‘Fallout’ Season 2 Episode 5 review: “The Wrangler”

I’ve been enjoying Season 2 of Fallout quite a bit so far, and for a variety of reasons. The production design continues to be a treat, the narrative threads have mostly been coherent and urgent, and I still love these characters, particularly Walton Goggins as The Ghoul. I know, definitely the furthest thing from a nuclear hot take.

And yet “The Wrangler,” which starts to unspool some of those very threads, is probably the episode I have the most mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it’s the show’s most cinematic outing, in that none of these storylines conflict with each other.

It’s all moving toward one final destination that I’m still excited to see. But it’s also the show, arguably, at its wobbliest, if only because, in some ways, it’s still wrestling with way too many ideas all at once.

A mid-season episode that can’t quite balance its ambitions.

“The Wrangler” opens with the promise of spectacle—Lucy and the Ghoul surrounded by not one but four Deathclaws in the New Vegas strip. It’s a breathless moment that should feel consequential, and yet the show dispatches it almost immediately. The Ghoul tosses a distraction, they slip under a gate, and we’re done. I understand the impulse to keep the plot moving, but the repetitive nature of “Ghoul saves Lucy in distress” is starting to wear thin. The show clearly wants to position him as a counter-father figure to Hank, but without genuine friction or evolution in their dynamic, it’s becoming white noise.

What bothers me more is the confusion about the timeline that follows. They emerge from the Deathclaw encounter, and suddenly it’s daylight again—mid-morning, in fact—despite it being complete darkness moments before. They’re still standing at the same gate in Freeside, as if no time has passed. It’s sloppy in a way that undermines the show’s usually meticulous attention to detail. When a show like Fallout gets the production design this right—Freeside looks gorgeous, perfectly evoking the games—these continuity errors become all the more glaring.

The Ghoul’s sudden candor with Lucy about his decades-long search for his wife and daughter also feels unearned. Why reveal this now? The show wants us to believe he’s grown fond of her, that he sees her as a surrogate daughter figure, but the character work (and timing) hasn’t truly justified this level of vulnerability. More puzzling still is the implication that he’s never considered checking Las Vegas for his wife and daughter before, despite knowing House’s connection to Vault-Tec. He’s been to New Vegas before, so how did he miss this? The logic doesn’t track.

When a cheat code replaces consequences.

Lucy’s addiction arc from the previous episode gets a quick fix—literally—when the Ghoul gives her money for Addictol. I’m surprised the show retains this video game mechanic at all, because it essentially nullifies the consequences of her drug use with what amounts to a cheat code. For a moment, I hoped the show would complicate this, have her use the money for something else, force her to live with her choices a bit longer.

But no, we’re apparently ready to move on to the next plot point. Though you can certainly argue the erasure of the addiction plays into the moment later, when she still has enough drugs in her system to resist the Ghoul’s tranquilizer, but we’ll get to that.

The bar scene with the Ghoul staring at his reflection in the mirror is one of the episode’s quieter, more effective moments. Walton Goggins sells the weight of it. This man is potentially about to reunite with his family while looking like a corpse. The bartender (Edwin Lee Gibson from The Bear, in a nice bit of stunt casting) chatters about the Deathclaws until the Ghoul tells him to shut up. The implication is clear: the Ghoul’s attachment to Lucy is rooted in her acceptance of him despite his appearance. It’s a good character beat, even if the episode doesn’t give it the space it deserves.

“The House Always Wins,” but does the audience?

The flashback structure kicks into high gear with a pre-war sequence that begins with a Galaxy News broadcast and Cooper and Barb arriving in Vegas. Hank is there too, with a cold fusion briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, like a MacGuffin in a spy thriller. Moldaver calls Cooper with assassination instructions, framing it as the classic trolley problem: one life for countless others. Cooper, ever the moralist, can’t stomach murder outside of wartime. He leaves the poison in the phone booth. It’s consistent with what we know about the character, but it also feels like we’re treading familiar ground.

By the way, the pre-war Strip is visually stunning, yet another testament to the show’s production values. Cooper sees Congresswoman Welch (Martha Kelly) thrown down the stairs while wrapped in an American flag—heavy-handed symbolism, but effective—and helps her up while everyone else looks away. Barb notices, though, and I suppose the scene is meant to signal that she’s beginning to clock his true sympathies, but the episode’s ending more or less cuts this tension.

Inside the Lucky 38, the party is lavish and hollow in that very specific way prestige television has perfected. Barb schmoozes with RobCo people while Cooper spots Hank with the briefcase. Then, Rafi Silver’s decoy House whispers that the real Mr. House wants to meet him upstairs, where we get Victor the robot (he returns!) and Justin Theroux‘s House himself. It’s all functional buildup, and by this point in the episode, it’s clear we’re keeping things mostly streamlined to the Ghoul, House, and Vault-Tec.

An odd structural detour that somehow works.

Surprisingly, we see the Snake Oil Salesman from Season 1, traipsing his way to New Vegas in what can only be described as a comedic montage. Jon Daly sells the absurdity of this man skipping through the apocalypse, unbothered. And there’s a genuinely funny bit where he appears to be dating a Protectron robot, which I suppose received its setup in that earlier episode with the Brotherhood elder. It’s an odd structural choice to pull us away from Lucy and the Ghoul after spending fifteen minutes with them, but I’m willing to trust the show knows what it’s doing.

And it does, sort of. Hank appears, knocks the Salesman out, and drags him to the Vault-Tec labs for more mind control experimentation. As he passes the cryo chambers, we see Barbara and Janey frozen inside. Mystery solved? It feels too easy, too convenient, but by the end of the episode, it mostly earns the anticlimactic “reveal.”

I do like how the mind control test plays with our expectations, as the camera moves suggest another head explosion, but the Salesman survives the ordeal. Turns out his wasteland-addled brain is apparently too scrambled to fail. There’s dark comedy in that, even if I’m not entirely sure what Hank is necessarily looking for with these experiments aside from a proxy. Is this a different device or function than what he used on the Shady Sands bomber? The show isn’t clear on that quite yet.

“Go home, Vaultie.”

Keeping in line with how Vault-Tec-filled this episode is, we do get a little time with Norm and the Vault 31 managers. They arrive at the Vault-Tec offices from Season 1, and we get a scene that’s playing for comedy when it should be playing for horror.

These people genuinely don’t understand the nightmare they’ve walked into, and while there’s something amusing about that, it also undercuts the tension.

Ma June and Barv (also from Season 1) show up and tell Norm that Lucy is dead, along with a bunch of other things he admits he doesn’t understand or believe. And then Ma June and Barv just kind of leave? Feels abrupt, though they do warn him not to mess with their roach farm. It’s quirky world-building, but it also feels like the show is stalling a bit.

Lucy’s moral freefall lands with a thud.

Lucy can’t afford the Addictol, so she does what Fallout players might do: she sneaks in and steals it, along with a Power Fist. It’s a decent nod to the stealth mechanics of the games, and I appreciate that the show is trying to show Lucy adapting to wasteland logic. But then she gets caught by someone who killed the previous owner, he raises a gun, and she shoots him first. A customer walks in and asks who she is. Lucy replies, “I don’t know.”

It’s meant to be a profound moment—Lucy’s vault identity finally shattering—but it lands with a thud. The line is too on-the-nose, too aware of its own significance. Lucy’s character arc this season has been about moral decay, but the show somewhat short-circuits that development with this timing.

She’s been making questionable decisions, sure, but mostly she’s been reactive, following the Ghoul’s lead or stumbling into danger. This should feel like a culmination, but instead, it feels like the show is telling us Lucy has changed rather than showing us the incremental shifts that got her here with more elegance. Ella Purnell does what she can with the material, but even her performance can’t rescue writing this blunt.

House explains everything and nothing.

The House/Cooper flashback confrontation is long, complicated, and narratively dense in ways that will either thrill or exhaust you depending on your tolerance for exposition. House has used his mathematical models to predict the end of the world: April 14, 2065. Same day as Janey’s Cooper’s daughter) birthday. Cooper’s decision to come to Vegas pushed the date forward by a month, making him an unknown variable in House’s equations. It’s the kind of quasi-mystical determinism that science fiction loves, and Justin Theroux sells House’s clinical detachment beautifully.

But here’s where the timeline becomes genuinely confusing. In the games, the bombs drop on October 23, 2077—more than twelve years after the date House is predicting. We saw the bombs fall in the pilot episode of Season 1, and Janey didn’t look twelve years older than she does in these flashbacks. So what’s happening here? Is the show rewriting the timeline entirely? Is House’s prediction wrong? It reminds me of sitting through The Matrix Reloaded for the first time, down to the visual of House sitting in front of endless screens like the Architect. My assumption is that I’m the one missing something, but I’m too mentally exhausted to figure it out, so I’ll just wait for the moment.

House also claims the bombs won’t be dropped by him or Vault-Tec, but by whoever is behind “the demon in the snow”—the Deathclaw Cooper fought in Alaska. This should be a huge reveal, suggesting a third player in the conspiracy beyond Vault-Tec and RobCo, but the show hasn’t given us enough context to understand what that means. Is it the Enclave? West-Tek? Someone else entirely? Even knowing the “answer” from the games, I’m actually impressed with how the show has mostly kept this vague enough for me to second-guess my assumptions.

FEV and other acronyms of doom.

Back at Vault-Tec, Norm has an interesting conversation with Claudia, increasing the show’s biggest shipping opportunity, according to me. She reveals to Norm that Barbara Howard was one of the Vault-Tec executives, so they go to her office for answers on Phase 2.

Claudia has already figured out that Norm isn’t really Bud’s successor, and she seems like a safe ally for now. But Ronnie is lurking in the shadows, overhearing everything. It’s a classic setup, telegraphed so clearly that when Ronnie eventually confronts Norm, it plays out about as you expect.

First, though, Norm accesses Barbara’s terminal and searches for “Future Enterprise Ventures.” When that yields nothing, he tries “F.E.V.” and discovers files on the Forced Evolutionary Virus, apparently linked to Deathclaws. For game fans, this is a significant piece of lore, tying the show more explicitly to the experiments that created Super Mutants and other abominations. For everyone else, it’s probably just another ominous acronym in a show full of them.

The betrayal that saves the episode.

I would be much more down on this episode if not for how it all coheres. Lucy uses the Addictol and immediately pukes her guts out in a scene that’s gross and weirdly humanizing. She finds the Ghoul at the inn, and for a moment, there’s tenderness between them as he helps her through it.

Then the Snake Oil Salesman arrives, mind-controlled and dressed up like a corporate drone, and delivers Hank’s ultimatum: return Lucy to Vault 33, or Hank will harm Barbara and Janey in their cryo-chambers. Lucy realizes what’s happening and says it out loud in case it’s not obvious enough. The Ghoul will choose his family over her. He admits they were starting to become friends, then tranquilizes her.

This is Fallout Season 2 Episode 5, finally clicks into place for me. Sure, it’s unsurprising (the betrayal has been building all season), but Goggins plays it with the perfect mix of regret and resolve. The Ghoul isn’t a villain here. He’s a man backed into an impossible corner. Lucy, groggy from the tranquilizer but more resistant than expected, uses the Power Fist to send him flying through a window. He lands on a pole, brutally impaled, and the camera lingers on his broken body. It’s shocking. Visceral. It’s the kind of consequence the show has been avoiding all season.

Family comes first.

The flashback, intercut with the Ghoul getting foolishly drunk at the Lucky 38 and then being helped by Barb afterward, is effective parallel editing. These are the people he’s fighting to get back to, even if it means betraying the closest thing he has to family in the present. It’s interesting to see him apparently ready to admit what’s been going on to Barb.

We certainly have some time (I guess?) before they separate based on the timeline established in Season 1. No telling how that will really play out, though.

Also, as if this episode wasn’t traumatic enough, Lucy wakes up to find Hank standing over her. He even calls her “my little Sugarbomb.” She smiles and passes out again. It’s deeply unsettling, and I’m glad the show doesn’t immediately backtrack by having her escorted back to Vault 33.

The bottom line.

“The Wrangler” is trying to do too much. It wants to be a character study of Lucy’s moral decline and the Ghoul’s desperate gambit. Oh, and it wants to expand the lore with House’s revelations and the FEV discovery. It wants to juggle Norm’s subplot, Hank’s mind control experiments, and the Snake Oil Salesman’s return. Some of this works, as the final betrayal sequence is genuinely tense, and Theroux’s House is a compelling addition to the mythology. But too much of it feels scattered, undercooked, or outright confusing.

The show’s greatest strength has always been its willingness to sit with moral ambiguity, to let characters make ugly choices and live with them. “The Wrangler” gestures at that but often doesn’t fully commit. Lucy’s “I don’t know” moment should land like a gut punch. Instead, it feels like the show is defending itself to us. The House/Cooper scenes are dense with information but light on emotional resonance.

Fallout needs to trust its audience more. We don’t need Lucy to announce her identity crisis. And we don’t need House to explain every detail of his mathematical predictions. We can handle complexity and ambiguity. We can sit with unanswered questions. This episode tries to wrangle all its threads together—hence the title—but in doing so, it loses some of the specificity that makes the show compelling. Still, there’s enough here to keep me invested. The impaled Ghoul, Lucy, in Hank’s clutches, Norm discovering the FEV. These are strong hooks for the final stretch. I just wish the episode had more confidence in its quieter, messier moments instead of constantly reaching for the next big reveal.

Fallout Season 2 is available to stream on Prime Video.

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Images courtesy of Prime Video.