"The End" and "The Beginning"
It's interesting to notice that the first episode of Fallout is called "The End" and the last episode of season 1 is called "The Beginning". But that's because there are a lot of hidden meanings.
The reason this episode has this name is because it specifically refers to the big moments going on in Lucy's and the Ghoul's lives.
The "End" of Cooper Howard:
We open on October 23, 2077, with Cooper Howard performing for a kid's birthday party. During the party, the Great War breaks out as the bombs fall on America. This marks the fall of America.
But it also marks the "end" of Cooper Howard. Because the last we see of Cooper, he's riding away on Sugarfoot with Janey as the bombs fall. When we next see him, he's the Ghoul, and he's very much suppressed any attachment to the identity of Cooper Howard. He wears a tattered jacket and a bandolier over his old movie costume, and he's pretty much done everything to disassociate himself from his old identity, right down to using the Southern accent he used in his movies as his main accent.
The "End" of Lucy MacLean the Vault Dweller:
The episode being titled "The End" also fits the fact that we're seeing the final days of Lucy's life as a naive Vault Dweller. After all, a common theme amongst the Fallout games where the player character starts in a Vault is that you're irreversibly changed when you set out into the Wasteland.
And for Lucy, this moment where she passes through the vault door might as well be a metaphorical "death" scene, as demonstrated by how the blown out lighting makes it look like she's stepping "into the light".
This episode's title is also about pivotal moments for Lucy and the Ghoul, but also a few others.
The Beginning of the Great War:
This one's technically a bonus. But this episode is where we get to see the exact moment the Great War actually began: in a dimly lit room where Barb and other collaborators from Vault-Tec and other big corporations met.
The New Beginning of Cooper Howard:
Over the episodes that follow the Ghoul's little misadventure with Lucy, we see that her refusal to break despite his efforts to bring her down to his level have instead had the effect of helping him rediscover his old morals.
Here's the notable things the Ghoul does between the Super Duper Mart and when he meets Lucy again:
He takes the heat for Lucy's killing of the organ harvesters and some of the feral ghouls under questioning from Sorrel Booker.
He re-adopts CX404 and renames her Dogmeat, something that's intercut with flashbacks of him with Roosevelt, his pre-War Border Collie.
He shows sympathy for Lucy over her feeling betrayed by her dad, given he went through the same thing.
But the most telling clue that Cooper Howard has found a new beginning is the fact that his last line of the season is said in his own accent, not the Southern twang he's used as the Ghoul or in his movies:
The Beginning of Lucy MacLean the Wastelander:
A common thing we've seen across the Fallout games is that Vault Dwellers who leave their vaults can never go back.
The Vault Dweller from Fallout 1 gets banished from his Vault due to having been radically changed by his experiences in the Wasteland.
The Lone Wanderer of Fallout 3 fled into the Wasteland after nearly being killed by the Overseer. But they can't go back to the Vault for the sake of maintaining piece there following a civil war.
Lucy continues this grand tradition.
When she left Vault 33, she only went out with the intention of rescuing her dad and returning with him to the Vault. But as Wilzig warns her, she'll change, whether she wanted to or not.
Wilzig: You come from a world of rules, of laws. This place is indifferent to all of that. I do not think you would be willing to do what it takes to survive up here.
Lucy: I'm not going back without my dad.
Wilzig: If you insist on staying, then you will have to adapt. Question is will you still want the same things... when you have become a different animal altogether?
We see that Lucy does change. She becomes more jaded, cynical, violent, and less trusting of others, though she refuses to compromise her morals.
But once she gets to Moldaver, she ends up learning that all these things she was forced to endure these past two weeks were done on false pretenses: her dad's no saint at all. He's a war criminal responsible for the deaths of over 30,000 people out of petty jealousy because his wife dared to take Lucy and Norm away from him to live on the surface.
She can no longer recognize the man she once idolized and called her dad, because he was never real. She can no longer recognize herself as 'Lucy MacLean, Dutiful Vault Dweller" because that girl died when she stepped out of Vault 33. Her whole life has been nothing but lies.
And that feeling is only reinforced by what the Ghoul says: "You want to know how I know your daddy, don't you? Let's just say that everything about your whole little world was decided over 200 years ago." And while the Ghoul continues talking and tells her that she'll be killed by the Brotherhood if she sticks around, he's blurred out, visually conveying that Lucy has tuned him out and her inquisitive mind is stuck on the last sentence.
She wants answers, and the one who can help her find them is the man who pistol-whipped her, used her as bait for a Gulper, cut off her finger, and sold her organ harvesters.
She can't go back to Vault 33 again. Maybe she returns to rescue Norm and Chet, but there's no way she can ever live there again.
So she does the only thing she can do in this situation: she puts her mom out of her misery, and embraces the identity of "Lucy MacLean, Wastelander".
Ella Purnell said it best: "By killing her mum in a mercy kill, she’s doing exactly what the Ghoul did to Roger [in episode four]. She’s learnt from him. She has turned into him. When she said, “I’ll never be you,” maybe that’s not true. And in that moment, when she shoots her mum, it means so many things. It means, ‘I’m coming with you.’ It means, ‘I’m gonna meet my makers.’ It means, ‘I fucking hate you, but I have turned into you, you were right.’ It means she’s letting go of her golden centre."
The Beginning of Lucy and the Ghoul's partnership:
And of course, "The Beginning" is the start of Lucy and Cooper Howard's partnership.
It's a big shift for them to have gone from Lucy being his hostage...
...to her being his traveling companion.
Now it can truly be a mentor-mentee relationship where they bring each other to a sort of middle level, where Cooper softens and rediscovers his old ideals while Lucy hardens without compromising her morals.
I think Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins described this best in Variety's interview about shooting the Griffith Observatory finale (skip to 17:55):
Purnell’s lightbulb moment hit when she realized it all came back to the Ghoul.
“Part of the Wasteland that I carry with me literally is, it’s not the Wasteland; it’s the Ghoul. I’ve turned into him when I said I wasn’t going to do that,” says Purnell. “Most of Lucy hates herself for what she’s turned into, hates him for what he’s turned her into. But she doesn’t have a choice. She can’t stay here. When he says, ‘Do you want to go meet your makers?’ Lucy is never going to say no to that. And so, it’s not a broken ‘okie-dokie.’ It’s an acceptance of what’s happened to her. It’s an, ‘OK, there’s nothing else for me to do except put one foot in front of the other.’”
Goggins says the scene was one of the “most fulfilling parts” of the project since it started so brutally and ended slightly softer but not overly sentimental. The actor is glad the co-creators didn’t lean into that sentimentality.
“It isn’t father-daughter,” he says. “I think it is a person who has seen the loss of innocence in another person and deeply empathizes with it because he himself went through a similar experience 200 years earlier and is still reeling from the loss of that innocence that his tone changes. And when he says, ‘Are you coming?’ I just think that’s a pretty cool way to go out.”
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