Warning: Major SPOILERS lie ahead for Fallout season 2, episode 8, “The Strip”!The Ghoul’s journey has hit a slight snag in Fallout season 2’s ending, though Walton Goggins assures it’s a more hopeful closure to this chapter than it might appear.
Across both seasons of the Prime Video series, Goggins has played both Hollywood actor Cooper Howard in the Pre-War timeline of the show and his mutated self, the bounty hunter simply known as The Ghoul. While initially aiming to claim the bounty on Ella Purnell’s Lucy MacLean, he ends up joining her in her efforts to track down her father, Kyle MacLachlan’s Hank, to bring him to justice for his crimes regarding Shady Sands, but more importantly, to head to New Vegas for answers regarding his family’s fate after the war.
Knowing that his wife, Frances Turner’s Barb, and daughter, Teagan Meredith’s Janey, would be housed in a management-level Vault-Tec cryotube, The Ghoul heads to the facility Hank is hiding out in after taking a deal with Justin Theroux’s revived Mr. House to see his family. However, the Fallout season 2 ending sees him discover their tubes to be empty, with the sole clue to their fate being a postcard for Colorado, a nod to Barb and Cooper’s talks of vacationing there, giving The Ghoul renewed hope to find them there alive.
In anticipation of the episode’s premiere, ScreenRant‘s Grant Hermanns interviewed Walton Goggins and Frances Turner to discuss the Fallout season 2 ending. While looking at the moment in which The Ghoul finds Barb and Janey’s cryotubes empty, the Emmy nominee recalled it being “a lot” to process and that showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet had “many conversations back and forth” about how to play the scene before he entered the mix.
From there, the trio and director Frederick E.O. Toye entered the collaborative stage of the scene, with the group reflecting on the questions “what does it mean if they are there, and what does it mean if they aren’t there?” Feeling that either answer “could have happened organically” in the Fallout season 2 ending, Goggins recalled ultimately feeling that it was “the right decision” that Janey and Barb weren’t there:
Walton Goggins: But what happens, and I didn’t know this, we set it up, Fred Toye, our director said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I don’t know, just give me enough runway to just come down here and see it, and then just see me, and then see them.” And that’s what he did. It’s only like four setups. That’s all. It’s about this guy experiencing this moment. We did it maybe three or four times.
Despite the seemingly tragic nature of finding his family to have been gone, Goggins said that The Ghoul’s Fallout season 2 ending is far more hopeful than it appears. He went on to point out the “thing that we all have in common as human beings” is the desire to hold onto a sense of hope, which is what is coursing through The Ghoul for the first time in over 200 years as he heads to Colorado to find his family:
Walton Goggins: Hope springs eternal, hope is there. And he finally got the answer that he was looking for. You may not have gotten them yet, but they’re alive, man. That’s a big f—-ng deal. It was so rich to play, I can’t wait for you to see where it’s going.
Barb’s Second Heel Turn Is Rooted In A Key Choice
Ever since the Fallout season 1 finale revealed her to be part of Vault-Tec’s planning of The Great War that would destroy the world, Frances Turner’s Barb has found herself to be something of a villain in the eyes of audiences. Much of season 2 further played with these expectations, as Barb could be seen in marketing meetings about how to sell Vault residency to the public, while also being part of meetings to sell the cold fusion technology to Mr. House.
However, as it’s progressed, Fallout season 2 has offered a more complicated picture of Barb, who’s shown conflicted over the impending nuclear war and is eventually won over to help Cooper try and stop it. Reflecting on the multiple heel turns she’s experienced with the character, Turner called it “the thing that an actor lives for,” further denoting that her being unaware of said twists allowed her to “play the truth of where she was in any given moment” and to also “trust that the writing would take me where she’s supposed to go.”
Frances Turner: Pretty much all of Barb — up until season 2, when I had to pull you [Geneva] aside and say, “Okay, what’s really going on here?” [Laughs] So much of it was revealed to me the same way it’s revealed to the audience. It was really an exercise in just trusting the writing and trusting the relationship.
The conversation then turned to her final scene in Fallout season 2’s ending, in which Cooper is arrested by the House Un-American Activities Committee after turning over the cold fusion to the US President, played by Clancy Brown, and is phoned by Mr. House saying he picked the wrong side. Though initially shown in tears watching as her husband is taken away, a brief cut shows Goggins’ character telling her to make it seem as though it was all his idea, so that she can be there to care for Janey.
Acknowledging the somewhat performative nature of the character, Turner described Barb as “trying to hold it together in a different way” in the ending. Feeling that there’s “so much underneath the surface” that she has to keep contained at any given moment, this leads to Barb “projecting to the outside world [a feeling of] authority, cool, [and] kind of confident.”
Frances Turner: So, here’s another example where she has to turn on the face to say everything’s going to be okay, but she’s worried about her husband, and it’s breaking her apart inside. Also, she’s always trying to do the right thing, and then here he steps up to take that on for the family for her, because it’s always been about Janey for her, and it’s always been about Janey for him, too. And then continues to be 219 years later, traveling across The Wasteland trying to get back to his family.
All eight episodes of Fallout season 2 are available to stream on Prime Video now!
- Release Date
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April 10, 2024
- Network
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Amazon Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan
