"The Ghouls"

"The Ghouls" is the fourth episode of the first season of the Fallout TV series.

Synopsis[]

Summary[]

The Ghoul, suffering from withdrawal, begins coughing as he marches Lucy through the desert. They pass a medical clinic and hear someone yelling, "My name is Roger!" inside. The Ghoul forces Lucy to enter the clinic first. They find Roger, a nearly-feral ghoul, inside, and the Ghoul greets him as an old friend. Roger says that life has been rough since so many "smoothies" are bigoted against Ghouls but sees Lucy and notes that the Ghoul has seemingly befriended a smoothie. The Ghouls apologizes for not having any vials that can stop his friend from turning feral. Roger warns the two to leave "before things get ugly" and says it's been twenty-eight years since he started showing signs of going feral; the Ghoul himself has staved off the process for even longer by making steady money for vials. The Ghoul begins reminiscing about pre-ghoul life and the food they both enjoyed, getting Roger to think about happy thoughts. Turning to Lucy, Roger happily begins telling her about his mom before the Ghoul suddenly mercy kills him mid-sentence, horrifying Lucy.

Lucy questions the murder, and the Ghoul asks her name for the first time; he is surprised to learn her last name is "MacLean." Lucy is further revolted when the Ghoul begins eating Roger's corpse. She claims the people of Vault 33 have never resorted to cannibalism even during a "Great Plague of '77," during which her mother starved and her father "dropped to 128 pounds;" the Ghoul doubts her story. Lucy asks how he can go on living this way. He appears briefly shaken by the question, but dodges answering and demands her help cutting up Roger. She somberly complies.

The residents of Vault 33 decide to elect a new overseer with Reg, Woody and Betty as the candidates. Woody tells Reg he tried interrogating an imprisoned raider to no effect. The same raider attempts to break free from his confines, and Woody decides to sedate him. Betty confronts Norm about his suggestion at the assembly, and Norm remembers hiding when the raiders attacked. Betty advises him to "tread lightly" as he wrestles with his anger, stating that as the last MacLean, his words carry more weight among the population than he realizes.

Near Santa Monica Boulevard, Lucy and the Ghoul stumble upon a trough of water that the former's Pip-Boy indicates is irradiated. Nonetheless, the Ghoul refills his flask from the trough, and a parched Lucy cannot stop herself from drinking, too. The Ghoul seems to take pleasure in watching Lucy be broken down by the realities of the wasteland. She asks, "What are you?" and he says, "I'm you, sweetie. You just give it a little time." He's overcome by a sudden coughing fit, and Lucy uses the opportunity to try to make a break for it. She is caught off guard by a crater in the middle of the city when the Ghoul uses a lasso to drag her back to him. In the ensuing struggle, Lucy bites off one of his fingers. He, in turn, cuts off one of hers with a knife and calls the interaction "the closest thing we've had to an honest exchange so far."

Back in Vault 33, Chet is visited by Steph in his suite, and they bond over their shared trauma. She gives him some clothes that belonged to her dead husband, Bert. Seeing Chet wear Bert's scarf and sweater, Steph starts crying and calling him "Bert." She starts kissing him, and they impulsively decide to have sex. Before they can, Steph's water breaks, and she goes into labor.

The Ghoul takes Lucy to the Super Duper Mart seen across the crater near Santa Monica Boulevard. Using a squak box outside to communicate, the Ghoul sells Lucy to an unidentified male voice in exchange for two months' worth of chems. He forces her through the door before collapsing. Inside, Lucy is amiably greeted by Snip-Snip, a Mister Handy robot. Snip-Snip guides Lucy to a gurney where he surgically attaches a new finger to her hand from a drawer of detached human fingers. Lucy begins to relax and admits that she feared she had just been sold as a sex slave. Snip-Snip is appalled at the idea and cheerfully explains that he merely plans on harvesting her organs. He shoots her with a tranquilizer, and she passes out on the gurney.

Norm brings dessert to the prisoners. He judges a raider for killing the people of Vault 32, but the raider insinuates that they were already dead when they arrived. When Norm refers to the vault-dwellers as "innocent," the raider says that they were anything but. Suspicious, Norm tries to access the Vault 32 record from his computer but is denied. In Chet's suite, Steph is giving birth on his couch, assisted by doctors, when Norm invites him on an excursion. Chet and Norm sneak into Vault 32 to find their crop field, which has seemingly been dead for years. Investigating further, they find multiple Vault dwellers dead from either suicide or violent murders. The Pip-Boy on one corpse indicates that its wearer has been dead for two years. One resident, dead from sticking a fork in a toaster, sits in front of a looping television program about mice in an experiment who begin killing each other after their environment is overpopulated, suggesting that the Vault shared the same fate. Norm discovers the words "WE KNOW THE TRUTH" written on the wall in blood.

Lucy dreams of her mother as she begins to come to. Snip-Snip wheels her past a refrigerator aisle of captive ghouls, their organs on sale for 500 bottle caps apiece. One female ghoul repeats, "My name is Martha," in a similar manner as Roger. The human captors, Huey and Squirrel, instruct the robot to cut Lucy up immediately. In a separate room, as Snip-Snip begins the surgery, Lucy breaks free from her restraints and overloads the robot's circuits with a defibrillator. Lucy confronts Huey and Squirrel, threatening to destroy Snip-Snip; they are apathetic since he is a robot. Lucy reveals she loaded the robot's dart shooter with toxic drain cleaner and threatens to inject them with it; they set most of the ghouls free by her demands. Lucy orders them to free the remaining four ghouls, and they reluctantly do so. When they emerge, she realizes they are feral. Huey and Squirrel kill three of the ghouls and are killed themselves in the process. Martha alone remains and desperately repeats her name while going feral. Lucy tries to break through to her but is forced to shoot and kill Martha after she attacks.

Chet and Norm find more dead Vault 32 dwellers. In the overseer's office, they find the dead overseer tied to his chair and the words "DEATH TO MANAGEMENT" graffitied on the wall. Norm accesses the overseer's computer to look up Vault door records. He discovers the door was opened from the outside with a Pip-Boy registered to his mother, Rose MacLean.

Lucy leaves the facility clad in protective leather pads. She finds the Ghoul supine on the ground and deduces that he will soon go feral if he does not have access to vials. She firmly says that she will never be like him and gives him the supply of vials he needs. She says, "Golden rule, motherfucker." and departs. Later, the revitalized Ghoul enters the building and gorges himself on chems and vials left by the dead inhabitants. He sees a tape of The Man from Deadhorse on the TV and pops it in. He nostalgically watches his younger self kill the movie's villain as he sits on the couch in silence.

Credits[]

The credits sequence begins zoomed in on an overturned AmeriCorn popcorn container inside a destroyed car with two skeletons wearing movie glasses before panning out to reveal a ruined drive-in movie theater with numerous parked cars. As the camera pulls back further, it reaches a billboard advertising Protectrons which reads, "Buy your RobCo Protectron today! Neighborhood safety just became fun" in front of a railway junction with two bridges crossing over a large river. Once the camera reaches the other side of the river, it pans back then to show an unnumbered Vault door nestled in between the railway bridge supports before cutting to black.

Cast[]

Starring:

Guest starring:

Co-starring:

Stunt performers:

Uncredited:

Soundtrack[]

• Jack Shaindlin - "Let's Go Sunning"
• Michael Brown & Company - "Just Fine"
• Buddy Holly - "What to Do"
• The Swallows - "It Ain't the Meat"
• Sam Fonteyn - "Journey Into Melody"
• The Andrews Sisters - "I Can Dream, Can't I?"

Behind the scenes[]

• Aaron Moten (Maximus) is listed in the episode's credits, but does not appear in the episode itself.
• The video of mouse utopia experiment playing in Vault 32 is a fragment of Vault Seller's Survival Guide episode "Bud's Buds!", narrated by Michael Esper as Bud Askins.

Gallery[]

Steph Harper

Lucy with Snip Snip

Freed ghoul