‘Fallout’ Season 2 Episode 3 review: “The Profligate”

“The Profligate” is the first episode of Season 2 where Fallout starts to feel genuinely unsteady, albeit in the best way. Alliances wobble and moral positions collapse under pressure as characters who’ve spent the season reacting finally take actions that can’t be walked back. The episode moves across the wasteland with purpose, but its real interest lies in how easily violence becomes a tool of convenience once everyone decides they’re already past saving.

Bottling up the system.

The hour opens with a somewhat surprising return. Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton) appears for the first time this season, now visibly changed, hovering somewhere between human and ghoul. He’s running a fortified bottling operation staffed largely by children, many of whom appear to be ghouls or in the process of becoming them.

Turns out they’re producing Sunset Sarsaparilla, a detail that places the scene squarely in New Vegas territory, though the episode doesn’t rush to explain how Thaddeus ended up here or where these kids came from. What matters is his demeanor. He looks relaxed, carefree, and genuinely pleased to be outside the Brotherhood’s structure.

Even if the world he’s built is also rather strange and ethically compromised (“why aren’t you kids making me more money?” he dubiously asks at one point). The scene plants a quiet question that lingers through the episode: what does survival look like once you stop pretending purity is possible?

An American refusal to change.

Lucy’s story provides the episode’s most overt brutality. Marched through Caesar’s Legion camp as a prisoner, she witnesses the full scope of their cruelty. The woman she saved in the previous episode is executed immediately for failing her legionary, a punishment delivered without ceremony or much explanation.

The Legion’s Caesar remains distant, almost mute at first, while one of his commanders—played by Macaulay Culkin—takes charge of Lucy’s fate. Lucy responds the only way she knows how, by criticizing their misuse of Latin, their mangled ideology, their insistence on ritualized violence.

Culkin’s character explains that the Legion is fractured, locked in a civil war over the body of their founder’s heir, whose will sits unread in a pocket neither side can access. Lucy expectedly offers to mediate, drawing on her experience in “family counseling,” a moment that plays with bleak humor before turning even more bleak. She’s crucified on a makeshift cross fashioned from a broken power line, left to dehydrate under the sun. When Lucy appeals to the idea of America, she’s met with a simple response: America failed. The Legion has moved on.

The man who knows how wars actually start.

The Ghoul’s storyline continues to underline why he remains the show’s most compelling presence. Recovering from his radscorpion wounds, he talks to Dogmeat while carving poisoned flesh from his own leg, telling a story about a boat that stops being a boat once enough pieces are removed. He admits he doesn’t know why he’s talking, then realizes the answer himself. He finally has someone worth talking to. The moment carries quiet weight, grounding the character’s cruelty in profound isolation.

A flashback follows, returning to Cooper Howard before the war. He watches Barb pack a keepsake box for their daughter, meant for the Vault. Cooper hints that they may not need one, a remark loaded with knowledge Barb doesn’t realize he has. The episode cuts between this domestic tension and Cooper’s work for Charlie, which brings him to a veteran fundraiser where he learns more about Robert House and his plans in Vegas.

When Cooper encounters the real House in a restroom (unbeknownst to him), the exchange crackles with mutual suspicion. House speaks in broad philosophies about saving America. Cooper sees through him immediately, even if he doesn’t yet know exactly who he’s dealing with.

What the Brotherhood rewards.

Back at Area 51, the Brotherhood’s internal conflict sharpens. The elders debate how to respond to the Commonwealth paladin’s arrival, with Quintus pushing them toward continued alliance and confrontation. He invokes Roger Maxson and the Brotherhood’s origins, explaining their religious zeal as a reaction to pre-war human experimentation. The speech reframes the chapter’s fanaticism as something inherited rather than arbitrary. When the Yosemite elder sides with the Commonwealth and demands the cold fusion relic, the fracture becomes official.

Maximus finds himself caught between competing visions of the Brotherhood’s future. He suggests eliminating the Commonwealth paladin outright and is sharply dismissed by Quintus, who understands the political consequences better than Max does.

Outside, Max meets Paladin Xander, who offers a different version of Brotherhood life. In the Commonwealth, clerics don’t rule. Soldiers do. Xander warns Max that Quintus is on the verge of catastrophe and asks him to intervene. Max agrees, drawn by the clarity and confidence Xander represents.

Someone worth talking to.

Meanwhile, the Ghoul has recovered enough to find Lucy. From a distance, he surveys her crucified body and the Legion’s internal tension. Seeking help, he approaches what he believes to be an NCR camp, only to find it hollowed out and abandoned.

There he meets Victor, a robot with a Southern drawl who has been waiting for a decade, serving a future that never arrived. Victor talks about Robert House’s desire to live forever and mentions cold fusion, visibly unsettling the Ghoul. The past, once again, refuses to stay buried.

When the Ghoul finally encounters the remaining NCR rangers, the reunion is grim, especially for Fallout: New Vegas players who sided with said faction. Captain Rodriguez explains they’ve been cut off for years and are even unaware that Shady Sands no longer exists.

The Ghoul tells her the truth, then laughs at his own assumptions about the NCR thriving somewhere beyond the horizon. He leaves her with a bitter assessment, that maybe the NCR deserved to die. Rodriguez’s expression suggests the possibility has never occurred to her before.

Every system thinks it’s the last one.

Maximus and Xander’s partnership deepens during a mission against rogue robots, culminating in a brutal fight with a malfunctioning Securitron set to the strains of the national anthem. Maximus pulls the fusion core free with his bare hands, exhilarated by the violence. Xander encourages him, and the bond between them feels genuine, which only raises the stakes of what comes next.

But first, there’s the matter of Lucy’s rescue. Delirious from exposure, she barely registers the Ghoul’s presence as he approaches Caesar and proposes a trade. He offers information on the NCR’s last holdout in exchange for Lucy’s life. As Lucy is freed and led from the camp by the Ghoul, the episode intercuts with flashbacks of Charlie’s wartime speech and the gift of a commemorative lighter, a detail that carries forward with ominous intent.

The Ghoul admits to Lucy that freeing her may have been a mistake. Moments later, the Legion camp erupts in explosion. The Ghoul has deliberately sparked a civil war, turning the Legion against itself. The lighter in his hand connects the violence directly to the past, echoing Vault-Tec’s own strategy of engineered catastrophe.

The wasteland stops waiting.

The episode closes by circling back to Thaddeus’s bottling operation. Maximus and Xander stumble upon the ghoul children hiding from the rogue Securitron they just destroyed. Xander immediately sorts them by appearance, preparing to kill the ghouls without hesitation.

Max pleads with him as Thaddeus steps forward as well to attempt a peaceful resolution. Xander shows zero hesitation, though, and cites the Codex and the Brotherhood’s sharp distaste for “abominations.” It’s clear why the Ghoul thinks of the NCR as “the good guys” while the Brotherhood is just another violent, sadistic faction.

The moment ends with Max driving a fire hammer, the one Xander let him borrow, into Xander’s helmet, stopping him cold. When Max reveals himself to Thaddeus, the exchange is almost casual. Thaddeus asks what he’s been up to, and Max answers honestly. He thinks he just started a war.

No one walks away clean.

“The Profligate” is Fallout at its most confident this season. It deepens the show’s descent into moral chaos without losing sight of character. The episode understands that wars don’t start with speeches or villains, but with small decisions made for practical reasons by people who believe they’re out of options. By the end of the hour, no one’s hands are clean, and the show seems content to let that mess sit where it belongs.

What “The Profligate” ultimately argues is that moral collapse rarely manifests as a dramatic rupture. It arrives as a series of reasonable adjustments and compromises. The Ghoul starts a civil war because it solves an immediate problem. Maximus kills Xander because the alternative feels worse in the moment.

Thaddeus builds a life outside the Brotherhood because the Brotherhood made no room for him. Even Lucy’s suffering exists because she insists on behaving as though persuasion and shared values still matter in a world that burned it away centuries ago.

The season’s moral center breaks open.

Fallout frames all of these choices as understandable, even sympathetic, while also insisting that “understanding” does not equal absolution. The episode suggests that the most dangerous moments are not when people abandon their values outright, but when they convince themselves that their values can survive being compromised just this once.

There’s also a larger institutional argument running beneath the surface. Every faction in this episode believes it represents a solution to the failures of the past. The Legion replaces America with ritualized brutality and “foreign” tradition, not even realizing that tradition is based on just another fallen empire from even longer ago.

The Brotherhood replaces governance with theological doctrine, another failed system of the past. The NCR once replaced chaos with bureaucracy and now barely exists at all. Robert House, lurking in the margins, offers planning without empathy and longevity without accountability.

The real profligate.

Through all of this, the show appears to be saying that no system collapses solely because it is evil. Systems and civilizations themselves fail because they harden. They stop responding to the people living inside them. By the end of “The Profligate,” the show has made its position clear, though. The wasteland isn’t defined by who has the most power, but by who is willing to keep questioning the stories that power tells about itself. Meanwhile, everyone else is already halfway to starting the next war that never changes.

So who really is the profligate? If anything, Fallout turns the accusation of it outward, away from Lucy, and toward every character that believes they’re acting rationally. In Roman and Legion logic, a profligate is someone who wastes resources, indulges excess, and lacks discipline. An obvious slight in a wasteland where every bit counts. Lucy fits the label on paper, as she “wastes” her compassion and offers help where it isn’t strategically useful.

But the episode keeps showing that the real waste is happening elsewhere. The Brotherhood hoards cold fusion. The NCR clings to an identity long after its infrastructure has collapsed. Even the Ghoul, for all his clarity, takes lives when he doesn’t have to. Everyone believes they’re being efficient without realizing they’re burning through their moral capital.

Stray Thoughts:

• Watching Lucy explain to a bunch of Roman Empire cosplayers that she is not in fact a virgin and that her “cousin stuff” would fill up pages of her resume is genuinely Fallout at its absolute best. The dark humor only works because Ella Purnell sells the hell out of it.
• No Norm this episode, which is a shame. I’m excited to see him draft his own “Ten Commandments” for his wandering tribe of middle managers.
• Loved the reveal of Macaulay Culkin’s casting, which Prime Video kept under wraps (I guess literally) to build suspense. He and Kumail Nanjiani have been making the promotional rounds recently for the show, and it worries me that they apparently killed off such a well-known actor already. Doesn’t bode super well for how long we can expect Culkin in the show as well, but it’s great to see him, regardless.
• Very curious as well to see if Victor will come back this season. I find it interesting that he and the Ghoul already knew each other, and I’m generally intrigued what other bits of backstory involve the Ghoul during his 200 years after the war. The show seems to be hinting that his anti-hero status might not have been so “anti” until more recently.
• Also no Hank and his yo-yo this episode. Makes me wonder if the writers find his storyline easier to cohere with other subplots when they also have Norm in the mix.
• It was pretty obvious from the jump that at some point Max would kill Xander during their little field trip, but I’m overall happy with how they handled it. I was worried that Max would ultimately kill Xander and go to the Commonwealth in his stead or something, but it’s probably more interesting if he returns to Quintus still inspired by what Xander said about soldiers running the show back east instead of clerics. Seeing Max potentially wrest power away from Quintus would be pretty satisfying at this point.

Fallout Season 2 is available to stream on Prime Video.