A mishap during a gulper battle leaves The Ghoul without his life-preserving medication, which leads him and Lucy to a facility where he can trade for more. Meanwhile, Norm digs deeper into the mystery of how the raiders got into the Vaults…

Let’s discuss Fallout.

Following the encounter with a gulper that left The Ghoul’s vials destroyed, he drags Lucy out of her way in order to obtain more. They end up at an organ-harvesting facility, and it turns out he plans to trade Lucy for the vials. She’s forced to go inside, The Ghoul promptly collapses, and Lucy is on her own – though it quickly becomes apparent that whatever privilege she’s still clinging to isn’t going to help her in here, either.

The entire sequence inside the facility is impressive to me for a couple of reasons. First, it shows Lucy trying to cling to whatever sense of fairness and decency in humanity she still believes in, after everything she’s seen. She may also be trying to cling to that decency in herself – at the start of the episode, we see her attempting to escape, and in the struggle with The Ghoul that follows, they cost one another a finger. Lucy bites one off of him, so he cuts one off of her – and then observes that it’s “the first honest exchange we’ve had”.

Lucy is clearly willing to fight for survival. Lucy may not like that fact about herself, but The Ghoul isn’t wrong. This is as much of an honest glimpse of who Lucy is as when she’s preaching the golden rule – and I’m even more fascinated by her as a result of getting that glimpse. Work through it, Lucy. It sucks, but you need this.

Back inside the facility: Lucy tries to reason with a robot (bless you, Lucy) to help her, only to be tranquilized in preparation for the whole organ-harvesting thing. She wakes up before it begins (and curiously, while sedated and trapped in a Very Bad Place, she seems to be thinking of her mother – more on that later), and manages to overcome Snip-Snip (best robot name, even if it does have grisly connotations) and attempts a hostage scenario to get out again. But no sooner have the two stoners minding the medicine supply pointed out the futility of taking a robot hostage, than Lucy forces them to open a bunch of ghoul cages, and…

Oh, Lucy.

Here’s where the Vault-dweller privilege takes another shredding, because it doesn’t occur to Lucy that some of these ghouls might be in cages for good reasons – or that someone who looks and sounds sweet and innocent may, in fact, not be harmless. RIP, Martha.

Which leads me to the other reason I found this episode – and this series so far – impressive: extreme violence is used as a storytelling tool, not as a replacement for story development. Whenever something really violent happens, the incident is sudden, and it’s over just as suddenly – but it leaves a mark on the person experiencing it that changes them somehow. You know, like violent incidents tend to do. So kudos to the writers for understanding how best to use this tool, and for doing it so effectively.

Anyway! Back to the story. Lucy is one step from being free, but before she takes that step she’s got to decide what to do about The Ghoul. Kill him and walk away, or help him and walk away? And here’s where Lucy’s privilege falls away and her genuine sense of decency steps up, because she doesn’t have to like The Ghoul to want to help him, any more than she has to hate someone in order to be able to kill them. But she helps him regardless of what he’s done to her, because that’s the golden rule. And if she abandons that, then she really is just like him.

(Pause for Intense Sympathetic Feelings)

Meanwhile, the mystery of what happened in Vault 32 is deepening, and Norm is on the case. And it appears the importance of Lucy’s mother goes further than just some rosy-tinted memories, because whatever went wrong in 32 happened long before the raiders got there, and it transpires that they got in because Lucy’s mother (or at least, her mother’s Pip-Boy ID) let them inside??

So there was an outbreak of … something, in Vault 32, which I think coincides with a famine that starved a lot of people (including Rose McLean). Or everyone went mad, for reasons we don’t yet know. A secret was uncovered that made people very angry with the management, and they all turned on each other? Then the raiders got in, saw all this and went “oh hey, opportunity”?

And how does Moldaver fit into all this? What does she know??

ARGH. I have so many questions! But again, I am theorising wildly in the best way because this is just too intriguing!

Also: Norm for Overseer. If you’re going to cause problems, Norm, go big or go home.

Also also: … What the heck happened on that movie set? We’re getting some tantalising tidbits over time regarding what led to The Ghoul becoming The Ghoul, but this … seeing his former self on video was very interesting because even though he’s an actor playing a part, there’s a sense of something harder about him, something mean that wasn’t there before. So whatever went down to set this ball rolling, I suspect it happened on that set. BUT WHAT WAS IT??

I need answers, guys. I NEED ANSWERS.

Onward!