We’ve finally reached the climactic conclusion of Amazon’s big-budget Fallout. And let me tell ya – so much goes down in these last two episodes. Do the showrunners stick the landing after peppering us with an entire season’s worth of vault intrigue and mayhem? Or did they end up stumbling face-first at the last possible moment, leaving us underwhelmed, desperately searching for some semblance of satisfying closure? Our Fallout episodes 7 and 8 review breaks down the whole enchilada, so strap in ‘cause this is a long one!
Episode 7, “The Radio”
The penultimate episode starts with Adam and his son Tommy (new characters) looking like they just strolled off the Fallout: New Vegas set, rocking that snazzy NCR Ranger drip. After a long day of playing in the dirt, they head back home, with Adam hollering for his little girl, Sandra. But lo and behold, he stumbles upon The Ghoul, making himself comfy, chowing down on a steak at the dinner table. Fearing Sandra has met a grisly fate, Adam frantically calls out for her again, only for the kid to pop out and offer their friendly neighborhood ghoul a refreshing beverage. The Ghoul lets out a raspy chuckle, reveling in Adam’s momentary panic that he was feasting on Sandra’s tender flesh.
It turns out Adam’s boys have gotten mixed up with that raider queen Moldaver – The Ghoul flashes a letter revealing the older son Roofus ditched this dusty farm two years back to join her gang of wasteland ruffians. But that’s not all – he recruited his younger brother, Tommy, behind dear old dad’s back. Just when you think the gut-punches can’t get any more brutal, the ghoul confesses to killing Roofus himself, damaging the letter with Moldaver’s hideout location in the process. With his remaining family hanging in the balance, Adam forces dopey Tommy to spill that Moldaver’s holed up in the ruins of the Griffith Observatory. But in a twist so mind-numbingly stupid, Tommy decides to go for his trusty rifle instead of keeping his mouth shut. Barely a moment passes before The Ghoul puts him down with a well-placed headshot.
We then flashback to the pre-war days, where we catch Moldaver, back when she was just “Miss Williams,” stirring up some anti-establishment ruckus at a funeral parlor meet-up. This proto-revolutionary is rallying the troops against the powers that be, claiming they’re the real enemy holding humanity back from greatness. See, Moldaver’s division was cooking up cold fusion tech as an infinite power source to end the Sino-American war once and for all. But after Vault-Tec absorbed the project into Cooper’s wife’s division, progress screeched to a halt. So Moldaver tries every trick in her sedition playbook to convince Cooper to spy on his old lady.
Cutting back to the present wasteland, Lucy finds herself in a pickle – cuffed to a desk facing judgment from Overseer Benjamin and Birdie. Her crimes? A little B&E down on Level 12 followed by roughing up some poor vault dweller, and by that, I mean throwing acid on some dude’s face. But before they dole out punishment, the dynamic duo decides to give Lucy a blast from the past with a little history lesson straight outta the Vault-Tec archives. They cue up a holotape that lays bare the twisted origins of Vault 4 – it turns out the big wigs gave scientists Lloyd and Cassandra Hawthorne (the scientists from the Vault-Tec commercial that Cooper filmed) carte blanche to conduct unethical experiments hybridizing human “test subjects” with all sorts of radiation-proof creature DNA. And just who were these poor souls? Why, refugees from the surface lured in under false promises of shelter.
Naturally, these poor Cronenberg’d captives eventually said, “Enough is enough!” and rebelled against their mad scientist overlords. Flashing forward to the present, this former house of horrors has become a makeshift medical ward treating the poor irradiated saps still suffering from those sickening experiments. Benjamin and Birdie turn the hot lights on Lucy, demanding to know what twisted Mengele-esque program was happening back in her homeland of Vault 33. But the naive lamb insists there was no such unethical depravity afoot over there.
We rejoin our mangled weasel Thaddeus as he arrives at an abandoned Red Rocket truck stop with CX404, where he locks the poor pup in an old Nuka-Cola vending machine prison. Meanwhile, back in the twisted realm of Vault 4, our girl Lucy finds herself tied up in the atrium. Benjamin brandishes a wicked machete like a Marielito from Griselda (go watch that show if you haven’t) as he lays out Lucy’s grim sentence … exile to the irradiated surface world. In a surprise twist, instead of meeting the sharp end of Benjamin’s blade, Lucy gets the rope binding her cut and is gifted a two-week head start care package to fend for herself topside. Huh.
Lucy requests that her knight in power armor, Maximus, be allowed to remain behind. Little does she know, blazing a trail as always, the big lug has already swiped the vault’s precious fusion core to kick his armored ass into high gear! This cheeky theft causes a brief blackout before the backup generators rumble online. Now fully suited and booted, Maximus stumbles into the atrium and starts wildly attacking the assembled gawkers! It’s only when Lucy gives him the full rundown that the old bucket of bolts puts his photon thruster to rest.
Over in an entirely separate storyline, Thaddeus continues hauling his mangled carcass across the wasteland. He picks up a radio signal from some crazy cat calling himself DJ Carl (played by none other than Fred Armisen!), still rocking out to fiddly hillbilly tunes from centuries past. Smelling an easy mark, the chicken fucker from earlier episodes, who was about to kill himself, quickly jumps at the chance to con the man. Thaddeus is understandably wary and even briefly entertains putting this conniving con artist down to simply take his entire inventory of chems and meds. However, the crazy man claims to have a serum that could cure his foot, but only he knows how to mix it correctly. The price for helping the weasel? Why, Maximus’ fusion core, of course! Thaddeus gulps down serum, and by sheer wasteland voodoo, his raggedy limb is instantly remade good as new. The salesman even throws in directions to a nearby radio outpost before hot-footing it out of there with his nuclear battery.
We circle back to The Ghoul and his newly adopted pupper CX404/Dogmeat, who he comes across trapped in her makeshift soda can cell at the Red Rocket truck stop. Despite whatever lingering humanity he’s buried under those radioactive flakes, Ghoul Choom can’t resist liberating the canine and begrudgingly taking her in as a permanent companion.
In another flashback, we catch poor Cooper in an ethical dilemma – whether or not to bug his wife Barb’s Pip-Boy at the behest of Ms. Williams (aka Moldaver). The guy’s practically sweating with guilt as he pairs the listening device, even getting cold feet when he overhears Barb having an innocent chitchat with their daughter. For a fleeting moment, Cooper’s conscience wins out, and he chucks the spy gear into the trash. But before you can say “midlife crisis,” he’s dumpster diving to retrieve the earpiece.
Meanwhile, Thaddeus stumbles upon the radio station of that musical madman DJ Carl and manages to send out a distress call to the Brotherhood of Steel’s warmongering airborne cavalry. Ever the wily one, Thaddeus feigns appreciation for Carl’s utterly antiquated fiddle melodies while checking out the devious disc jockey’s deadly defensive measures. It turns out homeboy has rigged the whole joint with booby traps designed to punish anyone who dares criticize his retro jams- I have a feeling this bit was definitely inspired by Portlandia. Anyways, just then, Lucy and her paramour Maximus come swanning in to complicate matters. Thaddeus starts wildly spraying bullets in their general direction, but whether by divine providence or sheer dumb luck, his hailstorm of bullets somehow misses our duo of do-gooders.
Lucy makes an attempt to negotiate, but Thaddeus has the rug well and truly pulled out from under him when he stumbles straight into one of Carl’s traps and catches an arrow straight through the goddamn neck. Yet, to everyone’s surprise, including his own, he just shrugs it off, pulling the arrow free from his neck as the wound seals up behind it. At this point, I put two and two together and realized that Thaddeus’ invulnerability must be a side effect of that shady serum he guzzled back in the wastes. The old snake oil salesman neglected to mention it also kick-starts intense ghoulification.
The situation rapidly escalates as Brotherhood of Steel vertibirds converge on their position. Thaddeus is desperate to avoid their watchful gaze, fearful that his fresh ghoul status will have the hammer-bros gunning for him. Maximus makes the pragmatic call to snatch the severed head Thaddeus was guarding and let the newly minty fresh ghoul beat feet with his hopefully-still-present wits intact. Maximus defiles the skull of one unlucky dude who dared criticize DJ Carl’s musical crimes against humanity in one last bid to satisfy and fool the Brotherhood. He then instructs Lucy to leave with the REAL head while he plays decoy with the gory prop. The pair shares one last, passionate kiss, professing their undying love (awwww) and making promises to reunite once the Brotherhood’s none the wiser.
As if we hadn’t been mired in enough tangled subplots already, some bureaucratic Vault shuffling goes down in the background. We get characters transitioning between Vaults 33 and 32, Woody throwing a fit over leaving, and while top dog overseer Betty is distracted, Norm hacks into her computer and communicates with the overseer of Vault 31, impersonating Betty and requesting to be extracted – a rouse to get them to open the vault door.
Episode 8, “The Beginning”
Maximus meets with Elder Cleric Quintus, the Brotherhood’s seemingly top dog on this side of the Rockies. But instead of a hero’s welcome for recovering the mysterious “artifact,” poor Maxie lands himself on death row when they realize the severed head was a decoy – I mean, what did he expect to happen? However, Dane convinced Quintus to give our boy one last shot at leading them to the actual relic.
Meanwhile, Lucy has finally reached Griffith Observatory for her long-awaited reunion with dear old dad Hank … or so she thinks. Moldaver lays down the cold, hard truth – Hank is just a thawed-out Vault-Tec pawn, one of many overseers tasked with shepherding the vaults in a bid for those warmongering corporate suits to reclaim the surface. Just as this monumentally fucked up revelation is sinking in, we cut to Lucy’s cousin Norm as he wanders deeper into the bowels of Vault 31. There, he finds the whole operation being micromanaged by a literal brain-in-a-roomba. Not only that, but Normie comes face-to-face with rows of cryogenically preserved Vault-Tec stooges, just like Hank and our old frenemy Betty.
Over in an entirely separate vignette, we catch up with the wasteland’s own personal favorite son – that hard-boiled Ghoul on the trail of the observatory and the artifact within. In a timely flashback, we’re treated to an exposition of Cooper Howard driving his wife, Barb, to work. Using the bug he planted on Barb’s Pipboy, Cooper eavesdrops on a shady corporate cabal bickering and backstabbing as they jockey for supremacy. In one cruel power move, Barb shuts it all down by proposing that they simply manufacture their own nuclear exchange. After that bombshell, a shell-shocked Cooper then crosses paths with young, wide-eyed Hank MacLean.
In the present day, Moldaver finally spills the beans on her beef with Hank – she was close friends with Lucy’s mom, Rose, who left the vault after suspecting Hank’s shady intentions. Rose linked up with Moldaver at Shady Sands before Hank came in hot, snatched the kids, and nuked the whole damn town in a cold-blooded massacre (I guess that means New Vegas is still canon then). The poor woman only “survived” (if you can call it that) by being ghoul-ified, leading her to Moldaver’s dinner table.
With the artifact finally in her grasp, Moldaver only needs those proprietary Vault-Tec codes from an executive prick like Hank to finally fire up her cold fusion wet dream. Lucy pleads with her captive paterfamilias to cooperate, which he begrudgingly does—with perfect timing, depending on who you ask, the Brotherhood’s aerial armada swoops in, overwhelming Moldaver’s defenses, which appear to be affiliated with the NCR in a hail of laser warfare reminiscent of the Battle of Geonosis. In the midst of the escalating chaos, we cut to our favorite afflicted antihero, The Ghoul, as he ambushes a Brotherhood squad. In a poetic moment, the old waster exploits the same chinks in the Brotherhood’s power-armored hides that he learned way back in his Marine days.
While they are getting picked apart, Maximus hauls ass to find Lucy at the observatory’s peak. Lucy lays the truth on Maximus about Hank’s atrocity – that he destroyed his hometown of Shady Sands. Consumed by rage, Maximus attacks his future father-in-law … only to get his ass handed to him. As Maximus lies there, Lucy holds her murderous pops at gunpoint before the Ghoul comes strolling in with his own gun trained on Hank. After recounting meeting young Henry way back when, the Ghoul presses Hank on wifey Barb and daughter Janey’s whereabouts. Mr. MacLean clams up and beats a hasty retreat, leaving the Ghoul to recite the most famous saying in all of Fallout – “War never changes.”
Turning back to Lucy, the Ghoul lays it all on the line and offers her a stark choice – stick around to get wasted by the Brotherhood or join him in going to meet her “makers,” the vaulted powers that orchestrated all these shady schemes. After straight-up executing the ghoul-ified husk of her own mother, our girl makes the only sane choice and leaves alongside her unlikely guide, leaving poor Maximus behind amidst the rubble.
Flash forward a bit, and whaddya know, Maxie’s back amongst the living just as a terminally wounded Moldaver limps in to activate her cold fusion project. As LA’s ruins crackle with fresh power, the dying martyr encourages Maximus to ponder what a post-apocalyptic authority like the Brotherhood might do with such limitless energy – IF he could even stop them from seizing it.
Just as Maximus is settling into his latest existential crisis, Dane enters the scene, and seeing nothing but Moldaver’s body and Maxims standing over it, they jump to the obvious conclusion that Maximus killed her. Our disillusioned hero vehemently denies any such thing, but Dane’s not trying to hear it – they’re too busy hastily anointing Maximus as a full-fledged Brotherhood Knight to a roaring ovation from the assembled meathead chorus.
The final scene shows a defeated Hank arriving in the Mojave Wasteland, catching sight of New Vegas shimmering in the distance.
Final Thoughts
Now, I’ll be the first to admit – those opening episodes had me hooked like a raider on jet. Tight, cohesive storytelling that deftly wove together multiple plot threads into one satisfyingly dense tapestry. You could tell it was the product of a single creative voice with a firm vision. And it was – the first three episodes are written and directed by the same team. But then it’s like they kicked the writer’s room door wide open; every episode after that had a different writer and director.
Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate – I’m not here to mindlessly gush over every bit of this show. Nope, part of being a reviewer is calling out the problems when I see them. And I’ve got to say, the back half of this debut season was … lesser than the first.
The action set pieces, in particular, left a lot to be desired. They felt tacked-on, like an afterthought meant to break up all the dense narrative loregasms. Either far too brief to make an impact or stretched so thin, you could floss with them!
And I’ve got to call out the inconsistent character work while I’m at it. Are we really expected to buy that the same grizzled antihero who could systematically dismantle MULTIPLE knights in power armor simply forgot all his survival tactics when squaring off against Maximus earlier on? That’s just sloppy writing.
But here’s the thing – despite all those frayed edges and tweaked-out plot holes, this big-budget show still manages to compel audiences from start to finish. They double-down on the production values, fully leaning into that distinctive Fallout vibe of 50s Americana filtered through a bombed-out, radiation-soaked lens. Visually, it’s a treat to watch the designers’ creative vision unfold.
So, while it’s no genre-redefining masterpiece, Fallout is one of the stronger attempts to bring a beloved video game property to life on the small screen. You can tell that Amazon is betting on a 2nd season because many of these plotlines are left wide open. And while I generally don’t like these cliffhanger endings that set up a 2nd season, I think the show merits another season. Because at the end of the day, Amazon’s team understands what makes the Fallout franchise special – it’s bleak, nihilistic satire shining a mirror back on the worst impulses of American capitalism and consumerism. You might not get it perfect out of the vault on your first go, but give credit where credit is due – this show is excellent, and if you haven’t already started watching it, then what are you waiting for?!
Scores:
Episode 7 – 8/10
Episode 8 – 8/10
Overall Season 1 Rating – 9/10
Luis is a writer based in The Lone Star State. His work has appeared on multiple blogs, covering a wide range of topics. When he’s not writing about The Witcher or Cyberpunk, you’ll typically find him in the mosh pit of a heavy metal concert, trying new dishes, or watching/playing sports.
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