‘Fallout’ season 2 episode 1 review: “The Innovator”

Welcome back to the wasteland. Please enjoy the flea soup.

Season 2 premieres are supposed to ease you in. They tend to lean toward soft reintroductions and recaps that don’t blow out your kneecaps. The Fallout Season 2 premiere, “The Innovator,” by contrast, grabs you by the vault jumpsuit, shoves a RadioShack brain box on your skull, and asks (politely, cheerfully) whether you’d like to be put to sleep for what comes next.

This is still undeniably Fallout, but Season 2 arrives with sharper teeth and a meaner sense of purpose. If Season 1 was about uncovering the lie, this premiere is about what happens after you realize the lie was built by idiots with spreadsheets and god complexes.

Chaos is easy. Plans are hard.

Let’s start underground, where the real party is. Norm (Moisés Arias) now fully embraces his destiny as Vault-Tec’s new worst nightmare. He decides the best way to fight a centuries-long corporate conspiracy is the same way you break a vending machine: shake it until something expensive falls out.

The reveal that Vault 31’s grand plan is being overseen by a brain-in-a-Roomba named Bud is one of those jokes that lands because it’s also thematically perfect. Vault-Tec for all its grand, world-ending domination, is still a company of middle managers. And middle managers, when stripped of their authority, are feckless memo delivery systems on wheels.

Norm’s philosophy—plans are hard, chaos is easy—feels like the show planting a flag in this next run of episodes. Civilization took decades to ruin. It might take minutes to finish the job.

The innovator problem.

The episode’s title belongs to its most chilling presence: Robert House (via a Justin Theroux-shaped avatar of unchecked confidence). The pre-war flashbacks paint him as the spiritual ancestor of every tech mogul who believes society is a beta test and people are disposable UI.

House isn’t twirling a mustache. Fine, he isn’t only twirling a mustache. He’s asking to be punched in the face to “feel inevitability.” He’s offering $31 million to working-class men to let him bolt a box onto their necks. And when it goes wrong and heads literally explode, he calls this utter violence progress.

No one would dare accuse the satire in this show (or its peripheral games) anything less than subtle. Though it does make us wonder if Fallout has the prosthetic legs to carry out this desert parable about modern tech billionaires to some kind of surprising conclusion.

The odd couple in hell.

Out in the wasteland, the show wisely keeps its best dynamic front and center. Lucy and the Ghoul remain one of TV’s new great pairings, as they represent optimism versus experience, justice versus survival, mercy versus “I shot him in the shoulder, which was nice of me.”

Ella Purnell continues to play Lucy as someone who knows the world is broken but refuses to let that be the final verdict. Walton Goggins counters with a performance so weary it feels fossilized. Watching them argue about morality while people eat flea soup (without pants crackers, sadly) is the show in miniature: absurd, horrifyingly gross, and somehow sincere.

The Big Iron needle-drop during the ghoul’s massacre is pure Fallout pleasure, straight from the games themselves. It’s stylish, cruel, and darkly funny. Lucy shoots to disarm. He shoots arms off. Neither of them is fully right about what is “right,” and while this ongoing ethical debate threatens to become tiring, for now it’s easily the show’s most interesting dynamic.

Vaults are tombs.

Vault 24’s reveal is classic Fallout horror. It showcases a pristine idea rotted from the inside. Brainwashing experiments. Patriotism turned into a stress test. Technology that still can’t stop exploding heads after 200 years of R&D.

The message Lucy receives from her father—Go home. I’m going to fix everything.—lands like a threat disguised as love. She finally understands what the Ghoul already knows. That Hank isn’t just a misguided dude in need of justice. He’s f—ing dangerous.

The bottom line.

“The Innovator” is dense, nasty, and confident enough to let its mysteries breathe. It trusts the audience to keep up and doesn’t rush to explain itself. The humor is meaner. The politics are louder. The villains are no longer hidden behind Oz-like curtains.

If there’s a misstep, it’s Vault 33’s occasional cartoonish infantilization. A lollipop here, a support group there. It flirts with parody a little too hard in an episode already overstuffed with Vault-Tec commentary. But even that feeds the larger theme, as we see a population raised to be managed instead of empowered.

Fallout Season 2 thus far understands that the scariest monsters in the wasteland aren’t mutants or ghouls or even the radiation. They’re people who believe the world is broken because they’re not the ones calling the shots. And we’re like one or two more apocalypses from optimizing ourselves out of this mess.

Stray thoughts:

• Norm not immediately smashing Bud’s brain feels like a mistake, or maybe him hedging his bets…unless Norm understands something crucial: the fastest way to know you’re on the right path is to watch the system panic. Every protest from Bud reveals a ton of useful information.

• My favorite scene in this next to Big Iron is the flashback to when Cooper (Goggins) tried to escape with his daughter after learning his wife and Vault-Tec were planning to drop the bombs themselves. Without telegraphing it, you can see the panic in his eyes when he realizes the government is in on it with Vault-Tec and timing an emergency broadcast system to when Vault salesmen are walking around a nondescript neighborhood. Yes, this is very much a big callback to Fallout 4, but that final moment when Goggins sees himself in the Vault-Tec ad as part of the problem, thus convincing him that he’s complicit and can’t just “leave” is just plain-good storytelling.

• No Maximus in this episode, which is a shame, but my assumption is that we’ll get more of him and the Brotherhood (and cold fusion plot updates) in the next episode.

• I will never look at redheads the same way again.

• Loved seeing the Great Khans brought to life, along with so many other iconic Fallout: New Vegas flourishes. I’m still wondering how in the world they’re going to reconcile the multiple endings of that game without it feeling contrived. But the show has pulled off tougher challenges.

• The production design hasn’t missed a beat. This is seriously on its way to being one of the all-time video game adaptations in terms of how well it understands its own cinematic quality. Gripes with lore-fudging aside, this is just a good-looking show no matter how you come into its world.

Fallout Season 2 is available to stream on Prime Video.