Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 Recap: 'the World May End, But Progress...

The second season premiere gets a big Vault-Boy thumbs up from me.

Please note: major spoilers for Fallout Season 2 Episode 1!

I love my job—I just don't love it to the exclusion of everything else in my life, and people who put their work above all other concerns, like friends, family, and their physical and mental health, make me a bit uneasy.

Case in point: Hank MacLean, played by Kyle MacLachlan in Prime Video's Fallout series. Hank is the ultimate business zealot. Before the bombs fell, Hank was so dedicated to his work at Vault-Tec that he voluntarily had himself cryogenically frozen for a couple centuries. He got thawed out, married a Vault-dweller named Rose, had two kids, and then murdered 30,000 people with an A-bomb. All in the name of business.

And he was just getting started! In the final episode of Season 1, Hank saw his daughter learn what a monster he was, left her behind to mercy-kill her ghoulified mother, then stomped his way across the desert to reach New Vegas. As Season 2 begins we see that Hank has not been shattered by the consequences of his evil acts: he's actually invigorated and ready for more.

Discovering that the front desk at Vault-Tec has collected over 400,000 unread messages over the past two centuries actually brightens his mood. "Let's get to it!" he says with a determined grin.

Hank's business, in Fallout Season 2, Episode 1, "The Man Who Knew," is the continued development of some pretty horrifying pre-war tech: a mind-control device that can be plugged into the base of a person's skull. In the episode's pre-war cold open, Robert House—at least it seems to be House, played by Justin Theroux—demonstrates the device on a construction worker unhappy that laborers are being replaced by robots.

The scene is an easy bullseye for own modern concerns about the proliferation of AI, our fears of it both replacing jobs and doing a terrible job at the jobs its replacing, and how we're being forced to beta test technology for billionaires because it's been crammed, half-formed and malfunctioning, into all of our devices and software (and in Fallout's case, our brainstems) without our consent.

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House mind-controls the worker to murder his pals, but then seems to lose control and cranks the device up to 11, which pops the worker's head like a corn kernel on a hot skillet. "The world may end but progress marches on," he says alm

Source: PC Gamer