The fifth episode of Fallout season 2, “The Wrangler,” brought three of its stories to exciting heights. Where the previous episode gave a lot of attention to Maximus, “The Wrangler” focuses entirely on Lucy’s experience in New Vegas, Norm’s group, and The Ghoul’s flashback story. This episode follows the exciting cliffhanger of the previous episode, with Lucy and The Ghoul escaping fairly quickly in the wake of multiple Deathclaws coming from the shadows. They spend most of the episode in Freeside, with The Ghoul drinking contemplatively and Lucy finding a remedy for her drug addiction. While The Ghoul has very little to do, Lucy kills the fake owner of a drugstore as she steals medicine and a weapon. A bulk of the episode, instead, is dedicated to Cooper meeting Robert House and the complex inner workings of his espionage assassination scheme. The specifics of the apocalypse are called into question, and Cooper’s moral dilemma hits a high point as he gets drunk. Finally, Norm’s side story with Vault 31 gets added layers when they discover a Vault-Tech building, and Norm is told that Lucy is likely dead.

In isolation, this episode’s tight focus helped deepen the character of The Ghoul/Cooper by having him present (in either form) for a majority of the episode. A minor consequence of this focus, however, is that Lucy’s heavy moral swing did not have enough room to breathe. On one hand, the speed at which she killed the man worked well, especially with her polite pleading. On the other hand, it would have helped to see her reckoning with it more, or even giving her more scenes alone. Interestingly enough, the episode succeeded in this attention to character with The Ghoul, as the scenes of him sitting at the bar or walking around in silence were quite evocative of what might be going on in his head. Lucy’s scenes were engaging, but the episode would have benefited from more of them. Being a side plot, the lack of screen time for Norm’s storyline was more forgivable. Additionally, his plotline has worked extremely well, though it suffers slightly from its inconsistent placement within the season at large. Overall, some individual storylines within this episode were engaging, but got overshadowed by the Cooper storyline. 

The inconsistent attention given to each character is more of an issue with the season, but its symptoms become particularly clear in episodes like this. However, the sheer number of storylines forces a show like this to either give very little attention to everyone in every episode, or give characters disjointed attention on an episode-to-episode basis. This system has worked incredibly well for The Ghoul, but it builds demand for Lucy to be given more attention. Still, regarding the season’s overarching storyline, “The Wrangler” was incredibly important and left all three of its storylines in extremely engaging places. It is unclear whether or not the remaining episodes will strike an even balance or continue to bounce around. In isolation, The Ghoul and Robert House were standouts of the episode, with Lucy and Norm doing remarkably compelling things in very limited screen time. 

Rating: 7/10