Compared to incinerating the planet, incinerating a puppy is a pretty low-stakes way to open an episode. However, it draws attention, and so did the second episode of Fall It calls my attention. Doubly so when it turned out to be actor Michael Emerson who did the cremation. I’ll go to my grave arguing that his Ben Linus is the soul of Lost; no other show of that magnitude was as dependent on its antagonist as the X-Men are based on both Magneto and Professor X. Who better to burn a puppy?
Taking over from Kyle MacLachlan in a “former star of a supernatural-obsessed mystery show on ABC lasts a total of a Fall In the Relay Race episode, Emerson guest stars as Wilzig, a scientist at a sort of well-maintained Earth complex called the Enclave. After injecting himself with some kind of futuristic capsule, a fellow scientist catches him sheltering a dog he had saved from the incinerator. The dog tears out the man’s throat and Wilzig flees to the moor.
You are far from alone out there. The fun of this episode (“The Target”) is seeing how much post-apocalyptic shit you can cram into your proverbial Junk Jet and fire at the viewer, counting on at least one aspect or another to provide a killer shot of entertainment.
For example, you might be interested in Maximus’s story, which features a cave full of barrels of hazardous waste, a power-armored knight who turns out to be an insufferable jerk played by Michael Rapaport (big exaggeration!), and an irradiated giant. mutant bear that takes the breath away from said gentleman, who shouts a bunch of variations of “Shit! Shit!” until Maximus finally shoots the beast to death. He takes his time largely because the knight basically tried to sacrifice him to the bear to save his own skin, something a worthy knight wouldn’t do. His final complaints about futility of his mission to recover old pre-apocalyptic junk for his clerics only reinforces Maximus’s conviction to let the guy die and claim the armor as his own.
His brief, quixotic tenure as a knight begins when he stops a man from punishing a theatrical charlatan (Jon Daly) who had been fucking his chickens, and ends when the Ghoul spanks his behind. It turns out that both men (well, “men”) are after the same target: Wilzig.
He is found (and in the case of the Ghoul, spectacularly mutilated) in a ramshackle town straight out of a Mad Max movie, where he is linked to a smuggler of sorts named Ma June (the formidable Dale Dickey). He is also he bonded with Lucy, by coincidence, after first saving her from a gigantic irradiated mutant cockroach at the beginning of the episode. (It’s not as gigantic as the bear, but it’s still alarmingly large for a cockroach.) Somehow, he knows everything about her and her Vault, much to her continued confusion.
A great battle ensues involving all of the aforementioned parties. The self-proclaimed knight Maximus manages well for a while, until he clumsily gets his foot stuck on a boardwalk; The Ghoul cuts a hydraulic line and Maximus is thrown through the air into the distance.
Meanwhile, an agreement is reached. Ma June reveals that she is working with Moldaver, the leader of the raiders who kidnapped Lucy’s father, and needs to transport the mutilated Wilzig across the wasteland to her somehow. (She replaces her foot with a prosthetic that looks like it was designed by the Cenobites.) If Lucy can do it, she can orchestrate a trade. What she doesn’t know is that Maximus needs Wilzig as badly as Lucy does, since bringing him back is the only way to save his own life after letting Knight Titus die.
However, Moldaver doesn’t really need Wilzig, he explains to Lucy after staggering to a stop next to a crashed USSR satellite. It’s just his head. So he takes a cyanide pill and hands her a fancy little chainsaw, a way to save her the extra effort of lugging her entire corpse behind her across another 20 miles of desert. He’ll still have to watch out for the Ghoul, who resurrects Wilzig’s injured dog using some kind of enhancer and will presumably use the unwitting creature to track down his master. What’s left of him, at least.
The best way to summarize this episode is this: it has a gigantic mutant irradiated bear, a giant mutant irradiated cockroach, and a fight between a guy in mechanical armor and a bulletproof zombie cowboy. If you saw those words on paper, some of you would say “hell yeah” and others would roll your eyes. I get either answer. Yet somehow this doesn’t feel like a harsh throwback to “OMG Ninja Zombie Pirate Amazing Sauce Epic Bacon,” even though FallThe film’s aesthetic fits that cultural moment of the 2000s without difficulty. (The puppy cremation thing is a borderline case, but it comes and goes so quickly and so early in the episode that it hurts less.) Each part had a special twist to make it a little more interesting than it needed to be: the extreme gore of the shootout, the exaggerated red fire light of the cockroach scene, the sheer size and power of the bear versus the terrified cursing and whining from the gentleman who suddenly isn’t so unstoppable.
Like Guy Ritchie’s recent Netflix surprise The Knights, this is (so far) good, solid genre storytelling in an over-the-top way. with no pretensions to depth beyond his welcome, intelligent mean streak. Let’s hope the streak continues.
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.
