‘Fallout’ Season 2 Episode 8 review: “The Strip”

There’s a moment near the end of “The Strip” where Lucy MacLean sits beside her father’s body—a body that’s still breathing, still moving, still technically alive—and realizes he’s gone anyway. Hank MacLean, the man who destroyed Shady Sands and built an empire of mind control, has activated one of his own chips. He doesn’t remember who Lucy is or what he’s done. He sits there, pleasantly blank, gently wiping a smudge from her cheek as any loving father would. Except there’s nobody behind his eyes anymore.

Was this mercy? Justice? It’s probably something worse than either. A hollow victory that feels like defeat. And Ella Purnell, who’s been crushing it all season, navigating Lucy’s moral education in the Wasteland, falls apart. Her reaction goes well beyond rage or even grief. She shows something closer to vertigo. The ground has disappeared beneath her, and she’s still falling.

This is what “The Strip” does best. It understands that in the world of Fallout, there are no clean endings. There’s just the ongoing project of survival in a system designed to break you. Lucy wanted to bring her father to justice. She got a lobotomized shell of a person who can’t even remember why he should be punished. The Ghoul spent 200 years searching for his family and found empty cryo-pods with a postcard pointing him toward yet another side quest. Maximus fought an entire pack of Deathclaws and only survived because an army showed up at random to save him.

The finale is messy, overstuffed, and occasionally frustrating, keeping it from true greatness. But it’s messy in the service of something ambitious. It’s a season-ending chapter that refuses to provide the catharsis we expect and instead commits fully to the idea that in the Wasteland, nothing ever really ends. Wars just pause. Searches continue. The systems that control us keep humming along beneath the surface.

It’s far from flawless, and there are plenty of issues that occur throughout the finale. But first, there’s the extraordinary scene with Lucy and Hank – the beating heart of why this finale works despite its flaws.

The mercy that isn’t.

Fallout Season 2 Episode 8 opens by immediately resolving the cliffhanger from Episode 7. We revisit Diane Welch’s severed head, still conscious after 200 years, wired into the machinery powering Hank’s mind-control system. When Lucy approaches, Welch can only moan two words: “Kill me.”

So Lucy does. It’s brutal and necessary, transforming Lucy in ways she can’t undo. This is the woman who started Season 1, unable to kill raiders. Now she’s performing executions on begging victims, calling it mercy because the alternative is worse.

And then Hank appears, and we get the exposition dump the entire season has been leading up to. Yes, he’s Enclave. Yes, the Enclave has been running everything behind the scenes. And, yes, the surface world is the real experiment, not the Vaults. Everyone out here has potentially been following programmed orders for 200 years without knowing it. Hank has perfected the mind-control technology to the point that the chips are microscopic and undetectable, and already implanted in countless people wandering the Wasteland.

It’s a lot of information delivered in a fairly compressed sequence, and Kyle MacLachlan sells every word. He plays Hank as a man so convinced of his own righteousness that he genuinely believes erasing his daughter’s personality and replacing it with compliance is an act of love. He wants his little girl back. And if that requires destroying who she’s become, he’s willing to pay that price.

When The Ghoul interrupts—knife to the guard’s skull, bullet to Hank’s leg, gun sliding across the floor to Lucy—it’s a direct echo of the Season 2 premiere. But this time, the Ghoul won’t kill for Lucy. And he won’t kill Hank for her either. The choice is hers. Always hers. He’s not her savior, not this time. He’s just removing the obstacles to her making a decision.

Lucy’s solution is elegant in theory. She’ll put the chip in Hank, make him a “good dad.” Bring him back to something approximating the father she remembers. But Hank reveals he’s already wearing one of his own miniaturized chips. And before Lucy can stop him, he activates it.

The real tragedy is that Hank becomes exactly what he wanted everyone else to be. Peaceful, compliant, emotionally present but mentally absent. He’s a puppet who looks like her father. And Lucy has to live with the knowledge that this might be the best possible outcome. He can’t hurt anyone anymore. He can’t remember his crimes. But he also can’t be held accountable, can’t face consequences, can’t even understand what he’s lost.

It’s devastating. It’s a scene that elevates everything around it, even when the surrounding elements are sometimes less successful.

The Ghoul’s 100 hours of gameplay.

Meanwhile, The Ghoul finally—FINALLY—reaches the cryo-chambers where his wife and daughter were supposed to be preserved. After 200 years of searching, after all the violence and cynicism and degradation, he opens the pods, and they’re empty.

Honestly, this is somewhat predictable. Of course, they’re not there. This show will never let The Ghoul have a clean resolution to his quest because the quest is the point. He’s been defined by this search for two centuries. What would he even be without it?

What saves the moment from feeling cheap, though, is Walton Goggins’s performance and the postcard. When The Ghoul finds “Greetings from Colorado” with Barb’s note—”Colorado was a good idea”—Goggins conveys simultaneous devastation (they’re not here) and hope (they’re alive somewhere). It’s a beautiful piece of acting that sells what could have been a frustrating non-resolution.

The note also raises interesting questions that the show doesn’t have time to address. How did Barb know Cooper would survive 200 years to find this? When did she leave? Was this recent, or did she flee to Colorado before the bombs even fell? The logistics are murky, but at least The Ghoul has a new direction.

His earlier scenes with Robert House are delightful in that antagonistic way the show does so well. House, now a digital consciousness forced to live on a Pip-Boy strapped to The Ghoul’s wrist, delivers one of the episode’s best lines: “Like it or not, Mr. Howard, everyone works for me eventually.”

It’s true, of course. House has manipulated everyone into serving his interests, even 200 years after the world ended. But The Ghoul’s response—abandoning the Pip-Boy once he gets what he needs—demonstrates that maybe House’s control isn’t as absolute as he thinks. Or maybe it is? And The Ghoul will discover he’s still playing House’s game without realizing it. The ambiguity here is productive.

The revelation that the government arrested Cooper for being a “commie pinko” after the cold fusion handoff explains his fall from movie star to birthday clown. It’s a nice bit of character backstory that also reinforces the season’s themes about how systems destroy individuals who threaten them. Cooper tried to do the right thing. He really tried. Then the Enclave destroyed his career and probably his marriage. 200 years later, he’s still dealing with the consequences.

The final image of The Ghoul and Dogmeat heading toward the Colorado Rockies is visually striking and thematically appropriate. He’s going into unknown territory—almost literally, since Colorado has only appeared in one Fallout spin-off game, Fallout Tactics, which mirrors his emotional state. After years of clinging to the past, he’s finally moving into a future he can’t predict.

Deus Ex NCR.

The show finally sells us on Maximus. Aaron Moten has been doing a solid job all season, making him believably idealistic without appearing stupid. And his physical performance in the Deathclaw battle is impressive. The sequence of him fist-fighting monsters in power armor, then improvising weapons from a roulette wheel and a pool cue after his suit malfunctions, should be thrilling.

And it is thrilling! For a while. But then the episode has to resolve the battle, and it does so by having the NCR army randomly arrive to save him. Not because Maximus called for help. Or because he earned their assistance through some clever earlier action. No, they show up because the plot needs Max to survive, and the writers couldn’t figure out how to get him out of this corner they’d written him into.

It’s disappointing because the show spent all of the last episode carefully establishing how dangerous Deathclaws are and how Maximus was willing to sacrifice himself to buy The Ghoul time. That setup deserved a payoff where Maximus’s choices mattered to his survival. Instead, we get, “and then the army showed up.”

The revelation that the NCR isn’t dead—that they’ve got an actual military force capable of operations—is interesting world-building. And seeing the iconic NCR Ranger armor from Fallout: New Vegas in its full glory this time is a nice visual callback. But it feels unearned as a rescue mechanism.

Thaddeus provides some support, sniping a Deathclaw with one arm (his other having fallen off in the last episode). But he can’t reload and becomes largely decorative. Johnny Pemberton has been a fun comic relief this season. And he’s been handling Thaddeus’s physical transformation into something ghoul-like with a fitting, bumbling energy. But the finale completely abandons that thread. He’s just a guy with one arm who makes jokes. It’s frustrating.

The moment when Maximus starts fighting in earnest, and the Freeside locals start placing bets on whether he’ll die, is darkly funny and very Fallout. But it also undercuts the heroism that the scene is trying to establish. Are we supposed to admire his bravery or laugh at the absurdity? The tonal confusion makes the sequence less effective than it should be.

When Maximus finally reunites with Lucy, the show finds its footing again. Their tearful embrace, with the sun rising behind Maximus (visual symbolism: he’s bringing hope back into her life), provides real emotional catharsis. These two have been separated all season, and their reunion matters because we’ve watched them both become different people during that separation.

The final scene—Lucy and Maximus standing in House’s office overlooking New Vegas, watching the NCR set up camp while the Legion marches toward the city—is beautiful and ominous. Lucy says it’s all her fault that there’s going to be a war. Maximus replies, “Yeah, well, welcome to the wasteland.” It’s a perfect encapsulation of their dynamic and the show’s philosophy. Everyone thinks their choices matter, but really, they’re all just contributing to inevitable conflicts that predate them and will continue long after they’re gone.

Side note: I really wish they’d titled this episode “Come Back Soon” rather than “The Strip.” But alas.

Macaulay Culkin’s legion.

Fallout Season 2 Episode 8 also features the Legion’s succession crisis finally being resolved. Lacerta Legate (Macaulay Culkin) drags the body of the previous Caesar back to his tent. He reads the succession note that everyone’s been killing each other over. But then he discovers it doesn’t actually name a successor. So he crowns himself.

In fact, he swallows the note before taking the crown. He declares they’re marching on Vegas to reclaim “Caesar’s Palace.” And that’s essentially it for the Legion until the end of the episode, when we see them approaching New Vegas. Culkin is clearly having fun chewing scenery as a theatrical villain leading a faction of Roman LARPers in the post-apocalypse. But the show doesn’t give him enough to do. He gets a total of three minutes of screen time, which is a waste of a charismatic guest star and an interesting character.

The Legion’s appearance in the finale is pure setup for Season 3. We’re clearly heading toward a three-way war between NCR, Legion, and whoever controls New Vegas (House? Lucy and Maximus? Someone else?). This directly parallels Fallout: New Vegas‘s central conflict. While exciting in theory, in practice, it means the Legion subplot doesn’t go anywhere. It just hits pause.

Again, this is indicative of a larger problem with the finale. It sometimes feels more interested in setting up Season 3 than in resolving Season 2.

Norm’s Radroach Revolution.

It’s been hard to discern just what the show wants to do with Norm. And I’m not sure “The Strip” provides an answer.

Norm is about to be “tried” by the Vault 31 management trainees. Claudia tries to help and gets pushed into an elevator button. The elevator opens, Radroaches flood out, and they eat the managers in graphic horror-movie fashion. Norm and Claudia escape.

It’s fine as a sequence, sure. The Radroaches are appropriately gross, and the managers die horrible deaths and all. But what does it accomplish narratively? Norm spent most of the season being captured and recaptured while learning about Vault 31’s breeding program, which doesn’t really go anywhere. He sends an SOS to Lucy that she never hears, but apparently, the Enclave does. He discovers secrets that don’t impact the main plot.

Moisés Arias is talented and watchable, and Norm was one of Season 1’s breakout characters. But Season 2 has him just existing in parallel to the main action without meaningfully connecting to it.

The finale has him and Claudia escaping together, presumably heading toward Vault 33 or New Vegas. That suggests Season 3 will try to integrate him back into the main storylines. But for Season 2, he feels like an afterthought. It’s the show’s most significant structural weakness this year.

What is Phase 2?

“The Strip” includes another Steph flashback, revealing she and Hank were engaged after just one night together. (Also, she later tells the Enclave that she’s his actual wife, but it would be a safe bet to assume she’s lying). This, of course, explains why she knew about Hank’s keepsake box. It’s efficient character work that adds dimension to their relationship.

In the present, the Vault 32 residents turn violent after Chet exposed Steph’s secrets in the last episode. They’re chanting “Death to management!” and storming her office. Cornered, Steph opens Hank’s keepsake box and finds an Enclave Pip-Boy.

She contacts the Enclave with a simple, chilling message: “Initiate Phase 2.”

The show doesn’t explain what Phase 2 is, but the heavily telegraphed answer seems to be the Forced Evolutionary Virus. This is the same bioweapon that creates Super Mutants. The Enclave may be done with subtle experimentation and ready to start forcibly transforming Vault populations.

It’s a great cliffhanger that sets up obvious Season 3 plotlines. And it also means Steph’s arc doesn’t really conclude this season. She goes from triumphant Overseer to exposed liar to desperate woman calling for backup—more movement without resolution.

The show’s handling of Steph has been one of its successes this year. Annabel O’Hagan has taken what could have been a one-note villain and found unexpected depths. The Canadian refugee backstory recontextualizes her ruthlessness as a survival instinct honed over centuries. But like several other threads, her storyline ends on “To Be Continued” rather than any kind of closure.

Blink, and you’ll miss the post-credits scene.

That’s right. After the credits, we get a scene at the Brotherhood of Steel camp. Dane brings documents to Elder Cleric Quintus, who announces: “Quintus the Unifier is dead. Quintus the Destroyer is born.”

He then unrolls blueprints for Liberty Prime Alpha. The massive anti-communist combat robot from Fallout 3 and 4.

For game fans, this is a huge deal. Liberty Prime is one of the franchise’s most iconic elements: an enormous mech that shouts propaganda slogans while obliterating enemies. “Death is a preferable alternative to communism!” It’s absurd, terrifying, and somewhat expected.

For the show, it means the Brotherhood suddenly has access to a superweapon that could dominate all other factions. It transforms them from fringe players to major threats in Season 3.

It’s also good television practice. The post-credits scene provides a stinger that rewards viewers for sitting through the credits while setting up future storylines without cluttering the actual finale. But it also contributes to the sense that “The Strip” is more interested in what’s coming next than in what’s happening now.

Good, bad, and ugly.

“The Strip” teeters between its flaws and triumphs. There are unquestionably effective moments of emotional goodbyes and real, transformative character work. But for every character like Lucy who gets a moment of significant change, there’s one like Norm whom the show has forgotten how to work with.

The performances are terrific, and the overarching themes remain coherent. But the storylines are split between those that are well-executed and those left behind in the service of seeing Season 3. For every moment of catharsis, there’s a beat of frustration. And it all seemingly boils down to the series’ (understandable) desire to pave the way for the incoming story rather than offer satisfying conclusions.

And yet…

Even though “The Strip” is a deeply flawed finale, it nonetheless succeeds at what matters most. It builds desperate anticipation for Season 3.

And that’s mainly due to how the show handles its world-building, which remains exceptional. The revelation about miniaturized mind-control chips creating an army of unknowing sleeper agents. The Enclave’s confirmation as puppet masters. Liberty Prime’s introduction as a game-changing superweapon. Phase 2’s ominous implications. The NCR’s survival as a military force. The Legion’s march on Vegas. House’s digital resurrection. All of these elements expand the show’s scope while remaining thematically coherent.

And crucially, the show is still faithfully maintaining its identity. This is still Fallout in all its darkly funny, morally complex, visually striking, thematically ambitious post-apocalyptic glory. It’s television that takes its source material seriously. While still finding its own voice.

The show continues to understand what makes the Fallout canon so special. It’s not just the retrofuturistic aesthetic, the post-apocalyptic setting, or the dark humor. It’s the questions Fallout raises. When do good intentions curdle into authoritarianism? Does humanity deserve saving when humans keep making the same mistakes? What do you do when there are no good choices, only less-bad ones?

“The Strip” delivers on that promise even when its plotting goes nuclear. And in an age of television where so many shows play it safe, we should take messy ambition over cautious mediocrity every time.

Fallout Season 2 Episode 8 is available to stream on Prime Video.

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Images courtesy of Prime Video.