Fallout – Season 1 Episode 4 Recap & Review

The Ghouls

Episode 4 of Fallout picks up with Lucy and The Ghoul wandering through the wasteland. They arrive at Westside Medical Clinic, where they find a fellow Ghoul called Roger. There are empty vials all over the floor and he bemoans smooth skins for their, well, smooth skin. Unfortunately, Roger is turning so Cooper puts him out of his misery and shoots the guy in the head. Before they go, The Ghoul eats parts of Roger.

Lucy isn’t particularly happy about this barbarism, but her luck turns sour when The Ghoul decides she should help make ass jerky and slice the guy up. She’s starting to understand the wasteland now, and despite her insistence before, is forced to drink the dirty puddle water outside to quench her thirst.

Over at the Vault, voting is about to take place between Reg, Betty and Woody for becoming the new Overseer. They still haven’t got any information from the raiders they’re keeping in containment though. With the guys pretending like everything is hunky-dory, the odd one out here is Norman. He misses his father and sister, but as the last standing MacLean, his voice carries weight, at least according to Betty anyway. 

Norman is ashamed of himself for hiding while all the fighting was going on, but he gets some sound advice to “tread lightly”. What he does learn however, is that something was going on at Vault 32 and it’s far from innocent. In fact he’s denied from accessing the records, which only backs up his concerns after speaking to one of the prisoners.

He teams up with Chet and they head inside again to see if they can make sense of Vault 32. This time though, they have a proper look. The last bio-signal detected on one of the Pip-Boys was actually from two years ago. It would appear that the Vault-dwellers were long-dead before the raiders showed up, meaning there’s something far more nefarious going on here.

Given how some of the corpses are laid out, it would seem that they killed each other. Scrawled in blood on one of the walls are the words “We know the truth”. Checking the Overseer’s log, Norman realizes that the raiders got in by using Rose Maclean’s ID. Alas, the plot thickens.

Lucy and The Ghoul head over to the SuperDuper Mart, where the gunslinger intends to sell Lucy in exchange for vials. These keep him from turning into a fully fledged zombie and keep part of his sanity. As Lucy heads on in alone, The Ghoul passes out on the floor. Inside the Mart, a shellshocked Lucy is taken over to the medical clinic where she’s given a new finger by a “friendly” robot called Snip Snip… and is then tranquilized. You see, this robot is also going to harvest her organs too, hence the name.

Lucy thinks quickly though and she manages to subdue the robot. She holds up the bandits at gunpoint (or, well abraxo cleaning fluid point with Snip Snip) and has them free the ghouls trapped in the cages. However, some of them have turned and Lucy is forced to kill one of the zombified women.

She’s the lone survivor in all of this, but Lucy does drop some vials for The Ghoul outside, retorting that she’ll never be like him. When Lucy walks away, The Ghoul heads inside and finds the motherlode of vials, which he takes for himself. Funnily enough, one of the videos there happens to be of Cooper back in his movie days, and he settles down to watch it.

The Episode Review

The Mystery with the vaults continues to develop and to be honest, these are usually the most interesting parts of the Fallout games so it’s good to see them explored here. There’s a decidedly “Westworld” feel to parts of this, given the gunslinger and the mystery box atmosphere, but there are enough differences to keep things unique here. Exploring the different vaults and uncovering the stories on the computers are some of the best subplot storytelling outside of Fallout: New Vegas’ plots and intricate writing so it’s definitely a welcome inclusion.

Meanwhile, we have the drama involving Lucy and The Ghoul, which sees the former start to act more like a wastelander and learn more about how to survive. I’d imagine for the remainder of the episodes we’ll see her pick up the mantle for being the better fighter/smarter warrior to subdue The Ghoul but we’ll have to wait and see on that front.

It is worth noting though that there was no Maximus in this chapter, so perhaps we’ll get more of him shine through in the episodes ahead?