‘Fallout’ Season 2 Episode 7 review: “The Handoff”

At the end of Fallout Season 2 Episode 7, there’s a severed head in a mainframe.

I should probably ease into that revelation with more context, but honestly, that’s the beating heart of “The Handoff,” an episode that takes every moral question Fallout has been circling for two seasons and finally commits to answering them in the most horrifying way possible. The head belongs to Diane Welch, the well-meaning Congresswoman who convinced Cooper Howard to hand over cold fusion to the President.

She’s been kept alive for 200 years, wired into a mainframe, her pacifist consciousness literally powering the brain-control chips that Hank uses to create his sanitized version of peace. When Lucy discovers this, Ella Purnell‘s face does something extraordinary. It doesn’t crumple into horror (like last week) or harden into resolve. It just stops. She’s looking at the physical manifestation of good intentions perverted into authoritarian control, and there’s no adequate emotional response.

It’s the kind of image that stays with you precisely because the show refuses to explain it away or soften it with sentiment. Fallout has always been interested in how systems corrupt individuals, but “The Handoff” inverts that formula. Here, an individual’s goodness is extracted like a natural resource and used to power a system of control. It’s brilliant and stomach-turning in equal measure, which is very much this show’s sweet spot.

This is the episode where Fallout Season 2 stops being pretty good television that occasionally reaches for greatness and becomes something more assured and confident. It’s messy in places (we’ll get to that). But it’s messy in the way ambitious television is messy, not in the way confused television is messy. The difference matters.

Steph’s story, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the retcon.

The episode opens with a sequence I absolutely did not see coming. Steph flees from some kind of internment camp through a snowy Canadian forest with her mother. An American soldier in power armor executes Steph’s mother. And in her dying breath, she delivers one of the season’s most cutting lines. “Don’t think of them as human beings. Think of them as Americans.”

It’s a hell of an opener, and it recontextualizes everything we know about Steph. Until now, she’s been the show’s least interesting antagonist. Just sort of generically manipulative and power-hungry without much depth. Annabel O’Hagan has been doing what she can with the material, sure. But there’s only so much you can do when your character exists primarily to be suspicious and vaguely threatening.

But this flashback does real work. Suddenly Steph isn’t just another Vault-Tec drone playing power games. She’s someone who murdered her way into America. Clearly, she clawed and scratched for survival in a country that annexed her homeland. She got a job as a maid in Robert House’s hotel and latched onto the first opportunity (Hank MacLean) that might get her into a Vault before the bombs fell. She’s been playing a long game for literal centuries, and the desperation that fuels it makes sense now.

What makes this work beyond simple backstory is how it ties into Fallout‘s larger project of interrogating American exceptionalism. The Vault dwellers’ visceral disgust when Chet reveals Steph is Canadian—200 years after Canada ceased to exist as a nation—demonstrates how propaganda outlives its context. These people have no memory of Canada, obviously. But they’ve inherited the hatred anyway, passed down like heirloom china or a family recipe. It’s pointed and uncomfortable. Especially when you consider that Steph’s mother’s line works both ways. Americans dehumanized Canadians during the annexation. Then Canadians learned to dehumanize Americans right back.

And yes, considering current events and the political climate between American and Canada right now… And the whole internment camp thing… Let’s just say this episode hits a little too close to home.

The wedding scene where Chet finally grows a spine and exposes Steph’s secrets plays beautifully because we understand the stakes now. This isn’t just about a forced marriage or Woody’s murder. (RIP Woody, we hardly knew ye, but your broken glasses in the garbage disposal were a hell of a detail). It’s about how desperate people become complicit in systems they hate, and how those systems eventually consume them anyway.

The handoff that broke the world.

Meanwhile, back in the flashbacks, Cooper Howard is making the worst decision of his life, and Walton Goggins plays it with just the right amount of naive hope mixed with desperation. He wants so badly to believe that handing cold fusion to the government—to Diane Welch and the President—will somehow fix things. That there are still good people in positions of power who will do the right thing.

The scene where he actually makes the handoff is deliberately understated. He gets into a car with Welch, meets the President (played by Clancy Brown in what might be the most inspired bit of casting this season), and just… gives it away. No dramatic music. No ominous foreshadowing. Just a man making what he thinks is a moral choice.

This restraint makes the horror of what follows—Welch’s preserved head, Cooper’s 200 years of cynicism—land harder. The show understands that the greatest betrayals don’t announce themselves with trumpet fanfares. They happen in the mundane spaces between good intentions and catastrophic outcomes.

Clancy Brown’s presence adds a layer of metatextual weight for longtime fans. He voiced Rhombus, an honorable Brotherhood of Steel paladin, in the original 1997 Fallout game. Now he’s playing the pre-war President who, in game lore, joined the Enclave and helped orchestrate the apocalypse. It’s the show winking at its audience without undermining its own seriousness. A trick it’s gotten increasingly good at.

But what strikes me most about these flashbacks is how they reframe The Ghoul’s behavior in the present. His refusal to trust Maximus, his insistence on working alone, his cynical worldview… It all stems from this moment of trusting authority and watching it fail spectacularly. He gave the world’s most important technology to “the right people,” and they turned his friend into a literal brain tube. Why would he ever trust anyone again?

The episode doesn’t make this explicit, which I appreciate. It trusts us to connect the dots between Cooper’s naive idealism and The Ghoul’s corrosive cynicism. All without spelling it out in dialogue. That’s good television.

Lucy and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mainframe.

In the present, Lucy continues her project of trying to do the right thing in a world that punishes her for it at every turn. She’s determined to shut down Hank’s mind-control operation despite his increasingly persuasive arguments about creating lasting peace.

Kyle MacLachlan is doing career-best work this season. He plays Hank as simultaneously monstrous and genuinely loving toward his daughter. When he explains how the brain chips work—”It tidies things up a bit, cleans the memories of the horrors they’ve experienced”—he sounds like a man who truly believes he’s saving people from themselves. And the terrible thing is, he’s not entirely wrong. The people he’s controlled do seem happier. They’re not suffering anymore. They’re just not themselves either.

This is where the episode’s moral complexity really sings. Lucy encounters one of the controlled workers, the NCR member who helped her in an earlier episode (and also got her extremely high, which remains one of the season’s funnier character beats). He’s peaceful now. Content. And Lucy has to reckon with the fact that destroying the system will return him—and everyone else—to their traumatized, violent states.

But she makes the choice anyway. She handcuffs Hank to a kitchen drawer, steals his Pip-Boy, and heads for the mainframe room. And then she opens the door.

I mentioned Purnell’s face at the top of this review, but it bears repeating. What she does with her performance in that moment is remarkable. There’s a progression from curiosity to confusion to dawning horror to something beyond horror. A kind of existential vertigo when confronted with evil so banal and systematic that individual moral responses feel inadequate.

Lucy’s not just horrified by what she’s seeing. She’s horrified by the realization that this is how her father’s “peace” works. That it requires someone genuinely good—Diane Welch, a woman who actually wanted to end violence—to be trapped in endless suffering to make it function. We have to assume Lucy connects the dots on this herself, since she wouldn’t know who Diane is. But we know Lucy. We know that she will automatically view Diane as a victim, not someone who deserves this cruel fate.

It’s the show’s darkest irony. The mind-control technology only works when powered by authentic pacifism. Robert House couldn’t make it work because he wasn’t truly good. You need someone who genuinely believes in peace to program others toward “peace.” The system requires goodness to function. Which means it must extract and weaponize goodness. Which means it destroys the very thing it needs.

The finale will presumably force Lucy to decide whether to destroy the system, and with it, Diane Welch’s 200-year nightmare. Though doing so will unleash chaos. It’s a genuine moral dilemma without an easy answer. And that’s than most shows would attempt in their penultimate episode.

Three men and a pack of Deathclaws.

The other major thread follows The Ghoul, Maximus, and Thaddeus forming the world’s most unlikely alliance to assault New Vegas. This storyline is pure kinetic pleasure. Less interested in moral complexity and more focused on being spectacular action television.

The group raids an NCR warehouse for weapons and armor, giving us a sequence packed with Easter eggs for game fans. Maximus dons NCR Power Armor, and the moment he walks through Freeside with that armor on, something shifts. The crowd recognizes the symbol and follows him. The NCR—the New California Republic, the Wasteland’s most successful attempt at rebuilding democracy and Max’s inherited legacy—is diminished by the show’s timeline. But its iconography still carries weight. People still respond to it with something like hope.

It’s a smart piece of visual storytelling that could easily have been clunky. “Look! He’s wearing the important armor from the games!” And so on. But instead it feels truly earned. Maximus has been searching all season for a way to be heroic, to live up to the Brotherhood’s ideals despite the Brotherhood’s corruption. Now he’s literally wearing a different faction’s symbol. One that represents democratic values instead of technological hoarding. The armor says what dialogue couldn’t. He’s choosing a different path that “suits” him far better.

The Deathclaw battle that follows is nothing short of fantastic. These seem to be practical creatures mixed with CGI, giving them a physicality that’s genuinely frightening. When Maximus fist-fights one in power armor, you feel the weight of every blow.

But the battle also goes wrong in ways that matter. Maximus successfully buys The Ghoul time to reach House’s casino, but in doing so, he crashes back through the gate and unleashes the Deathclaws on Freeside’s civilian population. His heroism has consequences. People are likely going to die because of his choices, even though those choices were also necessary to achieve the larger goal. It’s messier and more honest than a clean victory would’ve been.

Meanwhile, The Ghoul reaches House’s chamber and activates the cold fusion device. The computer boots up, displaying House’s face on a screen. Yup, presented exactly as he appeared in Fallout: New Vegas. It’s yet again more fan service. But in this case, it’s fan service with thematic purpose.

House represents yet another vision of how to save humanity. Through technocratic autocracy via a certified genius who genuinely might be right that he knows better than everyone else. He’s not conventionally evil like the Enclave, but he’s not exactly good either. He’s rational self-interest elevated to governing philosophy. Fans of Bioshock are probably wondering “Hey, where’s our show?”

The episode ends with House’s return to consciousness, presumably 200 years after the world ended (if we’re breaking game canon again). Plus all the instability that implies. What does he want? What can he do? The finale has its work cut out for it.

Thaddeus’s own “handoff.”

I need to address something that didn’t fully work. Yes, Thaddeus’s arm literally falls off during the preparation sequence, rendering him useless for the battle. Yes, I found it sort of morbidly hilarious. But I have to admit, it’s clearly a plot convenience. Specifically to reduce the number of characters the show has to juggle during the action sequence. It also appears to hint at Thaddeus being more than just a normal Ghoul. Bolstered by The Ghoul’s surprise at his clavicle mouth thing. What this means for Thaddeus exactly is unclear (Super Mutant? Something new?)

Regardless, Johnny Pemberton has been doing interesting work with Thaddeus’s transformation this season. And the body horror of his deteriorating form could be compelling! But having his arm just… fall off at precisely the moment the plot needs him sidelined feels cheap. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re juggling too many characters and need to bench one for a few scenes. It stands out in an episode that’s otherwise quite elegant about its plotting. Especially compared to last week.

It’s a minor quibble in an otherwise strong episode, but it’s the kind of seam that shows when a show is straining against its own ambitions.

What are we doing with Norm, exactly?

The Norm subplot continues to be the show’s most frustrating element. Moisés Arias plays the character as well as ever, yes. But good lord, the show can’t seem to figure out what to do with him.

This episode gives him maybe three minutes of screen time. He wakes up, hears the Vault 31 managers planning to kill him, gets knocked out again, wakes up to find Claudia helping him escape, sends an SOS to Lucy and Hank that no one receives, and then gets caught again by the angry managers. It’s all functional plot mechanics without any emotional weight. Let alone thematic resonance.

I understand that a penultimate episode has to service multiple storylines while also providing table-setting for the finale. But Norm’s arc has felt adrift for several episodes now. We learned in earlier episodes that Vault 31 is part of Bud Askins’s breeding program for Vault-Tec leadership. That the current managers are frozen pre-war employees who’ve been sleeping through most of the apocalypse. That’s potentially interesting! But the show hasn’t done anything meaningful with that information beyond establishing it exists.

Norm’s continued captivity should feel tense or at least relevant to the larger narrative. Instead it feels like an obligation. Like the show knows it needs to check in with this character but doesn’t have time to actually give him a storyline.

The SOS message he sends—which lands on Hank’s radio in New Vegas to zero ears—might pay off in the finale. But right now it feels like the show’s treading water with this character until it figures out what his actual function in the narrative is supposed to be.

The episode’s greatest trick.

What “The Handoff” does better than any previous episode this season is commit to its ideas without hedging. Previous episodes have sometimes felt like they were presenting moral complexity by simply refusing to take positions. “Well, is mind control bad if it makes people happy? Who can say! Here are arguments on both sides.”

But this episode plants a flag. Yes, mind control is bad. Even if it makes people happier. Even if it prevents violence. Because it requires extracting someone’s consciousness and trapping them in eternal suffering to function. And because it removes the fundamental human capacity for growth, change, and authentic experience.

The show arrives at this position not through speechifying but through imagery. Namely, Diane Welch’s head, sustained by a feeding straw, wired into a machine. Kept conscious but completely immobile for two centuries. It’s body horror as moral argument. This is what “peace through control” actually looks like when you pull back the curtain. This is what Hank’s sanitized facility requires to function.

At the same time, the episode doesn’t let us off the hook easily. When Lucy handcuffs Hank and prepares to shut everything down, we know what that means. All those peaceful workers go back to being traumatized killers and cannibals. The NCR member who helped Lucy returns to whatever hell he was living in before. There’s no clean solution where everyone gets saved and no one suffers. There’s just the choice between complicity in ongoing systematic evil. Or destructive moral action that will cause immediate harm. Or, as Lucy would say, a side that is “vaguely problematic.”

That’s genuinely difficult television to pull off. And the show earns it by doing the work to make us understand both sides. We’ve spent time with the mind-controlled workers. We’ve seen them smile. And we’ve heard them say they’re happier. The show is telling us: yes, that’s all true. And it’s still wrong.

Moral clarity like that only works when you’ve established the complexity first. If the show had introduced Diane Welch’s head in episode one and said, “See? Mind control is bad,” then it would’ve felt simplistic. But by spending the season letting us sit with the uncomfortable question of whether Hank might be right, the revelation of what his rightness requires lands with real force.

American exceptionalism.

I want to return to that early line, because it’s been rattling around in my head since I watched the episode. “Don’t think of them as human beings. Think of them as Americans.”

It’s delivered by a Canadian woman who’s been shot by American soldiers. (Or contractors, or whoever’s enforcing the annexation—the show doesn’t specify). She’s dying. And her final advice to her daughter is to dehumanize the people who will control her fate for the foreseeable future. To survive by refusing to see Americans as fully human.

The line works because it cuts both ways. Obviously, the American forces dehumanized Canadians during the annexation. You have to, if you’re going to justify violent occupation of a neighboring country. But Steph’s mother has learned that lesson too. She’s teaching her daughter the same cognitive trick that oppressors use, but from the position of the oppressed.

It’s a dark mirror of how nationalism perpetuates itself. The Americans told themselves Canadians weren’t quite human. (Or weren’t quite American, which in this context amounts to the same thing). The Canadians learned to think the same way about Americans. And now Steph carries that poison forward 200+ years. Trapped in a Vault system built by the very people her mother told her to see as monsters.

The episode doesn’t belabor this point. It trusts us to feel the weight of that line and understand its implications. But it’s the kind of writing that elevates Fallout beyond simple post-apocalyptic adventure into genuine social commentary.

And the fact that the Vault dwellers are disgusted to learn Steph is Canadian—that this matters to them, that they care about a nationality that ceased to exist before any of them were born—demonstrates how completely the propaganda succeeded. America won. Canada was erased. And still the hatred persists. Because hatred is self-sustaining once it embeds itself in culture.

It’s bleak and brilliant. It’s the kind of thematic work that justifies everything else the show does.

The structure problem(?)

“The Handoff” juggles six distinct storylines. Steph’s flashback and present crisis, Cooper and Barb’s cold fusion handoff, Lucy and Hank’s confrontation, The Ghoul/Maximus/Thaddeus assault on New Vegas, Norm’s escape attempt, and various Vault 32/33 dynamics. That’s a lot of spinning plates for 48 minutes of television.

The result is that some threads feel underdeveloped (Norm), some feel rushed (the actual handoff to the President happens very quickly), and some feel just right (Lucy’s journey to the mainframe door). It’s uneven in the way that ambitious television is often uneven. It reaches for more than it can perfectly execute but mostly succeeds anyway.

I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, the episode would benefit from cutting one or two threads to give the others more room to breathe. On the other hand, the momentum created by jumping between storylines keeps the episode feeling propulsive. Even when individual scenes are relatively quiet. And the thematic connections between the threads (everyone making choices about trust and authority and control) create enough cohesion that the jumping around doesn’t feel random.

There’s an argument that a more focused episode would be a better episode. There’s also an argument that this kind of maximalist ambition is exactly what makes Fallout work when it works. I lean toward the latter, to be honest. But I understand why some viewers might feel overwhelmed by how much the show is trying to do at once.

MacLachlan’s masterclass.

I haven’t talked enough about MacLachlan, who deserves his own paragraph at minimum. He’s playing a character who could easily tip into cartoonish villainy. He’s a man so convinced of his own rightness that he’s literally mind-controlling people into compliance. But MacLachlan finds notes of genuine paternal love mixed with wounded idealism. He has absolute conviction that he’s saving people from themselves.

When he explains the brain chips to Lucy, there’s no cynicism to it. He’s patient. Almost gentle. He wants her to understand. And when she rejects his vision, he doesn’t appear angry. He looks genuinely disappointed. Like a father whose child refuses to see the obvious truth he’s trying to show her.

It’s a deeply unsettling performance because MacLachlan makes Hank’s authoritarianism feel like it comes from a place of care. He sincerely loves Lucy. He sincerely believes he’s creating a better world. The fact that he’s doing monstrous things doesn’t feel like hypocrisy or self-deception to him. It feels like the natural endpoint of his worldview. That is, if violence is inevitable and suffering is guaranteed, why not create a system that eliminates both? Even if it requires sacrificing autonomy?

The performance works because MacLachlan never asks us to sympathize with Hank. But he does make us understand him. And understanding him makes him more frightening, not less. Because he represents the seductive logic of benevolent authoritarianism. What if we could just make people stop hurting each other? What if we could engineer peace? Wouldn’t that be worth almost anything?

The episode’s answer is a firm no. But MacLachlan makes you understand why someone might think the answer is a hesitant yes.

Where we go from here.

“The Handoff” leaves the season finale with an enormous amount to resolve. Deathclaws loose in Freeside, Lucy facing the choice to destroy or preserve the mind-control system, Robert House awakened and presumably pursuing his own agenda, Steph barricaded in her office, Norm in danger from Vault 31 managers, and the looming question of what the President/Enclave did with cold fusion all those years ago.

That’s potentially too much for a single episode. Even a supersized finale! But this episode’s success makes me more confident the show can make it work. “The Handoff” demonstrates that Fallout knows what it’s doing now. It’s found its voice, which turns out to be morally serious without being preachy. Darkly funny without undercutting its own horror. Willing to commit to difficult ideas rather than sitting in permanent ambiguity.

Season 2 has been building to this confrontation between idealism and pragmatism. Between individual autonomy and systematic control. Between the naive hope that authority can be trusted and the bitter knowledge that it usually can’t. And now all the pieces are in place for those confrontations to actually happen.

Will it stick the landing? We’ll find out soon. But “The Handoff” is definitely a penultimate episode that makes you believe a great finale is possible.

Final thoughts.

This is an 8 out of 10 episode that occasionally threatens to be a 9. Primarily because of its tendency to service too many plotlines at once. And also its ongoing uncertainty about what to do with Norm. But what it gets right, it gets really right.

The Diane Welch reveal is genuinely shocking and thematically rich in a way that elevates everything around it. Steph’s backstory transforms her from a one-note antagonist into one of the season’s most complex characters. The Deathclaw battle is spectacular action filmmaking. Clancy Brown’s cameo is pitch-perfect. And the episode’s willingness to finally plant a flag on the mind-control debate—to say definitively that this is wrong, even as it acknowledges the complexity—feels earned and necessary.

More than anything, “The Handoff” feels like a show that knows what it wants to say. And better yet, it’s figured out how to say it. Earlier episodes this season sometimes felt like they were stalling, circling around ideas without committing to them. This episode commits. It takes the moral questions it’s been asking and starts answering them. Not just through dialogue but through imagery and consequence.

The severed head on the table. The peaceful smile on the face of the mind-controlled worker. The disgust of Vault dwellers learning someone is Canadian. The naive hope in Cooper’s eyes as he hands over cold fusion. These images do more work than any amount of philosophical debate could do. They’re the show trusting its own instincts and trusting us to understand what it’s trying to communicate.

That trust pays off. “The Handoff” is thrilling, thoughtful, occasionally messy, and exactly the kind of ambitious television that makes you excited to see what happens next.

Fallout Season 2 Episode 7 is available to stream on Prime Video.

---

Images courtesy of Prime Video.