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My Fallout season 2, episode 3 predictions

Going off impartial IMDb cast listings, what we've seen in trailers, and in the "next on" preview for episode 3 above, here's what I can guess will happen:

Lucy and the Ghoul vs. Caesar's Legion:

The Ghoul will rescue Lucy from the Legion, though Lucy will do a bit of saving herself. What Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins have said in interviews is that Lucy and the Ghoul will come to an understanding about this and what happened at the hospital. And Goggins in particular says the Ghoul makes a very big decision that revolves around saving Lucy.

The Ghoul now realizes that he really needs to learn to communicate with Lucy and explain things to her. It was admittedly in-character for him to have not been better at articulating the threat; he's been largely by himself for the last 219 years. People skills aren’t exactly his strong suit anymore, and he probably hasn’t had proper conversations with someone who is new to the wasteland in a long time either.

On his end of this thread, he'll realize pretty quickly that something has happened to Lucy. The reason why is because despite being ticked off at him for killing the other slave due to this communication failure, Lucy *did* say she would come back for him. And she was very concerned for his safety after he was injured; the only reason she made the snap decision to not give him her last stimpak was because the Legion slave (who was injured due to him using her as a human shield) cried out for help, she figured the woman was likelier to die without immediate medical attention. And even then she felt bad about having to leave him behind, though she uses cruelty to try and mask her guilt.

So when Lucy doesn't return soon, or when the Ghoul's recovered enough from the radscorpion poison to get back up, his first thought will be that he needs to save her from the Legion, and it's all his fault that that's happened. And in desperation, he'll turn to the NCR (sworn enemies of the Legion) to try and get help. The "Next on" teaser showed the clips from the August and November trailers of the Ghoul visiting Camp Golf, talking to an NCR Trooper, and encountering Victor.

I think he'll try to get the NCR's help, but they're stretched far and thin and see it as borderline suicidal. So the Ghoul will be on his own, and I think he'll have to don a disguise to get into the Legion camp. They've prominently hinted at this through that Revenge of Brutus poster on the wall of his house behind Barb when she gets home in episode 1, which is also what we see at the start of the episode 2 credits.

He'll get in, find Lucy, they'll kill a bunch of the Legionaries, and find refuge with the NCR at a different garrison (possibly the one in Primm, since the episode 1 credits showcased that town).

Meanwhile, at the Legion camp, well, it's hard to say what Lucy will go through, aside from two things:

Even though the slave did make mention of how the Legion are rapists, Lucy won't be violated. This is Fallout, after all, not Game of Thrones.

By being captured and having to find a way to escape, Lucy will learn that she cannot save everyone, and sometimes you will have to commit violence in order to survive. It's perhaps appropriate that this moment will come from encountering a group notorious for their mistreatment of women (it's pretty telling that this slave was telling Lucy, "I wouldn't want to see you get raped by the wrong people"). And that starts with the very woman that Lucy just tried to help out. I doubt that her superiors are going to be pleased with her mission's failure and her partner getting killed (I think they were at the hospital on a scavenging mission to get medical supplies when the scorpions attacked), and that's why she's clearly begging for mercy from Culkin here:

I'm pretty sure that in these images of Lucy being brought before Caesar (the image of Lucy is from the "next on" while the image of Caesar is from this behind the scenes video), that's the rescued slave's head on the pike to Culkin's right.

It'll sicken Lucy that in her efforts to be a good person, she just brought this woman to her death. And once the Ghoul gets into the camp to help her, or possibly before he even shows up, she'll be itching to go on a killing spree.

There must be a reason why we haven't seen much footage of whatever battle happens at the Legion camp. Just this clip from trailer 2 of one of the tents being blown up, and a clip of Culkin stabbing another Legionary to death. I believe that's because this is going to be the first time Lucy will have to kill a living human being. To date, she's only ever wounded other humans (injuring a few of the raiders from the Blue Wedding, and shooting Great Khans in the arms and buttocks in Novac), and the only times she's killed humanoids were when she killed feral ghouls (killing Martha in self-defense at the Super Duper Mart, and mercy killing her mother).

However things go, Lucy is reunited with the Ghoul, they find refuge with the NCR, and we get this scene that was in trailer 1 where the Ghoul is now addressing her as "Miss MacLean" (this admittedly might not be in episode 3, but at the start of episode 4).

I think the Ghoul's guilt over how he's been treating her ever since they first met has finally caught up to him by the point of this scene, and he's come to terms with the fact that he needs to treat Lucy like an equal, not like a child. That he's addressing her in this trailer 1 clip as "Miss MacLean" is a start to that. This could even lay the foundation for him to admit the truth down the line about really being Cooper Howard.

But Lucy doesn't feel all that great about having to make concessions to her "Golden Rule" philosophy to save her own skin, even if the people she killed to do so were pieces of human garbage, and that leads her to turn to using chems (interviews, set visit articles, and a few of the shirts on the Amazon Fallout store have hinted at this). The consequences of this decision will then be on display when she and the Ghoul encounter the ghoul Kings outside Vegas come episode 4.

Having to kill Legionaries to save herself is the one thing that I think can explain Lucy going from being hesitant to kill the Great Khans in Novac to ruthlessly gunning down ghoulified Kings here in Vegas without thinking. There's a learning curve.

Brotherhood of Steel Civil War:

From what we saw in the teasers and in this preview, Paladin Harkness will be taking Maximus under his wing. Perhaps tellingly, he mentions that "this isn't the first time that the Brotherhood has been on the verge of civil war." He can only be specifically referring to the last internal conflict that happened on the West Coast in the early 2270s in which Arthur Maxson's parents were killed, and which got so bad that the young Maxson had to be sent to the Capital Wasteland to be raised at the Citadel by Owyn Lyons for his own safety. This is all documented in a terminal entry in the Citadel in Fallout 3.

They'll be going to a facility that's guarded by still working Securitrons, assuming this is Maximus or Harkness we see engaging this particular Mark II Securitron (it has the cigar-chomping army soldier face of the Mark IIs, though the screen flickers and briefly takes on the crossed-out face of the Damaged Securitrons that Dr. 0 tried building at the Big Empty).

Not sure what Harkness' motives are for recruiting Maximus, but I'd assume they are in no small part related to the fact that Quintus has all but declared Maximus to be his heir. I think he might be trying to butter up Maximus to give him information on Quintus he can send back to the Commonwealth.

Pre-War Cooper Howard:

We'll get back to the pre-War storyline in this episode, and get this scene of Cooper meeting Charlie Whiteknife at an American Veteran Entertainment Alliance fundraiser. From the teaser, I think Cooper has turned to Charlie for advice because he's really uncomfortable with the idea of assassinating House, as Moldaver is strongly suggesting he do. But Charlie's not the only person Cooper's going to meet there...

...because he's also going to meet Robert House himself there. For whatever reason, House is there pretending to be a military vet, but Cooper susses out that he's someone with an ulterior motive. I'm thinking House knows that Moldaver is looking into him (because Moldaver must still have some very powerful connections in order for her to have learned about House building his missile defense system), and that what's gotten Cooper on his radar.

I think it's also interesting that they're having Cooper meet House before ever visiting the Lucky 38. From the looks of it, I don't think Cooper will recognize him as House. And the reason I guess that is because they established in our first scene with House in episode 1 that he's been so reliant on using the body double played by Rafi Silver for public appearances that he can walk around in public without ever being recognized. Plus in a different teaser, they showed Cooper riding up an elevator to the Lucky 38 penthouse with the body double, and trailer 1 showed House swiveling around in his chair at the monitor bank like a Bond villain as Cooper entered the penthouse. I think that only then will Cooper realize that he talked to the real House at the previous meeting.

Man... I really wanted Xander to be cool and show Max there was another way and then nope, though charismatic, he still embodies all the stuff I hate about the Brotherhood.

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