“Forget about them being people. Consider them Americans instead.”

In the satirical universe of the Fallout games, the creators imagined a future where the United States absorbed Canada as part of its empire, a satirical jab at American expansionism. Little did they know, reality would soon blur the lines of satire. The notion of Canada becoming “the 51st State” has evolved into a tangible goal for the U.S. government, if you can call the chaotic decisions of our current administration “policy” in the traditional sense. We’re governed by the very type of unhinged billionaires Fallout warned us about, turning fiction into a grim reality.

This backdrop lends the episode’s cold open and its end credits, depicting a desolate border between America and Canada, a haunting resonance. In a flashback, we see the hardened, one-eyed Steph as a survivor of a Canadian internment camp. (The term “hoser” has become the derogatory slur for Canadians.) Her escape from American oppression is aided by a suicide bomber who sacrifices themselves to take out a heavily armored Marine, though Steph loses her companion (played by Natasha Henstridge) in the attempt.

The dying woman’s final words urge Steph to do whatever it takes to survive the impending nuclear disaster, insisting that Americans are undeserving of mercy. This sets the stage for Steph’s ruthless actions, as she slits throats before the title sequence. We later find her in Coop’s flashback, now a waitress at Robert House’s Lucky 38 casino. She interrogates Coop on how to secure a position with Vault-Tec to gain access to one of the Vaults. He suggests she speak to the unconscious Hank MacLean, whom she then abducts in a laundry cart. Evidently, her persuasion works, as she eventually ends up in a special vault designated for management, to be revived centuries later.

This revelation casts her role as Overseer in a new light, explaining her harsh and relentless behavior. Whether it’s the execution of the timid Woody (farewell, Zach Cherry; we’ll catch you at Lumon HQ), permitting a drought in Vault 33, or coercing Betty to reveal the location of a secret briefcase hidden by Hank, it’s all driven by her quest for retribution.

I’m gonna take a wild guess and say it entails killing as many Americans as she can by unleashing the Forced Evolutionary Virus and turning them into deathclaws. I’m also going to guess was Vault-Tec’s plan for Vault 33 all along, as Norm keeps attempting to uncover while the thawed-out Vault managers keep knocking him unconscious. Sometimes, the actions of people who want to destroy America and the actions of people who claim to want to preserve it are indistinguishable from one another.

All of this, I assume, is why Steph is in such an all-fired hurry to marry Chet — such a union would make her American, more or less, which I assume is her ticket to long-term survival once she springs her trap. But Chet blows up her spot by outing her as Woody’s murderer (he found his glasses in the garbage disposal) and… dun dun DUNNNN…a Canadian!!!! As those gathered there today to witness their wedding go berserk, Steph, her empty eye socket protected by an eye-patch in bridal white, runs away, sealing herself into the Overseer’s office as all the angry Vault-dwellers pound on her door.

Back in Vault-Tec’s sanctum sanctorum beneath Lucky 38, Lucy MacLean rejects her dad’s Darth Vader–style proposal to bring order to the wasteland as father and daughter. After playing nice over a home-cooked meal — wearing a pretty yellow dress and everything — she handcuffs her dad to an oven. Apparently she’s not sold on his argument that the Legion (crucifixions, torture) and the New California Republic (high taxes) are equivalent threats, deserving of wholesale lobotomization. She careens off in the golf cart he just taught her to drive to the mainframe governing all of his brainwashing implants. Lucy discovers that it’s drawing all its power from a severed human head.

But we viewers know the head belongs to Congresswoman Welch, the taciturn but righteous-seeming representative Coop saw at the V.A. and again getting roughed up by Robert House’s security goons. He rather uncharacteristically spills every last bean about the plot to exchange cold fusion for nuclear weaponry and destroy the world so that RobCo and Vault-Tec can rule the ashes. In exchange, she facilitates a direct handover of the cold-fusion diode from Coop to the President (Clancy Brown), whom he trusts to make the right call.

We’ve seen how that works out, of course. The bombs drop. House lives on in digital form, as the Ghoul discovers when he infiltrates House’s command center. Welch winds up a nuclear-powered head in a jar. For god’s sake, the President is played by Clancy Brown, not known for his good-guy roles. As Maude Lebowski once put it, the whole thing stinks to high heaven. And if indeed Cooper Howard wound up giving away the world’s future to a real world-annihilating piece of shit, his subsequent cynicism isn’t so hard to understand. Perhaps that’s why he insists on holding onto the widget instead of Maximus, but I wouldn’t rule out a hidden motive.

And oh, while the Ghoul is sneaking into the casino, Maximus is rumbling with several deathclaws in an old suit of New California Republic power armor. The people of Freeside, who remember the NCR’s glory days, cheer him and the Ghoul and Thaddeus (whose arm falls off) as they approach the combat zone. But after the battle leaves Maximus on his back and the gates from the deathclaws’ hunting grounds to Freeside blown wide open, they’ll likely change their tune pretty quickly. 

It’s weird to refer to a show as wild and woolly as Fallout as having done anything elegantly, but I really am impressed by how this penultimate episode of the season advanced all of its storylines without feeling scattershot. Lucy and Hank and the automated-man chips, the Ghoul and Maximus and Thaddeus and their attempt to infiltrate Vegas. Coop and Barb and Welch and the Vegas flashbacks. Steph and Betty and Chet and the power struggle for the Vaults. Robert House’s quest for immortality. The bitter-tasting backstory of oppression and annihilation. A knight in power armor doing battle with a horde of monstrous troll-orcs. It’s all there, achieved with a deftness and balance many similar shows (Preacher and Mrs. Davis to name two) have never touched.

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.