2 Episode 5 recap: 'Another player at the table'
Please note: major spoilers for Fallout Season 2 Episode 5!
If the last episode of Fallout Season 2 left you hoping for a knockdown, dragout fight with a deathclaw, I've got some bad news for you. After not one, not two, but three deathclaws make a dramatic entrance on the New Vegas strip, Lucy and The Ghoul make a wise but fairly unexciting decision, and one we've all made when encountering a big monster in a game: they just sprint past them and load into a new map.
Despite the lack of a battle, it is nice to see typically too-cool-for-school Ghoul absolutely terrified, and we know why: he was maybe the first person to ever see a deathclaw in the wild in Alaska, and even after 200 years they still make his irradiated blood run cold.
It's not a great sign for New Vegas that deathclaws have moved into the Strip, though on the other side of the fence at least Freeside is looking busier and more bustling than it ever has. Those deathclaws are now between The Ghoul and Hank MacLean, who's holed up in the secret management Vault-Tec vault The Ghoul has never managed to find—the one he believes contains his missing wife and daughter.
So, now what? "You can't just waltz past a pack of deathclaws," says The Ghoul, despite having just waltzed past a pack of deathclaws. He goes to get drunk while Lucy heads to the store for some anti-drug drugs.
Cleverly paying tribute to the question of which Fallout: New Vegas ending is canon, the Ghoul's bartender mentions how the Strip has changed management over and over again. "It's like one of them merry-go-rounds. NCR, Legion, NCR, Legion, fucking robots..." Is this how NPCs feel, trapped in a world where history changes every time we play? Must be rough on the neurons.
Flashback to Old Vegas, where Cooper is in full secret agent mode, though House is already onto him. "Mr. House would like to see you," says Mr. House to Cooper, thus resolving the not-so-mysterious mystery: Justin Theroux's character is the Robert House, and Rafi Silver's character is Robert House's human avatar for public appearances. ("Robert House's Double" is Silver's character's name in the credits.)
The meeting doesn't go well. House claims he knows everything but then starts rattling off all the things he doesn't know, like who is behind the deathclaws or who will actually start the war. He doesn't think it'll be Vault-Tec who drop the bombs, though: "I believe there is another player at the table."
"Who?" asks Coop.
"I don't know," says the man who knows everything.
One thing House does know: Cooper's presence in Old Vegas has changed the equation and the bombs are going to fall a month earlier than House's calculations originally predicted. For some reason, Cooper Howard is a major variable in all that math predicting the destruction of the planet, and his daughter has something to do with it, too. Somehow.
"Who ends the world? Is it you? What if it is you?" House shrieks at a fleeing Cooper. "I don't think you're a cowboy at all! No! I think you're a killer!" It's genuinely a bit chilling.
In lighter news, Snake Oil Salesman (Jon Daly) optimistically makes his way to New Vegas to reunite with his beloved sex robot FISTO, but immediately falls victim to Hank, who is looking for a new test subject for what has turned out to mainly be a head-exploding device. But it doesn't explode this time! Interestingly, the gadget isn't just going to mind-control the Salesman, it's also going to wipe his entire memory. He's OK with it though. "Please! Yes!" he begs when told he'll forget everything he's ever cherished, which one can only assume means dozens of molested chickens. At least Hank has found a willing participant this time.
We also see another mystery solved, maybe: the Vault-Tec HQ Hank is running does in fact contain the cryotubes for both Barbara and Janey Howard, Coop's wife and daughter. The tubes are active but we can't see through the frosted glass, so... are they actually in there? For real? Or is this just a placeholder in case the writers decide they want them to be somewhere else in a later season? We'll see. We're only midway through Season 2, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are more twists in The Ghouls' main quest.
On the Strip, Lucy shops for Addictol to cure her Buffout dependency, but finding the price has been jacked up at Sonny's Sundries, she sneaks in the back door and shoplifts an even more expensive Power Fist. Then she fails a stealth check and is immediately spotted by the person pretending to be Sonny, who doesn't even remotely fit into Sonny's clothing. Lucy notices a bucket filled with the actual, dead Sonny, and wins in a draw with the fake Sonny, scoring a critical hit with her pistol. Like The Ghoul told her earlier, she's a killer, just like he is.
Meanwhile, Norm and his crew of defrosted junior executives have made it to a Vault-Tec Headquarters, where they find the corpse of the receptionist, Janice. "Still at her desk, yeesh," says one junior exec. "She always was a kiss-ass." They're not all bad eggs though: one of the young executives, Claudia, actually mourns for her lost family and pet cat and the world in general. Dale Dickey arrives as Ma June from Season 1, telling Norm she met Lucy but assumes Lucy is already dead, the wasteland being what it is. Norm doesn't believe it though. "You don't know my sister."
In Barbara Howard's old office, Norm continues investigating Future Enterprise Ventures, or FEV, which we, and now Norm, know actually stands for Forced Evolutionary Virus, the "gene-altering agent for organism supercharging." It's not a good thing. Norm doesn't have time to learn anything else before he's choked out by Ronnie, the most alpha business twerp in the pack.
The Ghoul and Lucy meet up at the hotel, where the mind-controlled Snake Oil Salesman, now looking about as cleaned-up as someone like that could ever look, arrives as a surrogate for Hank to make a deal. If The Ghoul brings Lucy back to her Vault, he'll let Cooper's family remain safely frozen. Otherwise he'll pull the plug on their tubes and let them perish.
We're in episode five of eight, the perfect time for a character arc downswing, so the Ghoul accepts the terrible deal without even asking for proof of life—he's obviously feeling a bit desperate after 200 years of searching. He tranks Lucy, but before she passes out she Power Fists his betraying Ghoul ass through the goddamn window and watches as he's impaled on a pole three stories below. Pretty badass! For a second I thought "Whoa, did they just kill off Walton Goggins?" But then I remembered he can regenerate and this is a TV show that would never kill off its biggest star in Season 2.
Lucy finally falls over and sees her horrible dad Hank leaning over her before she conks out. I don't think it's going to be a pleasant family reunion.
Pip-Boy Pointers
???? Quarry Junction: The bartender mentions the Strip's deathclaws originated there, which means I didn't kill that whole deathclaw family when I played New Vegas? Maybe some new ones moved in after I left.
???? Victor: We get to see a shiny, brand-new Victor meeting Coop for the first of what sounds like many times. He's the bot who digs us up at the start of Fallout: New Vegas.
✊ FISTO: Another familiar New Vegas robot: As I speculated in December, FISTO the protectron makes an appearance, being romanced by the Snake Oil Salesman. We, the Courier, programmed him to be a sex worker. Glad he's still finding work.
???? FEV: In Fallout lore, FEV was created a few years before the bombs fell and tested on single-celled organisms, dogs, chimps, and eventually people, which led to all sorts of horrors like super mutants and centaurs.
????️ House's Hat: I don't know what it's actually called: the silver cap that connects House's brain to all those computers while his body is a withered husk in Fallout: New Vegas. He puts it on before he begins screaming at Cooper in Old Vegas. No reason, it's just there to make us point at it, but it definitely makes the scene more disturbing.
???? Gomorrah: We see it in the closing credits: it's the hotel and casino run by the Omertas in Fallout: New Vegas. Like everything else in these credits sequences, it's seen better days.