Man, the show Fallout is an absolute triumph. From the moment I hit play on any episode, there’s a comforting certainty that what unfolds will be nothing short of captivating. The humor swings between pleasantly light-hearted and deliciously dark. The violence can be both exhilarating and unsettling, evoking reactions ranging from “hell yeah!” to “oh, damn.” The creators have committed to practical effects and physical sets, steering clear of CGI overload. With a cast featuring familiar faces like Macaulay Culkin, Jon Gries, and Kumail Nanjiani, each episode promises a blend of the radical, bizarre, outrageous, and comedic. The show tackles issues of corporate greed and capitalism with a boldness that could ruffle the feathers of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, a modern-day Robert House. It’s a delight to witness on Amazon’s tab, capturing the thrill of a creative team pushing boundaries.

It’s remarkable just how visually stunning Fallout has become. Take the latest episode, where director Liz Friedlander crafts exquisite wide shots, like the Ghoul and his dog against a sunlit hill, and intense close-ups, such as Cooper Howard inspecting a lighter gifted by his friend and secret ally, Charlie Whiteknife. This season, the show ditches the blue/orange color grading in favor of vibrant film, a choice championed by producer/director Jonathan Nolan. This aesthetic shift has elevated Fallout to one of the most visually delightful series since Vince Gilligan’s artistic masterpiece, Pluribus.

Meanwhile, writer Chaz Hawkins cleverly weaves a narrative of parallel civil wars, both sparked by our protagonists’ morally complex decisions.

On one front, our protagonist Lucy, the Vaultie heroine, discovers the harsh truth about the Legion, a group of Roman-inspired cosplayers. Despite her efforts to save a woman from their clutches, the Legion executes her and crucifies Lucy as punishment. Macaulay Culkin, playing a character far removed from his own persona, reveals that the Legion is embroiled in a succession war with two leaders, both vying for dominance.

The faction that captures Lucy dismisses her ideals of the Golden Rule, with Culkin’s character coldly stating, “Good is not a meaningful vector in history. Only strength.” This echoes a disturbing moment from Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, where children sang “Deal from strength or get crushed every time” to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” At the time, it was the most overtly authoritarian message I’d ever witnessed from a presidential campaign. Ah, how naive I was back then.

At any rate, the Ghoul recovers from the giant scorpion sting he received last episode by carving the venom-infected flesh out of his leg. He tells the faithful dog he picked up during Season 1 that while he dislikes Lucy, he needs her for his plans later on. But pay attention to that sentence: The Ghouls is talking to a dog. He’s even petting him lovingly! “It’s just been a while since I had someone worth talkin’ to, that’s all,” he explains to the happy animal. Really, he’s explaining it to himself. 

In order to free her, the Ghoul seeks help from the Legion’s fiercest foes, the remnants of the New California Republic. All he finds at their main base is an old robot friend of his named Victor (voiced by William Sadler, Die Hard 2’s main heavy) who can’t offer much help — and who seems a bit menacing there towards the end. The few active NCR soldiers he does find, Rodriguez (Barbara Eve Harris) and Biff (recurring White Lotus villain Jon Gries), are old and desperate for reinforcements. 

So the Ghoul devises a plan. At first it seems like he’s up to his old amoral tricks, selling out the location o the NCR holdouts in exchange for Lucy’s freedom. Instead, he rigs the Legion’s supply of dynamite to explode after they leave, destroying the fenced border between the two warring Legion camps and sparking an all-out battle among those who survived the explosion. It’s not clear that any Legion faction will emerge victorious — the Ghoul’s equivalent of doing a good deed for the world.

He wasn’t always so cynical, of course, as Victor the robot reminds him. In a series of flashback scenes, we see Cooper Howard, the Ghoul’s old human self, attending an award ceremony for his pal Charlie at a VFW hall. Charlie, who’s secretly part of Los Angeles’s anti-war underground, delivers a speech that drives home many inconvenient truths about war. He’s getting an award for saving a man’s life, but he had to kill three other men to do it. Those men believed in their cause as much as Americans like Charlie and Cooper did. They cared about each other just as much as Charlie and Cooper did. Now they’re dead because of what Charlie and Cooper did. 

Did the side that cares about safeguarding people’s lives and happiness prevail? You’d hope so. But Charlie knows they didn’t — that America’s capitalist cabal plans to initiate nuclear war, effectively winning a civil war for control of the country with a single barrage of A-bombs. Coop, meanwhile, watched his wife Barb pack things up for their life in a Vault, knowing that she was the one who proposed the nuclear war to begin with. And Charlie knows that Cooper has been asked to kill the man who’ll likely push the button, the billionaire industrialist Robert House. He gives Cooper the commemorative lighter (lol) that he received for his bravery, which the Ghoul still hangs on to today, to drive home how valuable this mission really is.

It appears that neither man knows that Robert House is right there in the VFW hall with them. The mustachioed dandy harasses Cooper in the men’s room, accusing both him and Charlie of being pinkos. But, he says, it’s a position he can sympathize with. All the billions of people on Earth have been backed into a corner, he says, and the solutions people propose are bound to get “messy messy.” Coop exits the encounter — but what does the presence of the man he’s supposed to assassinate right there in the same building with him and Charlie say about the opsec of the assassination plan to begin with?

Back in the future, Knight Maximus has reached a similar crossroads. With Lord Quintus’s plans for civil war jeopardized by the presence of Xander, the representative of the far more powerful Brotherhood chapter called the Commonwealth, Maximus proposes just killing the guy. After all, isn’t that what they do around here? Quintus angrily ridicules Maximus for the suggestion, calling him a mere “sword” to be wielded, not to be lectured by. 

Xander, meanwhile, seems like an alright dude. With none of the religious hangups endemic to Maximus’s faction, he’s a happy-go-lucky guy, and — hey, guess what — all he really needs is Maximus’s help in retrieving the cold fusion device Quintus controls so that they can stop the civil war before it starts. Flying around in a brotherhood chopper, shooting the shit with a fellow soldier with big ideas, brings a rare smile to Maximus’s face.

That smile fades when he sees what Xander is like in action. Sure, it’s cool to watch him use a rocket-powered Thor hammer to wallop a malfunctioning security robot. (Maximus gets in on the act by punching its TV-screen face in.) But when Xander takes aim at a gaggle of ghoul children who perform child labor at the soda factor operated by ne’er-do-well Brotherhood squire turned ghoul Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), Maximus sees he’s really no better than Quintus. Indeed, there’s a truly ghastly moment when Xander cheerfully separates Thaddeus’s human child laborers from the ghoul ones, the way labor-ready people were separated from those too old or young or infirm o work at Nazi extermination camps.

That’s quite enough for Maximus. He brings the rocket-powered hammer down hard on Xander’s helmeted noggin, killing him instantly. Maximus and Thaddues then catch up a bit — recall that they knew each other during Season 1 — before Maximus explains that he just started a civil war. (Thaddeus’s thoughtful reply is “Okay!”)

Now, this isn’t a particularly “spectacular” episode of Fallout. The Ghoul doesn’t go on the gun-toting killing spree among the Legion that you might have expected. The dynamite detonation and subsequent battle are viewed from a distance. Xander and Maximus rumble with a robot, but they’re smiling and chatting and having the time of their lives while they do it, so it’s not like it’s particularly tense. No one nukes anything.

Yet it’s still replete with vividly imagined moments. Lucy on the cross, watching crows peck at a dead man nearby, seeing one land on her own crosspiece, waiting for her to die. Michael Cristofer’s Quintus dismissing Maximus by prolcaiming “Behold, the dimness of the sword.” The execution of the woman Lucy rescued, right on the spot. Barb crying over leaving her old life behind when she herself decided to destroy it. The Ghoul getting humanized not by Lucy, but by a dog. Kevin McAllister and Uncle Rico. Xander’s inane catchprhase: “Hot dog!” Child laborers happily justifying their slavelike conditions by shouting, in unison, “Most kids are dead by this age!!!” A comic-relief congresswoman announcing “I don’t think America can afford any more corporate influence in Washington,” aired under an administration available for purchase by the highest bidder, which may well include the man who owns the streaming service on which this show is aired.

That’s a huge range of high points in an episode not meant to be a high point itself. Boy, that’s a meal I could eat any day of the week.

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.