Fallout Season 2 Episode 3 recap: 'All that remains of America is its overwhelming failure'

Note: Complete spoilers for Fallout Season 2 Episode 3!

Good news, wastelanders: Thaddeus is back and he's all ghouled up! In any other world, he'd probably be a villain—after all, he's making children (some ghouls, some not) work 22-hour shifts at the Sunset Sarsaparilla bottling plant, where they're de-bottling the stock to collect all those precious caps.

But Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton) is so good-natured that I just can't see him as evil. "Keep it up and you'll have big gross calloused hands in no time!" he reassures a little ghoul struggling to remove a bottlecap bare-handed. The rallying cry for his army of children: "Most kids are dead by this age!" Thaddeus sure puts a positive spin on things.

Not so positive: Lucy has been captured by Caesar's Legion while saving one of its members (who they immediately decapitate, because that's how the Legion do), but on the plus side she gets to meet Macaulay Culkin. (Did you know his legal name is Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin? I'll let you Google why.)

OK, she doesn't really meet Macaulay Culkin, she meets Legate Lacerta, played by Macaulay Culkin, and she has the same reaction we all did when we met the Legion in Fallout: New Vegas—why are you pronouncing Caesar with a hard C and not a soft C, you absolute weirdos? (The answer: that's how it was pronounced in Latin, and these guys are seriously into their Roman Empire cosplay.)

Like all extremists, the Legion doesn't have all of their history right, just what suits them. While Lacerta and Caesar discuss who gets ownership of Lucy, the well-read Vault-dweller schools them. "Prima noctis isn't even a Roman tradition," she says. "It's from the Middle Ages. They were just nasty people borrowing a Latin phrase."

Unsurprisingly, she's hung on a cross to bake in the sun as Lacerta reveals the Legion is currently stalemated in a war with… the Legion. The faction has become split down the middle following the death of the previous Caesar. Lucy's Speech skills can't bail her out, either. She tries persuading Lacerta that the treatment she's getting is un-American, but he's not moved. "All that remains of America is its overwhelming failure," he says.

Once again, the show skirts around the specifics of Fallout: New Vegas. There's no mention of how or why Caesar died—of natural causes, player-based causes, or any of 100 other possibilities—leaving everyone's personal canon untouched. The previous Caesar's skeletal corpse bearing the name of his true heir is lying in a no-man's land between the two Legion camps, and no one wants to break the uneasy cease-fire to retrieve it.

Don't worry, the Ghoul isn't going to let Lucy get picked apart by the Legion, not because he likes her but because he sees her as a means of getting what he wants. Realizing he can't take on two Legion squads alone, he visits Camp Golf, but once again the Fallout series shows that the NCR has fallen on hard times. The House Resort and Country Club at Camp Golf is abandoned except for Victor, the Securitron from Fallout: New Vegas—yep, the very robot who digs up The Courier at the start of the game. It's so darn nice to see him again.

If Victor sounds a bit different than you remember, it's because he's now voiced by Jesse Burch and not William Sadler, as he was in the game—a little disappointing since Sadler is still actively making TV and films, and it would have been cool if he'd reprised his role. Victor is also a bit worse for wear since we last saw him. "Spent the last 10 years thinking I was a soda machine," he tells the Ghoul, who he's got some history with.

Victor is able to point the Ghoul to some NCR rangers: a total of two of them who have been hiding in the hills for more than a decade, apparently locked in a struggle with the Legion. And I gotta say… it's a bit hard to really feel this conflict. A duo of shabby NCR rangers stuck on a hill for 10 years while a Legion that looks like it consists of maybe 20 people has them supposedly boxed in? The scale of it just doesn't feel like a war for the wasteland is happening—more like a few people went camping in the desert. Maybe Amazon's budget for extras and costumes isn't as bottomless as it was for The Rings of Power.

Meanwhile, in the pre-war past, Cooper Howard attends a ceremony for war veterans and hears his former comrade deliver one of those suspiciously apt speeches relevant to his current situation, about how sometimes you have to do something bad (like assassinate Robert House, perhaps) if it protects the people you care about. Robert House is there, by the way—the Robert House we suspect is the real Robert House—lurking in a restroom like a creep to interrogate Coop about his "pinko" friends and suggest that too many people trying to solve the same problem with different solutions is "messy, messy."

You know, I'm starting to think the wealthiest man in the United States may have a screw loose. Can you even imagine? Unhinged or not, he's clearly onto Coop's secret assassination mission before Coop has even fully decided if he's going to undertake it.

Back to the future: the Ghoul strolls into Legion's camp and gives up the NCR's location in exchange for Lucy, which seems like a real dick move, though it's just a ruse to get close enough to light their supply of dynamite with the same commemorative Zippo lighter his buddy gave him over 200 years ago. "They gave that to me for saving a man," he friend said, "not for killing the three it took to do it."

The explosion kicks off a frenzied battle between the stalemated Legion camps and, one would assume, advances one of the two current Caesars into power in the process (and kills a heck of a lot more than three men). Did the Ghoul do a good thing? A stupid thing? It might not matter: it needed to be done.

Speaking of split factions, the Brotherhood of Steel is on the edge of a civil war, too, as Elder Cleric Quintus tries to convince the leaders of the gathered chapters to unite against the Commonwealth, who have sent an emissary, Xander, to collect the cold fusion MacGuffin that continues to propel the plot. Quintus invokes Roger Maxson, founder of the Brotherhood, in his case for betraying the Commonwealth. "His government had defied god, and for that, he defied his government."

Maximus has an idea, if you can call it that: "This Xander guy. I could just kill him. That's what we do here, isn't it?" He's pretty firmly humiliated by Quintus, who suggests that murdering Xander would kickstart a war they can't win without full support of the western Brotherhood factions. Butthurt, Max teams up with Xander (Kumail Nanjiani) who encourages him to defy his cleric, then takes him on a joyride in a vertibird.

It's nice to see Max smile a bit as he gets swept up with Xander's enthusiasm for action. They thrash a Securitron and collect its fusion core, with Xander offering Max his super sledge. The joy of ass-kicking screeches to a halt, however, when the tin-plated duo runs into Thaddeus and his collection of ghoul kids and Xander turns out to be just as much of a fanatic as Quintus. Xander wants to kill the kids—abominations!—but Max is a decent human being who just isn't into murdering children. He super sledges Xander's noggin instead, thus completing the very act Quintus warned him about.

"I think I just started a war," Maximus says.

"I'm the floor manager here, so sounds like we've both got a lot going on right now," Thaddeus says. God, I'm so glad Thaddeus is back.

Pip-Boy Pointers

???? Sunset Sarsaparilla Plant: Hey, I know that place! It was a location in Fallout: New Vegas, related to a bunch of quests.

???? Caesar pronunciation: Both Lucy and The Ghoul mentioned the weirdness of pronouncing Caesar with a hard C, and it's funny both times.

???? Roger Maxson: You can't have a bunch of Brotherhood elders sitting around and not have one of them namedrop the founder of the BOS.

⛳ House Resort and Country Club: I'm sure it was CG, but the exterior was a dead-ringer for the in-game location at Camp Golf.

???? Victor: Probably the biggest direct reference to the games in the series so far: he's the actual robot who digs our ass up at the start of New Vegas. He's a bit shoehorned in here as some fan service, but I will absolutely allow it.

????Rocket-assisted super sledgehammer: I was surprised to look it up and see this wasn't in New Vegas, but only came along in Fallout 4. There was a super sledge in earlier games, but not with a built-in rocket!