Fallout recap: “The One Where Matt Berry Plays A Very Polite Dissection Robot”
Water breaks, Lucy kills, and Walton Goggins watches old movies in a very satisfying fourth episode
TV Reviews Matt Berry
[Editor’s note: This is a recap of Fallout episode four. The recap of episode five publishes April 16.]
In talking about Prime Video’s Fallout over these last four episodes, we’ve largely skipped over its merits as Hollywood’s latest big, expensive video-game adaptation. Partly that’s because a series has to stand, first and foremost, on its own strengths; no amount of in-jokes, Easter eggs, or bobbleheads can spackle over a show’s basic obligation to function as a compelling narrative (something Fallout has mostly achieved, we’d argue, despite a few lulls here and there). But also, there’s the fact that the series hasn’t necessarily engaged with the Fallout games as games very much; the story beats, the music, the look of the thing are all fairly spot-on, but—barring the fight sequence in “The Target”—there hasn’t been much here that replicates the experience of actually playing Fallout.
“The Ghouls,” though, addresses that deficit in spades. After all, what could be more Fallout than that classic series mainstay, Exploring An Abandoned Vault Where Something Fucked Up Happened, Way Before You Got There?
In fact, this episode is something of a twofer: We not only get Chet and Norm investigating the ruins of Vault 32—where some overachiever apparently set out to break the record for “Most Messed Up Thing Anyone’s Ever Done With A Foosball Table, Impalement Edition,” amongst other grisly deaths—but also Lucy clearing a classic Fallout dungeon (an abandoned supermarket) after the Ghoul sells her to two of the most affable organ harvesters we’ve ever seen on TV. That also means we get plenty of time with Matt Berry as cheerful dissection-bot Snip-Snip and Fallout’s most fucked-up sex scene since the last one, so, honestly, what’s not to like?
The theme of the day is survival, of course, as the Ghoul runs Lucy through a cynical crash course on who gets to eat who out in the Wasteland. (Hint: The person with power is the one who gets to set the table at any given moment.) It’s a philosophy that makes some room for sympathy—note the way the Ghoul lets his old buddy Roger, deep into the process of becoming a zombie-esque feral ghoul, go out on a happy memory before he puts a bullet through his rapidly degrading brain—but not restraint. After all, the ass jerky isn’t going to make itself, right?
And, sure, some of this stuff is a little on the nose (or lack thereof), as the Ghoul all but forces Lucy to suck down irradiated water to buy herself a few more days of life, literally forcing her to become more like him to survive. But the presentation is spot-on, the rising clicks of the Geiger counter on the young Vault Dweller’s Pip-Boy pushing back ineffectually against the far more insistent drumbeat of survival. One of Fallout’s greatest strengths, so far, is its ability to leverage the grotesque as it makes its various points, and the vileness of the water, and the repeated shots of Roger’s—we don’t know how to put this— butt flesh hanging off the Ghoul’s backpack, are a constant reminder that, in the words of our old pal Tom Hanks, the weak in this world are meat. This is something that only gets underscored when Lucy bites off the Ghoul’s finger just before he makes the hand-off and gets her own severed in return.
It’s a shocking moment, a reminder that Fallout, despite its comedy impulses, is under no obligation to play nice with its characters. Sure, Lucy gets a new (albeit very dead-looking) finger re-attached a few minutes later, after she’s passed into the custody of Snip-Snip (in what is, transparently, another set-up for an attack on her idealism). But Fallout never wants you to forget that, in the Wasteland, you’re only one slip-up, one oversight, one missed vial, from being someone else’s meal.
That’s true out of the Wasteland, too: We don’t check in on Maximus or Thaddeus this episode, and so we’re left to draw our parallels between Lucy’s ordeals and her far more well-fed friends and family back in Vault 33—even if not all of them are getting the Jell-O cake they so desperately desire. And these weirdos do want things, albeit in ways that come off one part tragic, three parts hilarious. Case in point: the scene that sees Lucy’s grieving (and pregnant) best friend Steph stop by Chet The (Former) Door Guy’s place to drop off some of her dead husband’s effects, a process that goes from consolation to grief-based sexual role-play to explosive water breaking in the course of about a minute. As we noted above, Fallout’s lack of subtlety about the human body is one of its strengths, and this is a quick, funny bit of sketch comedy that also reminds us how out of touch the Dwellers are with their actual feelings.
Which might explain why things went so wrong over in Vault 32, which now appears to have exterminated itself well before Moldaver and her crew of killers ever passed through on their bloody little errand. Despite the Vault Dwellers helpfully graffiting things like “We know what you did” on the walls right before dying—the most video game-ass thing to ever happen in a video-game adaptation ever—Norm and Chet can’t make heads or tails of it. Fallout isn’t especially concerned with being a mystery show—it’s too irreverent to treat the various MacGuffins it’s been setting up with the necessary respect—but it does at least make a creepy spectacle of the artfully arranged corpses that greet our two adventurers on their little side-quest, before ultimately revealing that the whole thing has something to do with Lucy and Norm’s mom.
The main event, though, deals with Lucy herself, who gets another object lesson in the dangers of compassion after threatening the incredibly pleasant organ harvesters into letting go of all their captives, including the feral ghouls they’ve had locked up for discount parts. (The sight of horrified people locked up in supermarket freezers is another entry in Fallout’s big list of “fucked up stuff we never knew we didn’t want to see,” by the way.) But even getting her first kill (on a turning feral named Martha) only serves to harden Lucy’s resolve to be good in a world that seems to demand badness: Citing the “Golden Rule, motherfucker,” she gives the Ghoul his mind-saving medicine before tromping off into the Wastes. Ella Purnell, as per usual on this show, nails it: She’s completely convincing as a version of Lucy that’s getting harder, but not crueler, in response to the need to survive.
We end, though, on the Ghoul, whose own desperate desire for more of that life-giving fluid gets sidetracked by an even more primal need of his own: an old copy of The Man From Deadhorse, the movie we saw him filming back in “The Head.” Walton Goggins’ eyes are hard to read here and not just because we’re seeing them from beneath about a pound of Deadpool cosplay. Is he reminded of the compromises of the past? Taunted by his own former appearance? Or just wrestling with the reminder that there are, from time to time, more important things than the pure, desperate need to survive?
Stray observations
- In focusing on headier stuff, I’ve probably lost sight of the most important thing about this episode: Matt Berry voicing a very polite robot that wants to take out your organs. Berry doesn’t bust out any especially weird line reads, but it’s always a pleasure to hear his soothing voice in non-soothing circumstances.
- Worth noting that the Ghoul clocks Lucy’s last name with interest.
- “Sometimes a fella’s gotta eat a fella.”
- Goggins, unsurprisingly, only gets better the more room the show gives him to show the nuance lurking behind the Ghoul’s surface cruelty.
- Dear Chet: We know the line is only really there to prime the viewer for the water breaking right after. But if we could never hear “Now that is one wet lady!” in the midst of a sex scene ever again, that would be super.
- Dr. Snip-Snip has impeccable bedside manner: “You’re lucky I don’t have to use a thumb! Our finger inventory’s in a sorry state.”
- Fallout Game Corner: Mr. Handy robots date back to the original Fallout games, although Snip-Snip is pretty clearly modeled on the versions from Fallout 3 onward. Radiation King TVs are all over the place in the Waste, and anyone who’s played Fallout 4 knows Abraxo drain cleaner is a great source of antiseptic (or drugs) in that game’s crafting system.
- “It’s v-very poisonous!”
68 Comments
Honestly, I was hoping for more of the Darkplace DOCTOR LUCIEN SANCHEZ line readings from Berry, rather than What We Do In The Shadows. It fits better with the character. But still, always nice to hear a bit of Berry, even if he’s not taking it quite to 11.
…crash course on who gets to eat who out in the Wasteland.
Phrasing!
And it’s “who gets to eat whom.”
Hey, it’s the Wasteland. Love is where you find it.
Agreed on this episode having two big video game beats. The clear of the Super Duper Mart and the Vault Exploration/Discovery scenes. It’s amazing to me how well they have nailed the look and feel of these things to the things you do in the games. At least FO3 and onward. It is uncanny and bizarrely thrilling to lovers of those games.A lot of times genre shows fall into video game cliches even when they aren’t adaptations. The whole, “do this quest before you can do this quest” sort of thing. Fallout falls into its own cliche of the Wasteland’s “Golden Rule” as voiced by the Ghoul. “Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time.” So many of the goofy side scenes in this show just remind me of those diversions, to the point where I expect there to be green text at the bottom of the screen showing dialogue choices. But rather than it being a detriment, it is immensely satisfying.
“there hasn’t been much here that replicates the experience of actually playing Fallout”This I have to disagree with. I jumped back on New Vegas for the first time after a few years after finishing this show over the weekend, and I think we all forget, for a much fun as the games are, so much of the game play is just walking from one place to the next. It can be REALLY tedious and boring and then sometimes you get 80% of the way to somewhere and then a fucking death deathclaw pops up and kills you and that’s it and you have to start over because you forgot to save every five minutes (this is not a spoiler by any means, for any one who has not finished the show yet).Even in the slower moments of the show, I think the gameplay is replicated beautifully.
The show also has no real sense of geography at all, which again does rather closely replicate the experience of wandering around the game map at random and seeing what you turn up.
We also saw one of these robots in the show’s opening party scene, an indication that despite all other appearances the “Great War” is still a while in the future and we just happened to have reverted to a ‘50s-esque society.It has to be deliberate that they cast the victim of the big cannibalism orgy from Yellowjackets as someone so disgusted by the idea, right?
Why did you feel the need to post (possible two?) Spoilers from two shows on here. You asshole.
The entire article is spoilers. Nobody made you click on it. If you haven’t watched yet, why are you here?
I’m pretty sure the Mr Handy in the party house is from Season 1 , so its probably not really a spoiler . (And the 1950s vibe of the pre war era is always a bit confusing , its either seems like its an alt 1950s that had some advanced tech , or a version of the future that has a 50s aethstetic , but had to revert to earlier technology for some things (small flat Black and White TVs)etc while having future tech (Hover cars/Robots/power suits), which is the official explanation .)
I always thought the world of Fallout was basically the nuclear age envisioned by science-fiction comics of the 1950s. Where by the year 2000 everything was running on nuclear fuel and robots were everywhere but simple things like phones, toasters, and TV’s used pretty much the same technology of the day, with maybe a slightly more streamlined look.
That is exactly it – lots of futuristic tech, but none of the innovations that people in the 50s would not have seen coming. Large-scale adoption of plastics (there’s some, but I think they put a deliberate emphasis on wood and metal components when they are thinking about it), miniaturization, the internet, etc – if it wasn’t featured in a Silver Age comic, it ain’t in Fallout
I’m not sure if this is still canon, but the idea that informed the aesthetic/setting of FO1 and FO2 was that the transistor circuit had never been invented. So while you have all this futuristic tech, none of it is as compact as our tech is, because it’s still using cathodes and vacuum tubes and whatnot. They might have dropped that with the Bethesda titles, IDK, but I remember reading that in the FO2 strategy guide, back when those were a thing (and often the source of a lot of supplementary info about a game’s setting, actually)
One of those “spoilers” is from three episodes ago on this show. Why are you getting mad about spoilers about a show you’ve obviously seen? If you haven’t seen it, why the fuck are you spoiling yourself? While getting mad at people for spoiling it? seriously wtf
We also saw one of these robots in the show’s opening party scene, an
indication that despite all other appearances the “Great War” is still a
while in the future and we just happened to have reverted to a
‘50s-esque society.
Yeah, that’s a core part of the game’s setting and aesthetic and they’re not trying to hide or hint at anything. It’s pretty explicit.
Awe man I can’t wait to watch the pilot for Yellowjackets now that I’ve fallen in love with Purnell. I hope no one randomly posts unprompted spoilers! Incel
I’ve never watched an episode of Yellowjackets but saying that cannibalism in that is a spoiler is absurd. That’s the whole premise of the show that isn’t hidden at all! What if the stranded soccer players from Alive (and real life) were hot girls!
That’s a real oversimplification of the show
I’d hope so. I can’t imagine they could support multiple seasons if that’s all the show was about. Still, the inspiration from the famous 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 disaster is brought up in every description of the show, so cannibalism is hardly unexpected.
Also, it’s been three years since the show started. Exactly how long are we supposed to not talk about potentially spoilery things on the off-chance someone reading is interested in the show but for some reason hasn’t started yet?
This guy is mad at the person for spoiling something that happened in episode 1 of this show, a show that he has ostensibly seen (if not, why is he here?), so I don’t think he’s all there
What is wrong with you? Those are not spoilers. I’d be careful about calling people incels and assholes when it’s actually you who is the problem.BTW – Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.
Just watch the first season of YellowJackets and you’ll be fine. The show gets progressively as it goes on, so don’t even bother with 2. Honestly the show peaked with the pilot, so maybe just check that out.
Fallout is what we call retro-futurism – the sci fi of the past, here the 50s. So the pre war stuff happens in the 21th century as the kind imagined in the 50s.
The games imply that basically the 1960s never happened in the Fallout universe so 1950s culture just continued rather than reverting to it later on. Although in the show’s universe apparently the civil rights movement must have happened at some point because Cooper is married to a Black woman with no apparent racist reaction by others and Black people are shown as holding high ranking roles in the Vault.
If I remember right also the transistor wasn’t invented? Or maybe was invented much later on.
I remember reading that in I think the FO2 strategy guide, which had some interviews with some of the developers. IDK if it stayed canon when they switched over to that Maryland company
I rather like that they are at least somewhat woke while shoveling the world into the furnace of the military-industrial complex
You ahould probably stop pretending you are a Fallout game expert considering you have barely played any of the Bethesda games.
Literally why do you even care. Most people who associate Bethesda with the licence probably weren’t even alive when numbers before 3 existed, so he’s probably more of an expert than you are. And even if he wasn’t, again, why do you care. He didn’t like the new ones, so why should he play them through to completion? To satisfy you?There’s no shortage of places you can go fellate Bethesda if you want to. Just go there and leave this guy in peace.My god gaming nerds are the absolute worst.
It’s funny (and also sad) how much the Fallout gamers over on Steam hate the Fallout show because it isn’t canon. And because the primary protagonist isn’t murder-thieving her way across the wasteland like they would. To be fair, the more recent Fallout games make murder-thieving the easiest way to complete the game. It can be fun to play that way, but it doesn’t make for an interesting story to watch.
I’m fine with this show being its own thing, but I admit I would have loved for this show to have a New Vegas/Courier type story. New Vegas is my favorite, and I would have loved to see some familiar faces. Plus I would love a storyline about a truly independent New Vegas (not the Yes Man version). I can understand why they went the Vault Dweller protagonist though.
Maybe you’ll get that next season.
Uhhhh, I’ll just say… avoiding spoilers as best I can here… definetely keep watching the show.
Let’s be honest, most of them hate it because the main character is a woman.Having never played any of the games, the impression I’ve gotten from how people talk about it is that the show’s story could well be going on adjacent to anything in them, without needing much work to be full canon. At the very least, people are contrasting that to how the Halo show just runs roughshod over the games’ story (and I should point out, I love that it’s doing that).
The show is canon, according to Bethesda, and, as a huge fan of the games, I can say the show works fine within the “canon” of the games (which has always shifted a bit due to unreliable narrators and the needs of the current game’s story). The show changes the location of one pretty famous large settlement in the games, out of convenience and plausibility of the characters getting there, but there’s no actual effect on the game’s lore. It appears the biggest gripes are coming from a shot in finale that shows some dates scribbled on a chalkboard that seem to contradict when certain events happened but it’s easily misinterpreted and doesn’t actually show the date of the event these people are apparently up in arms about. It’s hard to get into more detail without spoiling the finale so I’ll just say the complaints are really just people complaining that their in-game choices, and the endings they got in a certain game, aren’t where the show ends up. Which is a silly complaint in my view because the games all had different potential endings, some much more so than others, and obviously all those wildly disparate endings can’t be canon.
Because you say you haven’t played any of the games I’ll bring up the fact you can play as a woman in them, and there are even small differences in game play and many people play through them multiple times with different character options including sex.
Let’s be honest, most of them hate it because the main character is a woman.Which is bonkers cause by my count the show has three main characters, and two are men.
The show is canon. I think that’s why it takes place chronologically later than any of the game entries. It has been called “basically Fallout 5″ in other places.
The show is canon though, according to Bethesda, and really, aside from the location of one place (that was likely just for the sake of it being a place the characters of the show would be closer to) it pretty much follows the timeline of the games. I consider myself a FO geek and I don’t get what the “purists” are up in arms about. I’ve seen the posts of their biggest complaint, but it hinges on a (comically helpful video-gamey) timeline someone wrote on a blackboard that is ripe for misinterpretation. There’s also a huge reveal at the end of the finale that maybe you could not like the implications of, as a fan of a certain game, but it doesn’t contradict anything the games have shown.
I don’t get what the “purists” are up in arms about.
Once again, they’re pissed that the show wasn’t made specifically for them.As always, fuck ‘em.
The whole point of adapting Fallout to TV, is that the creators don’t have to replicate canon and specific characters and plots from the games. the world of Fallout is the perfect setting to forge a new story with new characters, just like each individual games does.If the series simply depicted plots and characters from the games, those same jerks would be bitching about how the plot and characters didn’t live up to their expectations…. i.e. The Witcher series.
The Bethesda games are the ones that fuck up a lot of the existing canon and changed the tone of the series for the worse, in my opinion. They’re worth playing through exactly once, which is what he says he did.They certainly aren’t superior to the Black Isle games, nor is any knowledge of either era required to enjoy and review a TV show that is forging its own canon.
I really want this show to establish their ghoul rules other than some have radioactive plot armor and others don’t.Also the Jell-O is totally mind control right?
If ghouls don’t get steady rad-x, they go feral… what’s not to get about that?
Lucy continues being friggin’ great.
And Maximus continues to be the worst.
I mean, they made him like a child. Lacking most vestiges of common sense or knowledge. He’s selfish and likes things that make him feel good or powerful. The common sense approach to his situation would be to tell those he came across that his Knight had died but that he was going to use the armor to complete their very important mission. Battlefield commendations are a thing.
That actor is probably the worst part of the show. He just looks sad and bored all the time. Every close up of his face while he’s in the suit conveys no emotion, or interest in the action that’s happening outside of it. Remarkably terrible.
Wah. Wah. Fucking wah.
The highlighting of Cooper Howard “I’m not that kind of guy” to the Ghoul definitely having become that kind of guy.
His cameo probably took weeks to record. “Push the fucking button Clem Fandango!!!”
Not knowing the lore well, I suspect I was more creeped out by the Vault 32 field trip than those who have played the game and who knew about the ulterior motives for the vaults.The show doesn’t spend a lot of time on traditional horror, but when it does it’s effective.
just to clear it up and to repeat other comments, the Fallout games take The Vaults as each one having its own story, and the series features different stories for I don’t remember if different vault numbers.
Don’t much care for anyone or anything happening in the vaults (let’s just stay with Lucy in the wasteland), but as an excuse to explore some creepy past exposition, this was good. The sitting body with a fork in the toaster? Thumbs up. If the show insists on cutting back here, then it should be more this, and less jello cake and pregnancy kinks. I never played Fallout Shelter, the vault management sim, but I guess concentrating so much story here is something for those fans?I liked this best of the 4 eps so far (though you’d think getting your finger severed would illicit a much bigger reaction). Classic Fallout dungeon is a good way of putting it with that supermarket, and the Mister Handy bot looked, behaved and moved perfectly. Goggins’ Ghoul is showing a lot of nuances as a scoundrel; The kind of anti-hero designed to be an audience favorite. It’s working. I love this motherfucker. And Lucy is in the school of hard knocks now, but she’s not going to let it destroy the good in her. Yes to all of this.
I never played Fallout Shelter, the vault management sim, but I guess concentrating so much story here is something for those fans?The goings on in vaults, past and present, has always been a mainstay of FO games. It’s not referencing Fallout Shelter. It’s just leading an unfamiliar audience into the revelation of what the vaults actually are, which is again, a mainstay of every game.
Houses of Horror. That is what they are. 1% social engineering experiments? No thank you.
Some of the vaults were that, but some were normal. Vault-Tec’s own employees obviously aren’t going to put themselves in the fucked up house of horror vaults, and they’re certainly not going to take their chances on the surface. Coop’s wife herself hints at this (“one of the good vaults”) later on in the series
Couldn’t disagree more. Norm’s detective work is carrying the uneven narrative so far.
The sequence of Chet and Lucy’s brother exploring an abandoned vault and trying to figure out what horrible thing happened there is resonant of all the FO games
Why did the robot need to replace her finger before stealing her organs?I don’t know, and it was really quite delightful!Even if we didn’t, as I was hoping, get to hear Matt Berry wildly (mis)pronounce the word “Ghoul”. I bet he could have gotten six or seven syllables out of it.
First of all, I think the series is pretty much spot on what I wanted. The retrofuturistic look, dark humour and really fantastic cast is just perfection. I’ve been pretty avid fan of the first two fallouts and played them through about 10+ times both. Fallout Tactics only once (as it was too thin on story) and didn’t really like the F3 or even test anything newer.Also one thing that keeps popping in my mind. How cool would the Foundation been if it had been similarily retrofuturistic, like the book was. And the action less over the top, and more like old dudes drinking cognac and discussion.
“But if we could never hear “Now that is one wet lady!” in the midst of a sex scene ever again, that would be super.”Be grateful: He could have said “Now that is one moist lady!” instead.
Gotta say Matt Berry was just the perfect casting as the voice of the Mr Handy robots.
The very first episode’s (this season on Fallout” preview spoils that Berry actually appears himself later on.
Matt Berry was perfect for Snip Snip. All we needed to make it even more hilarious was a ghoul in the distance repeating to himself “my name is Clem Fandango… my name is Clem Fandango…”
The “I’m just going to harvest your organs!” scene is probably my favorite scene in the series, because it has elements of all the things that make this series good. The muzak contrasting with Lucy’s trepidation, the twist when the person on the other side turns out to be a well-mannered robot, the black comedy as the robot finds her a new finger, and the hope spot followed by the second twist as Lucy finds out she’s not going to be a sex slave but is going to be an organ donor is so perfect.