Approximately fifteen seconds later Fall In episode 4 (“The Ghouls”), I finally reached my breaking point: this cheerful American musical nonsense from the 1940s and 1950s is too much! Even when I looked up the lyrics to the first song, a silly little ditty about how “Life is worth living when nature gives,” and discovered that the video game Fallout 3 Taken from a 1950s nudist film, its exuberance feels more oppressive than titillating. Any culture steeped in this kitsch for 200 years is lucky if your worst problems are noseless zombies and radioactive bears.
The Ghoul doesn’t work 100% for me as a villain. I find his shocking tough-guy speech, that whole “I’m you, baby, just give it a little time” thing, to be the kind of thing that makes “video game dialogue” an inherently pejorative phrase. I’m not sure what kind of lesson he’s trying to impart.
It was at the moment when I was calmly and methodically cutting off Lucy’s finger as revenge for biting one of hers that I realized this was the point: No trying to teach Lucy something. You want to believe he’s trying to toughen her up, shake her out of her naivety, but you can’t square that with the way he pours water right in front of her, or gloats while she swallows radioactive animal urine or whatever. What the hell is she, or she cuts off his finger and then sells her to organ harvesters, presumably never to be seen again.
He’s just being mean, because he’s a mean person. He’s a villain, as described by his former fully human self in a movie just before blowing off a bad guy’s head via “an old Mexican eulogy” about how a person “was ugly, strong, and had dignity.” Cooper gives the bad guy two out of three before putting one through his skull. But now, the Ghoul is also nothing but ugly and strong. His dignity was long extinguished, as evidenced by his senseless cruelty toward Lucy.
Lucy doesn’t pay him back, despite going through a sort of minigame where she has to escape the movie. Hostel. To get his precious life-saving vials (the only thing keeping him from going crazy and wild like the poor bastard he’s running in the open), he swaps Lucy with an organ harvesting operation.
Set in an abandoned megamarket, the group consists of two slackers and a cheerful robot named Snip Snip, voiced by Matt Berry. (The man’s accent is James Mason/Michael York level English.) It’s a darkly funny sequence as things go from bad to worse for poor captive Lucy. The threat of sexual slavery is replaced by the threat of vivisection! Humans and demons locked in tiny cages! Freezers full of dismembered body parts! Drawers full of severed fingers! Guys who order live organ donation without taking their eyes off the boob tube! Lucy escapes her, no thanks to herself, when she orders the organ traffickers to release the wild demons without realizing that that is what they are.
But even though she has been born again strong and emerges equipped for life in the Wasteland, she has not succumbed to the violent vision of America embodied by the Ghoul. That is, on an interpersonal level: she still has a famous name in a society made up exclusively of descendants of people rich enough to flee nuclear devastation and leave everyone else to fend for themselves. Other than that, however, she does not kill the Ghoul or let him die. She leaves him some vials, allowing him to revive and raid the entire arsenal, presumably preparing it for years to come. Lucy lives the Golden Rule, just as she herself has been saying.
One last point: Fall He has an admirably dirty mind. I don’t know if it’s just the presence of actress magical prisoner Egwene surrenders and pours water on behalf of her slaver. I mean, maybe you didn’t have that reaction when Ella Purnell drank water from a trough while a cadaverous, towering, black-clad Walton Goggins looked on approvingly while holding her leash, but all I can say is that I’m not made of stone .
The same goes for the situation in the Vault, where the race to replace Hank as Overseer continues and the quest to civilize the captured raiders continues. On the trail of a captured raider, Norm and his cousin Chet investigate the devastated Vault 32 and discover that its population committed mass murder-suicide two years before the raiders arrived. All records related to that vault and its correspondence with yours have been sealed, bloody graffiti reading “WE KNOW THE TRUTH” and “DEATH TO THE ADMINISTRATION” is your only clue, and the vault door was opened for the raiders. using a code that belongs to… Norm and Lucy’s long-lost mother?
However, the reason Chet goes on this excursion is to get away from the scene at his house, where Steph, the one-eyed pregnant murderer, is giving birth. Why there? Because she came to try to convince Chet to take action against the muggers, she gave him a bunch of her late husband’s things, dressed him in them, jumped on his bones, and her water broke almost immediately when her fingers touched his swimsuit area. . (I don’t know, I think any explicit reference to wetness as a marker of arousal demonstrates a willingness to be frank in the depiction of sex that is praiseworthy, even if in this case Chet got it a little wrong.)
There’s no Maximus footage in this episode, so it’s a bit off-model in that regard. I’m starting to sound like a broken record though, but twisted violence, fun monsters, solid jokes, and a dirty mind seem to be a winning formula for Fall. That’s even as director Daniel Gray Longino and writer Kieran Fitzgerald replace the initial team of Jonathan Nolan, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner. Each episode feels like beginning the beginning of a new level.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about television forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York TimesandAnywhere that has it, In fact. He and his family live on Long Island.
