Fubar Season 2’s ending was about Luke, Tally, Chips, Emma, Barry, Roo, Aldon, Farkas, Reed, and Dr. Pfeffer stopping Dante from kicking off nuclear armageddon. Initially, it was assumed that Dante wanted to cause the collapse of the American economy, which would trigger a domino effect and lead to the destruction of the global economy. How? By attacking the four main points of the power grid that provided electricity to the United States of America, which were located in Kodiak, Litchfield, New Mexico, and Colorado. Dante, with the help of his trusted aide, Greta, had managed to take down three of them, thereby making the Carson Hydroelectric Dam his last target. But right when Luke was done securing the dam, Greta arrived, threatening to undo all the work he and Chips had done. Emma and Roo showed up too, which led to a standoff. Luke got Greta to stand down by convincing her that if they tricked Dante into thinking that they’d killed America’s power grid, he would pay her her fees. That’d expose Dante’s location and allow Luke and his team to nab him. However, as soon as they temporarily switched off the power grid, the entire country’s nuclear system was activated, as it saw the electricity shutdown as a threat to the nation. So, finding Dante wasn’t a priority for them anymore; saving the world was. Did Luke and the team succeed? Was Dante ever found? Let’s see.
Spoiler Alert
Chips Was Dante
As soon as the United States of America went to DEFCON 1, Luke and his crew were hit with the realization that this was Dante’s plan all along. The threat of economic collapse was just a ruse. He wanted to shut down the power grid to activate the nukes. Since every country, especially Russia, kept track of who was readying their nuclear arsenal, they’d do the same, and that’d inevitably escalate into the annihilation of mankind. Chips put forth the theory that, since the nukes couldn’t be disabled digitally due to the electrical reboot, there must be a physical backdoor to the nuclear operating system that’d allow the authorities to stop an apocalypse caused by a glitch like the one they were staring at. Luke revealed that, back in the day, four operatives were given the password to one such backdoor that’d disable the nukes, and Luke was the only one alive to use it. Since one of the only ways to feed the password into the system was via voice recognition, Luke would have to be present inside one of the many nuclear silos. As all the silos were interconnected, shutting down one silo would shut down all of them.
Back at the CIA facility in Newark, Barry, Farkas, and Reed were worried that, in the time that it’d take for Luke and the others to get to that silo, Russia might just initiate a nuclear strike. Since it was impossible to establish contact with the Kremlin, they had to rely on the next best thing: SVR agents Volek and Tina. Tina knew that Volek had betrayed her and used her skills to help out Dante while convincing her that whatever she was doing, she was doing for Russia. So, she didn’t really hesitate before revealing Volek’s location to the CIA. In the meantime, Luke and his team reached the silo and motivated the old-timer to remember the password, which was an excuse for the show to make a list of cinematic references. Here are the ones that I caught: Total Recall, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Survivor, Star Wars: A New Hope, The Terminator, and Titanic. And the one that cracked the code was the “Wazzup” Budweiser commercial. While all this was going on, Aldon made his way into Volek’s house. With Barry’s help, he tried to fix the satellites that the latter had programmed to block all communication so that Reed could establish contact with the Russians and stop them from preemptively launching their nukes. But Volek knocked out Aldon to keep Dante’s plan of nuclear annihilation alive, and, at the same time, Chips revealed that he was actually Dante while holding one of the two airmen stationed at the silo at gunpoint.
Dante’s Motivation
Since Luke, Emma, Greta, and Roo weren’t exactly convinced that Dante would actually kill someone, he shot the male airman while continuing to treat the female airman as his hostage. Volek was about to kill Aldon, but Barry remotely controlled Aldon’s car and crashed into Volek’s house, crushing the Russian to death and saving Aldon. As far as I remember, Fubar had never really established that any of their cars had this ability. But given how the show isn’t synonymous with the simple concept of setups and payoffs, I can’t exactly criticize it for something that it can’t do. Going back to the silo, Dante began his “villain yapping session,” where he explained that he had learned about Luke from his father. When Luke and Greta averted the Y2K disaster, Dante found out about the voice-activated nuclear missile control mechanism, and that Luke was one of the four people who could use it. Hence, Dante teamed up with Greta and began making his way to Luke, which eventually led all of them to the silo. I’m sure there are a few steps missing here, but if the series didn’t use Dante to explain how exactly he went from being a fanboy of Luke to a master manipulator of legendary spies, that’s not really my fault. Make up your own imaginary story and rationalize Dante’s decision any way you want; I’m sure the showrunners won’t really mind it, because even they don’t care if anything about the show works or not.
Anyway, Dante entered the command into the system to get all the nukes to launch, but Roo disconnected the line that linked all the silos to the one the characters were in. That didn’t ruin Dante’s plan because the command had commenced the launch of the missile they were near, and he knew that as soon as it hit the stratosphere, Russia would respond in kind, then America would do the same, and the war that he always wanted would begin. He destroyed the computer, hurt Luke, and then proceeded to make his way to the fallout shelter where he’d seek protection while the world burned. Emma went after Dante. Roo and the airman tried searching for some way to stop the missile from fueling because no fuel means no launch capacity. Luke and Greta got to the warhead to see if they could disarm it before it became airborne. Emma tried to get Dante to stand down and stop him from taking out the anger that he felt on the world just because his father had been used and then killed by his superiors in a fake mission to protect a politician involved in a sex scandal.
Dante clarified that while he and his dad did go on a mission to cover-up a politician’s crimes, Dante’s father wasn’t killed by those who had framed him; he was killed by Dante himself. He said that his father feared that Dante would “give up their position” during the shootout, since Dante was shot and probably crying in pain a little too loudly, which was why he tried to smother his own son. In retaliation, Dante killed his dad. Apparently, that day, Dante realized that the world didn’t deserve to exist because it had turned into a place that forced a father to try and kill his son and a son to successfully kill his father. Again, I don’t really understand the logic behind it because the show doesn’t have the space to dwell on the villain’s motivations after using up all the time it had at its disposal on the most nonsensical shenanigans imaginable to mankind. On paper, yeah, sure, patricide leading to the creation of a genocidal maniac makes some kind of sense. But in execution, it’s just confusing. At this point, you can either take it or leave it.
Dante Died
While chasing Dante, Emma came across that airman that the supervillain had shot and chose to take him to safety before resuming her pursuit. Roo and the other airman’s plan failed. Aldon managed to unblock the satellites, thereby allowing Reed to tell the Russians to stand down, but they didn’t believe him because they could see that the Americans were preparing to launch one of their nukes. Which meant that, even if Luke and Greta deactivated the warhead, the Russians would still see it as an operable nuke and retaliate. Therefore, they would have to prevent the missile from leaving American airspace, and to do that, either Luke or Greta would have to be inside the missile and bring it down safely. Greta chose to sacrifice herself because Luke had a family to look after while she had nothing much to live for. At the end of Fubar Season 2, Roo warned everyone in the silo that 15 seconds before launch, the blast doors would automatically shut down. So, they needed to clear the space before the missile took off. Emma used this opportunity to trap Dante in the silo. As there was no way to get the blast doors open, Dante was burnt to a crisp. Yes, I know that in the previous season, Boro (a much more well-established villain than Dante) made some kind of a miraculous escape as a bomb went off near him, only to be shot to death a few moments later. However, in the case of Dante, nothing like that happened. He was turned to ashes, thereby meeting the same fate that he’d written for the entire world.
Meanwhile, Greta prevented the missile from leaving American airspace, and the deactivated warhead landed on the banks of a lake in Utah. When Emma and Luke came to inspect it, Greta emerged out of it in one piece, as she had used a special kind of foam, the same one that was supposed to clog the aforementioned dam, to protect her from the impact. Although Emma had promised to arrest her for working with Dante, she gave Greta a free pass because she had just saved the world. After Greta had left the scene, Luke proceeded to explain how he, Tally, and Dr. Pfeffer had concocted this plan to fake the Brunner couple’s breakup. Because they thought that if Greta believed she had even a sliver of a chance of getting back with Luke, then she would defy Dante and save the world. I don’t know what the point of this scene was since Greta had already revealed that she almost sacrificed herself so that Luke could live a complete life with his family. I know that it’s futile to expect the creators of the show to make emotional or logical sense; yet, I keep trying.
Coming back to the plot, during the concluding moments of the show, Luke announced that he was retiring, and he remarried Tally. Emma had turned down Unit 9’s acceptance letter and was all set to date Aldon. Everyone (well, almost everyone) got the green light to go back home after living with each other for months in a CIA-sanctioned safehouse. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me because Boro had exposed the real identities of Luke, his family, and his friends, which must be available in some form to all (there were a lot) of their enemies. It was insinuated that Greta had eliminated everyone who had purchased that info from Boro to protect Luke and his loved ones. But that just sounds preposterous even by the show’s own standards, which makes me think that this “return to normalcy” is a giant hoax to get Luke to let down his guard. We’ll see. In the meantime, Aldon gave away his pet pig, Hamsteak, to Romi, Luke’s granddaughter. Reed sent Carter and Donnie to a CIA listening post (probably a homage to what was done to Donloe in Mission: Impossible) for 4 years for being involved in the death of a member of a biker gang, tasing a police officer, stealing a police car, and doing drugs. Roo got the job of regional director of the CIA. Barry and Aldon traveled to Finland to hand Tina over to the Russians in exchange for the Great Dane, who had been inexplicably abducted by them. While returning to the USA, the Great Dane told Barry and Aldon that he had noticed a lot of anomalies in Tina’s work, which indicated that she was helping the CIA instead of the SVR, which meant that she was still in love with Barry, despite acting like she had betrayed him for her country. After knowing that, Barry was elated, but elation suddenly turned into dread as the Great Dane revealed that he had pointed out the discrepancies to Tina’s superiors, and that meant they were going to kill her for siding with the Americans, hence setting the stage for the inevitable third season of Fubar, which would involve the CIA entering Mother Russia to rescue Tina.
