Fallout Season 2 Episode 8 recap: 'Everyone works for me eventually'

Warning: Complete spoilers for Fallout Season 2 Episode 8!

After episodes 6 and 7 came in at a mere 43 minutes long, I was hoping Fallout Season 2 Episode 8 would be a 90-minute corker with all the loose plot threads we've been following all season neatly wrapped up.

Alas, the final episode of Fallout Season 2, "The Strip", is another short one, clocking in at about 46 minutes, and it does more table-setting for Season 3 than wrapping up of Season 2. Don't fret, though: there's still a lot going on, a few fun reveals, some action, and a couple of resolutions.

Right off the bat, we get one of the answers we've been waiting for, though it's not remotely surprising. The Legion's civil war comes to an end as Lacerta Legate drags Caesar's (the original Caesar, not the two interim Caesars) skeletonized corpse from the fray of battle and into a tent, where he finally reads the note of succession.

The note reads "I as Caesar. I am the Legion. It ends with me." Wow, who would have thought this monstrous, murderous dictator was also a selfish jerk? Lacerta (Macaulay Culkin, whose real name is Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin, which is true, you can look that up), his hopium fully replaced with copium, knifes the only other witness, eats the note, and proclaims himself the new Caesar. No one in the Legion even bothers to fact-check his claim, but you know how the Legion is. Off to reclaim New Vegas!

Meanwhile, the newly awakened Mr. House basically confirms another suspicion of ours: he's fully digitized now. "Over the years my body became something of a target for wandering travelers with something to prove," House says from his giant monitor, finally making a reference to us, the Fallout: New Vegas players, the collective Courier. "I've been poisoned, shot, bludgeoned with a crowbar," he says. Yeah, we did mess you up bad as you lay there helpless in your metal diaper. Heh.

The Ghoul threatens to destroy the cold fusion diode, though House warns the explosion would be so big the damage would "extend to other planets." Uh, what? Excuse me? People have been carrying that thing around in their necks and pockets for 200 years—maybe it should have a warning label on it. They come to an agreement: The Ghoul will get to open his family's freezer doors if he leaves the fusion chip where it is, powering Mr. House.

Lucy's main quest comes to a head—literally. Poor Diane Welch does appear to have been just as she seemed: a sweet, boring, yet well-meaning person, now a severed head in a jar, her gentle thoughts reprogramming the wasteland savages. As people often do when Lucy meets them in horrible circumstances, Diane begs Lucy to kill her, and Lucy eventually obliges. With a crowbar.

"Like it or not, Mr. Howard, everyone works for me eventually," House says as The Ghoul put on a special Pip-Boy with House on the screen. I want that. I want one of those. It's like in Portal 2, where we got to carry around a tiny version of GLaDOS in potato form. Something about a chatty wee computerized villain on your wrist is fun. House reveals that the special vault Hank has been holed up in was made for "Vault-Tec investors," and admits there was an invisible adversary one step ahead of him: The Enclave. What's more, House confirms Hank is one of the Enclave, which we pretty much had guessed, though it's still nice to have it confirmed.

Meanwhile, Maximus got tail-slapped by a deathclaw and now there are, like, seven deathclaws stomping into Freeside. Luckily, his NCR armor was apparently built by Tony Stark and has all sorts of hidden weapons that abruptly come online like they did in that Spider-Man movie, and soon he's firing rockets from his back, flying, chopping off limbs, and blowing up heads. Vegas being Vegas, when Max's suit begins to malfunction, the locals don't want to help, they just want to place bets on whether Max will die or not.

Luckily, Max gets a hand (one hand) from Thaddeus, who squeezes off a perfectly-timed sniper shot to kill a Deathclaw, but can't reload on account of missing one of his arms. Max ditches his busted armor and picks up a roulette wheel as a shield and a pool cue as a spear to face down the rest of the deathclaws, because all Max wants to do is protect people, even if those people are actively betting on him dying. I have come to be quite fond of Max this season. I hereby demand he never be hurt or sad again in this show.

Luckily, again, Max is saved by a perfectly-timed sniper shot, again, but this time it's from the NCR, who have finally gotten their shit together and marched into Vegas. Hooray? I guess. Sorry, you can show me the iconic NCR helmet once as the Fallout theme plays and I'll get goosebumps, but the second time it falls flat. You got greedy, showrunners!

Meanwhile, Norm's situation goes from bad to worse as the pack of Bud's Buds accidentally open the elevator of the Vault-Tec building, last seen being used as a radroach farm. These are some high-level roaches, though. First off, they fly—and I don't mean the sort of hopping while flapping their wings they do in Fallout 4. I mean they buzz around like hornets on Jet.

Second, they tear people's throats out. Remember, this is a creature you kill as a kid with a BB gun in Fallout 3. They are tutorial-level monsters. I don't know what Ma June has been feeding them. Anyway, the roaches slaughter everyone not wearing plot armor, leaving just Norm and an injured Claudia, who leave the building and I assume head back to their Vault.

Back in New Vegas, The Ghoul arrives just in time to save Lucy from getting a mind-control chip implanted by shooting Hank in the ass. He leaves Hank's fate to Lucy, who decides she's going to implant him with the control chip so he finally becomes a good dad. Unfortunately, she's too late: he's already got a chip in his neck, miniaturized so small that you can't even see it, and he's apparently implanted tons of other people with them and sent them out into the world.

"The surface is the experiment, not the Vaults," Hank says. "Unbeknownst to anyone, they're following orders written for them centuries ago."

An undetectable mind-control chip? The Fallout show has basically re-invented Synths. Hank pushes the button to activate the chips, his included, and becomes a nice guy but loses his memory. So, Lucy essentially hugs the shell of her terrible father goodbye and has a tearful reunion with Max.

In a flashback to pre-war Vegas, pre-war Hank and pre-war Steph are pre-war… married? That brings new meaning to the word power couple. In present-day Vault 32, Steph, outed as a secret 200-year old Canadian, opens Hank's secret box and outs herself as a secret 200-year-old Canadian member of the Enclave. She calls for Phase 2 to be activated. That's probably not good: it's what Bud's personal assistant Ronnie said involved Future Enterprise Ventures, which is actually the Forced Evolutionary Virus . The signal is picked up in the Enclave outpost in the mountains we saw briefly in Season 1, the same one Siggi Wilzig smuggled out the fusion diode out of.

And finally, finally, after 200 years and two seasons of searching, The Ghoul finds the cryo tubes that contain his missing wife and daughter, only, they don't, they're empty, because they're now hiding in Season 3. Hank's wife left him a note, which is at least interesting because somehow she knew he'd still be alive to find her 200 years later, and she and Janey are in Colorado with the Enclave. Quest updated! We also learn that Cooper was arrested for being a commie pinko in the past, hence his movie star career ending and his birthday clown career beginning.

We're not done yet! The Legion, now led by Macauley Caesar, is marching to Vegas to meet the standing army of NCR while Lucy and Max watch from the Lucky 38.

"There's gonna be a war and it's all my fault," Lucy says.

"Yeah, well, welcome to the wasteland," Max says. Because he also started a war! Wait, what happened to that war between the Brotherhood, anyway? After the credits, we get a tiny glimpse: It's in full swing, and elder cleric "Quintus the Unifier" has renamed himself "Quintus the Destroyer" and unrolls blueprints for Liberty Prime Alpha. Coming in Season 3: a really, really big robot.

Now we're done! Great season, and there are lots of unanswered questions to ponder over while we begin our long, long wait for Season 3. Is Norm's Vault going to get dosed with FEV? What are the orders being broadcast to the neck chips? Was it really the Enclave who dropped the first bombs? Where did Ron Perlman's super mutant go? Where is the Brotherhood of Steel's war taking place? What the hell kind of mutant is Thaddeus turning into?

And why, why did we spend so much time with Vault 33's incest support group with no apparent payoff? See you in about eighteen months for Season 3!