The Brotherhood has made a grand return, more formidable than ever. Along with them arrives the last piece of the Fallout ensemble, Knight Maximus, portrayed by Aaron Moten. He is a noble character, albeit deeply scarred by his past. Under the mentorship of Quintus, played masterfully by Michael Cristofer, Maximus is being groomed to be his steadfast lieutenant. If you’ve been following the series, you might predict that Maximus’s trust in authority figures could lead to trouble, and you’d be spot on.

Area 51 serves as their new headquarters, introduced with a visually stunning scene where massive turbines reveal the entrance by sweeping away heaps of sand. In a humorous twist, two Brotherhood soldiers stumble upon an alien corpse but are far more excited to discover a perfectly functioning fridge nearby. With access to what is likely an extraordinary cache of weapons, Quintus aims to consolidate the Brotherhood’s fragmented factions under his leadership, with ambitions to dominate the wasteland. He pitches this vision to Maximus as a noble mission to improve the world.

A poignant flashback provides insight into why Maximus is susceptible to such ideals. We witness a harrowing moment from his past on the final day of Shady Sands, the capital of the New California Republic. A mind-controlled drifter, manipulated by Hank MacLean—who is later shown gleefully conducting brain-chip tests on mice—rolls a cart with a nuclear bomb into the heart of the town. Maximus’s father is unable to disarm it.

Faced with no other choice, his parents lock young Maximus in a refrigerator, advising him to ration the contents until help arrives. As they close the door, they listen to his cries, comforting each other in their last moments before the inevitable explosion. Their parting words to their son convey the hope that leaving the world slightly better is the greatest achievement one can aspire to.

This philosophy shapes Maximus’s worldview, contrasting with Lucy’s adherence to the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” Lucy’s mission to confront her father stems from his repeated violations of this principle on an alarming scale. Maximus, however, extends this ethos to encompass the entire nation, feeling a duty to rectify its course, not just individuals within it.

But being a heroic ideologue isn’t all its cracked up to be. In the ongoing pissing match between the factions, Maximus is forced to fight and kill a towering rival (XXX) without the use of his armor to prove his mettle to Quintus. Quintus himself appears about to be cockblocked on the conqueror thing by the Commonwealth, the Brotherhood’s most powerful faction, represented by a suave fellow played by Kumail Nanjiani. It’s a great use of stunt casting, with the character sticking out in that crew as much as Nanjiani himself does.

Most importantly for Maximus on a personal level is persistent voice in his ear telling him there’s another way. It belongs to Dane (Xelia Mendes-Jones), the striking person with the faint mustache who’s maintained a complicated friendship Maximus from the start. Recall that Maximus only became a Squire and then a Knight because Dane’s foot was injured by a booby-trapped boot, a self-inflicted wound wrongfully blamed on Maximus. Now, Dane’s the one person reminding Maximus that there’s a girl he loves out there. Would he rather start a war or find her?

A quick note about Dane here. The actor playing this Brotherhood member, Xelia Mendes-Jones, is a non-binary performer whom I remember fondly for their fantastic work as a fanatical slave-driver in the second season of The Wheel of Time. I haven’t caught Dane’s pronouns, but assuming the character is non-binary as well as the actor, this opens up some fascinating questions about Fallout’s world-building. 

Look at the other Brotherhood factions who come to the table. One is led by a woman. One is led by a virulent misogynist. One seems more like a confederacy of bandits who’ve abandoned the Brotherhood’s quasi-religious ideology altogether, in any variant. Most, but not all, of the soldiers we see are men. Where does Dane’s gender identity fit into the Brotherhood’s vision of itself, or at least Quintus’s vision of it? 

The question reminds me of how pre-apocalyptic America was both a fascist hypercapitalist hellscape and, apparently, a racial utopia. (Except for movie “Indians,” of course.) What compromises were made to perpetuate the Cold War indefinitely while still conceding to a civil rights movement one has to presume still existed in some form or other?

Not to go off on a whole rant here, but this is one of the great benefits of diversified casting. It opens up a whole new vista of storytelling and opens up the cast to a host of talented actors. It has to be smartly done, of course, but that is literally true of any kind of casting, so we can take it as read. At any rate, Fallout does basically everything smartly. Does the existence of a fully multiracial American fascist state merit some explanation at some point, especially given the segregationist mode in which the current American fascist state operates? Yes, probably. But that’s not a plot hole, it’s a darkened window you peer into, wondering what’s in there. 

On the Lucy and Ghoul end of things, our idealistic Vaultie tries and fails to convince the Ghoul he’s got to clean up his act. After all, let’s say he does finally reunite with his long lost family. Doesn’t he realize they’re going to think, correctly, that he’s a huge asshole? Lucy doesn’t know that back when he was Cooper Howard, the Ghoul’s wife Barb came up with the idea of corporations nuking America themselves rather than waiting for the Commies to do it, so who knows, maybe being a surly murderer will make him the man of her dreams — though given his longstanding antipathy toward his billionaire overlords, I somehow doubt it.

Lucy gets a chance to do things her way when she forces a detour to answer cries for help. She and the Ghoul find a pair of people in ancient Roman garb, one of them dead from a scorpion sting. A really big scorpion sting. No, wait — a really, really, really, ridiculously big scorpion sting. The gigantic creepy crawly that emerges to eat its smaller offspring and then attack Lucy and the Ghoul directly is one of the show’s best creature effects yet, and it’s clear much of it was practically done.

After they defeat the beast, both the Ghoul and the Roman have been stung…but Lucy chooses to use their only stim-pak health booster on the woman, not her traveling companion. Since he’s effectively immortal, he’ll survive and heal up in time, while she wouldn’t; besides, she says, it’ll do him some good to lie around immobilized for a while and think about the consequences of his actions. 

As usual, she probably should have heeded his warnings about the mess she’s getting herself into. The Roman proves as weird and sickly funny as anyone they’ve met — she’s very concerned Lucy might get “raped by the wrong people,” as if there’s such a thing as the right people to get raped by — but her armored compatriots, who trap Lucy in the end, don’t seem as friendly.

Finally, back down in the Vaults, Lucy’s brother Norm successfully convinces all the thawed out “Bud’s Buds” from the Vaul-Tec cryopods that this is all part of the wise Bud’s master plan, and that it’s some kind of test to see if they can escape the vault on their own, or something. Point is they make it out into the wasteland near the coastline — a miserable landscape of devastation to the pre-war Vaul-Tec creeps, but the most beautiful thing the Vault-raised Norm has ever seen in his life.

The funny thing is that they’re both right, and that’s true across the board on this show, nowhere more so than with the dueling outlooks of Lucy and the Ghoul. The gunslinger is kind of like a one-man Walking Dead, where he’s both the zombies and the human beings who’ve turned into ruthless, merciless killers to survive. On that show, there was only ever one correct answer when faced with the question of whether to help outsiders: Don’t, because they’re always dangerous, and the most important task for anyone is to protect yourself.

Lucy’s presence upsets all that. While the Ghoul is usually right not to trust outsiders, that doesn’t make Lucy’s belief in people’s fundamental goodness seem like a weakness. When he says “Empathy’s like mud, you lose your boots in that stuff,” we’re not supposed to believe that he — or Elon Musk, or any other real-world anti-empathy crusaders — have the right of it. Lucy’s optimism is presented as a strength even when it gets her into trouble; in Fallout’s view, it’s the world, not Lucy, that is wrong and must be made to change. 

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.