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Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Fallout Episode 4.
While the first three episodes of Fallout have focused on our three main characters equally, this fourth episode mainly prioritizes the stories of the MacLean siblings: Lucy (Ella Purnell) on the surface, and her brother Norm (Moisés Arias) back in Vault 33. In Episode 4, we begin to see that the MacLeans are kind of badasses, as Lucy has to truly fend for herself in the Wasteland while maintaining her Vault optimism, while Norm tries to find answers down below in the Vaults. Oh, and there's also a surgeon robot voiced by Matt Berry, so you know you're in for another solid episode of Fallout.
In a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, citizens must live in underground bunkers to protect themselves from radiation, mutants and bandits.
The episode begins with Lucy and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) still in each other’s company. As they pass an abandoned medical clinic, they hear yelling inside and decide to investigate. They find another ghoul that our Ghoul knows, who says that he’s starting to "turn." He asks if The Ghoul has any vials that will help him from turning, but The Ghoul claims to be all out. The turning ghoul mentions that The Ghoul has outlasted them all, and that’s because he’s good at making money to purchase more vials. As the two wax nostalgic over the good ol' days and how good food used to taste, The Ghoul shoots the turning ghoul, putting him out of his misery. He then gets down to business, pulling on his teeth and starting to eat the recently deceased.
Lucy understandably disparages this, and The Ghoul noticeably pauses after she gives him her name again. Clearly, it means something to him. Lucy says that this is no way to act, and while things in her Vault were once pretty bad, they didn’t resort to something like this. People starved, including her mom, and her father (Kyle MacLachlan) lost immense amounts of weight. But The Ghoul retorts that there’s a difference between what people say they did, and what they actually did. The Ghoul then demands that Lucy does some of the work in helping him make ass jerky out of the corpse.
Back in Vault 33, two of the leaders, Reg (Rodrigo Luzzi) and Woody (Zach Cherry), have started an election to see who will become the next overseer. After capturing several of the people who attacked their Vault from the surface, they discuss how they’ve tried to learn about their prisoners' ways, but with no reply. Meanwhile, another one of the leaders, Betty (Leslie Uggams), has a talk with Norm about his call for violence at the assembly in the last episode. Betty says that as the last remaining MacLean in the vault, Norm’s voice carries weight. When he mentions that he hid during the raid, Betty points out that Norm is lucky he hasn’t seen what happens when clever boys like him get angry, and that he should tread lightly.
As Lucy and The Ghoul continue their trek, Lucy is still dying for a sip of water — but The Ghoul only drinks the radiated kind, so a desperate Lucy begins drinking it too. Lucy then asks The Ghoul what he is, to which he replies, “I’m you, sweetie, you just give it a little time.” When The Ghoul starts having a massive coughing fit, Lucy makes a run for it but finds herself in front of a giant hole surrounded by destroyed buildings. Her hesitation gives The Ghoul enough time to lasso her and pull her back. But Lucy bites The Ghoul’s finger off. Instead of being deterred, The Ghoul simply cuts off one of Lucy’s fingers in retaliation.
In the Vault again, Chet (Dave Register) is still having a rough time now that his love/cousin Lucy is gone, and he’s no longer the gatekeeper of the Vault after he helped her escape. While Chet has the saddest dinner possible, he gets a surprise from Steph (Annabel O’Hagan), whose husband was killed in the recent attack, leaving her pregnant and alone. Steph has been going through her husband’s stuff and wants to see if Chet would like any of his possessions. It’s not long before Steph has dressed Chet in her husband’s old cardigan and scarf, which leads her to start crying and then make out with Chet while calling him her husband’s name. As they fool around, Steph’s water breaks, and she begins to go into labor.
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The Ghoul brings Lucy to a Super Duper Mart grocery store, where he rings a buzzer and says he wants to make a transaction, trading her for more of his necessary vials. The Ghoul sends Lucy in for a physical evaluation and then immediately passes out at the entrance. Once inside, Lucy meets Snip-Snip (voiced by Matt Berry), a robot who seems willing to take care of her. He rummages through a drawer of old, cut-off fingers and replaces Lucy’s missing one. Lucy starts telling Snip-Snip how worried she was about being with The Ghoul, afraid that maybe he wanted her as a sex slave or something. Snip-Snip reassures her, then says all that he’s going to do is harvest her organs before knocking her out.
In Vault 32, Norm brings the prisoners a Jell-O cake which he decides to give to another Vault Dweller instead, as he believes the incarcerated don't deserve the treat. He then speaks to one of the imprisoned murderers, who states that he doesn’t know what the people of Vault 32 were up to, but it certainly wasn’t innocent. Norm decides to investigate, looking into Vault 33’s communication logs with Vault 32, but his access is denied. He then decides to go to Chet, who is desperate for an out as Steph is having her baby right now, and the pair sneak into Vault 32.
Inside, they find dead crops and conclude that whatever happened occurred a long time ago. They see dead Vault Dwellers and discover that the last biosignal from a corpse was detected two years ago. Another Dweller is dead after putting a fork in the microwave, where he was watching a TV program about mice eating each other to survive. Norm and Chet figure out that the people of Vault 32 were already dead when the raiders got there, but who killed them? Did they kill each other? As they question this, they see something written in blood on the walls: “We Know the Truth.”
Within the Super Duper Mart, Lucy comes to as she’s wheeled through the grocery store, where she sees several ghouls trapped alive inside the freezer section. Snip-Snip goes to his two “owners,” who say it’s okay that they trade The Ghoul 60 vials for Lucy. Snip-Snip then gets to snip-snipping, as he pulls out his buzzsaw to harvest Lucy’s organs. She narrowly gets away, putting Snip-Snip out of commission by using defibrillators on him. She threatens the two men, aiming a gun at them full of syringes containing poisonous draining fluid. The guys say she can leave, but Lucy demands they free the ghouls as well.
After they let a few free, Lucy insists they release the rest, but they reply that she doesn’t understand. Once they’re released, it becomes clear that they’ve turned into essentially zombies who attack their captors. With both the ghouls and the two men dead, Lucy meets a ghoul who keeps reminding herself that her name is Martha, as if she’s struggling to hold on to her one last bit of humanity. As Martha starts to turn, Lucy sees a gun at her feet and knows what she has to do. As Martha runs at her, Lucy pulls the trigger and also puts Martha out of her misery—a parallel to The Ghoul’s actions at the beginning of the episode.
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As Chet and Norm continue to search Vault 32, they find even more bodies, including the vault’s overseer dead at his desk, with another message written in blood: “Death to Management.” In the office, they find the Vault Door Logs and discover that Vault 32 was opened from the outside. Chet mentioned that they’d need a Pip-Boy that every Vault Dweller wears on their wrist to get into the vault from the outside. But Norm says that the raiders did have one: the Pip-Boy owned by his mother, Rose MacLean.
As Lucy leaves the Super Duper Mart, she finds The Ghoul outside still alive. As he barely holds on to life, Lucy tells him that she may end up looking like him, but he’ll never be like him. She gives him the vials he desperately needs, proclaiming “Golden Rule, motherfucker,” before she heads out on her own. The Ghoul takes this opportunity to go inside the Super Duper Mart, raiding, drinking, and taking all the remaining vials that he can. He also finds a tape next to a TV, a movie entitled The Man From Deadhorse. The Ghoul puts it in, and we see it’s the film that Cooper Howard was filming at the beginning of the third episode. The Ghoul watches the conclusion of the scene he filmed all those years ago, shooting the bad guy like the director wanted. As he takes in The Man From Deadhorse, we can tell that, like Martha, The Ghoul is once again reminded of who he used to be, while we also wonder if there’s still humanity left inside that ghoulish figure.
Fallout Episode 4 feels like it's really starting to dive into the deeper themes and mysteries within this universe. The curiosity about what is actually happening in the Vaults only grows, and the question of what's going on with the MacLean family starts to become even more uncertain, while Lucy tries to hold onto her humanity despite the Wasteland testing her constantly. Episode 4 also addresses the power structures within this world in a major way, as Norm realizes something bigger than him is happening in the Vaults. There's even a hierarchy in the Super Duper Mart and how bartering occurs, with someone always higher on the totem pole in possession of more information.
Even in an episode that mostly takes place in a trashed grocery store, we can take that as a microcosm of the larger Fallout world outside those doors. Between this installment and the previous one, Fallout excels at expanding our view by focusing on smaller-scale stories that explore the harsh truths about its world.
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While mostly taking place in a grocery store, Episode 4 manages to hint at larger truths in the Fallout universe and within the MacLean family.
Fallout's first season is available to watch on Prime Video.
The post-apocalyptic series is based on the popular Bethesda Softworks game franchise.
We've got to be done with these episodes.
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