Bradylama
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Yeah. I'm thinking I'm back!
Episodes 1-3
This is just the Johnathan Nolan episodes. I'm not even half way done with reviewing the series. Here's a taste from episode 4 just to prove I don't hate everything about this:
Notes on Episode 4:
NOTES ON EPISODE 5:
Notes on Episode 6
Notes on Episode 7
Notes on Episode 8
Notes on Creative Troika; Pre-Prep for Nolanverse Redux
Return to the Nolanverse Episode 1:
(I was disatisfied with my notes for the Jon Nolan episodes since I was noting things down a lot more casually. Most of the problems with the show stem from here, which is why I had to go back and re-review).
Notes for Return to the Nolanverse Episode 2
Return to the Nolanverse Episode 3: Revenge of Georgetown
Episodes 1-3
Fallout tv
Notes & unanswered questions
Episode 1
- negotiations break down with “America’s adversaries”, unnamed. No mention of China.
Confirms that nukes were from vault tec.
- President was nowhere to be found for negotiations. Indicates that Enclave knew about the
conspiracy. Who struck first? An open question with unnamed adversaries.
- LA hit with ground bursts, looks like a cartoon
- why doesn’t cooper care about his daughter?
- “Lee moldaver” is a pseudonym or else Hank would recognize it. Yet he also doesn’t
recognize Moldaver. Vaults 32 & 33 communicate through telegrams but they’ve also traded
people. The “grain blight” was a past event by Moldaver’s implication.
- Nobody asks questions of the raiders. They are shown to have bad table manners. One of
the raiders has a neck sleeve tattoo that nobody questions. Nobody had rad spikes on their
pip boys.
- Vault planning to accelerate “reclamation day” from 500 year plan because of falling
radiation. WHAT IS CAUSING RADIATION LEVELS TO GO DOWN SO RAPIDLY?
- Door to vault 32 left wide open. Only norm checks it out. Discovers immediately the grain
blight was a lie.
- A raider admits later that they don’t know what 32 dwellers were up to, meaning Moldaver
kept her crew in the dark. If the raiders don’t know what they’re there for, why would they
leave the vault? They should want to take it over. They have all the advantages.
- The fucking jelly mold joke. After the alarm goes off.
- Why didn’t Hank get the “inter vault door breach” alert while norm was in vault 32?
- Children are at the brotherhood base. Does the brotherhood only recruit male orphans?
Where are the women? There are women.
- Power armors are left unattended & unguarded. The most holy relics and armor.
- Dane did boot thing to himself. Why not have Maximus do it? Makes him less Interesting.
- Lucy has to staple her stab wound but shouldn’t the stimpak cure it? How could she fight
with an open wound?
- Chet does have the authorization codes as the door guy. How did Rose escape? My theory:
Moldaver was a vault tec executive who contacted Rose through the telegrams.
- 33’s entrance door is exposed to sunlight. There’s no effort to conceal it at all. Human
remains litter the entranceway? People who didn’t make it? Wastelanders? How does
everyone not know about 33? Vault entrance is in the middle of Venice beach! It’s an obvious
landmark! How did The Master’s army not find it? It’s right on the coastline.
- Maximus joined the brotherhood to “hurt the people who hurt me.” Why isn’t he a
brotherhood fanatic? “I wanted it to happen, is that wrong?” Cleric: “violence is merely a
tool.” Why so genocidal then? “Eden, or whatever” is Eden something the brotherhood
believes in? Why doesn’t the cleric care about the flippancy with their beliefs? He knows
he’s a non-believer.
- Orders come from high clerics in the commonwealth to hunt down Wilzig. Is the brotherhood
in contact with the enclave?how would they know about Wilzig and how do they know about
the cold fusion core?
- Bounty hunters offer a bounty to cooper and he kills them anyway. Who is Dom Pedro and
why is he keeping cooper in a graveyard? They freed him from confinement and he kills
them. How does Honcho know that Wilzig is heading to Moldaver in California? Did the
Enclave issue the bounties? Honcho has a hand drawn sketch? Why didn’t Honcho explain
that cooper worked with his dad? The threat was dumb and unnecessary.
Johnathan Nolan wrote this shit?
Episode 2
- Wilzig really cares about Dogmeat for basically no reason. The Enclave has a massive
research facility. How? They tease super mutants on the gurney. Why does The Enclave have
the cold fusion core when Moldaver’s research was bought out by Vault-Tec? Wilzig injects
glowing radioactive material in his head but doesn’t get radiation poisoning. Why wasn’t the
Enclave monitoring something as valuable as the cold fusion core? There’s no security for it.
Wilzig steals it like it’s office supplies. Wilzig’s colleague discovers dog meat and sounds the
alarm, so what was Wilzig’s plan? Live with a glowing rock in his head? He only leaves
because of the alarm.
- Wilzig meets Lucy in the most cliched and creepy way possible. Did Johnathan Nolan have a
tv tropes page open for this? Wilzig walks off into the darkness after saying something
cryptic. Doesn’t even say his name. Yet another cliche. It’s ironic that Wilzig is the most
interesting character so far and he’s about to be killed off before we actually know anything
about him.
- Titus defies orders from the clerics because he “wants to shoot something.” Why doesn’t
anyone care about his disciplinary problems? He’s defying orders from the highest authority
in the Brotherhood. Maximus could have told the truth and the vertibird pilot could
corroborate it.
- Wilzig sits on a busted radioactive waste barrel. That scene was just to set up the Yao guai?
Titus wasn’t even looking for Wilzig. Maximus doesn’t even try to shoot the Yao Guai even
though pistol rounds wouldn’t pen a T-60. So it really is Maximus’s fault. Maximus stares
slack jawed the whole time. Yeah Maximus has no initiative whatsoever. Maximus is willing
to let Titus die by citing Brotherhood precepts but he wasn’t willing to put the razor in Dane’s
boot? He’s an idiot. “Not if I bring back the target.”
- Water filter guy. He really was putting sand in the water filter? How does anyone survive if
they’re all this stupid? Filly is known as a dangerous settlement, which is why filter guy has
never been, even though it’s the only market town in the area. The transition from desert to
fully verdant forest is immediate.
- Maximus would’ve had to wash Titus’s blood, piss, and shit from the power armor operator’s
suit. Missed opportunity for a funny sight gag. Maximus revels in having power armor so
much he’s practically a child.
- Filly has an outer market while the actual city is walled and made with trash. Admittedly not
a bad touch. Fully seemed a lot smaller when I thought it was just the downtown.
- Cooper is thumbing a vial to show he’s low on ghoul juice.
- THERE ARE STIMPAKS IN THE DISPLAY CASE OF THE GENERAL STORE BUT THEY
WONT GIVE WILZIG ONE EVEN DESPITE THE CONTRACT WITH MOLDAVER!!!
- It’s a shame I’m about to hate on this scene. The store owner is the best character in the
whole season.
- “Everyone knows who Moldaver is.” So why don’t we know who Moldaver is? Do people
fear her? Do they admire her? Both? What is she trying to do, actually? Why does she
conduct the NCR remnants like a raider band? Imminent questions which are never
answered.
- “And why is that?” Ma June’s statements about the vaults should be causing Lucy more
existential angst. The whole purpose of the vault as she knows it is irrelevant if people
already populate the surface and have an active culture.
- Wilzig knows intimate details about the design and inner workings of Vault 33. Does he know
its actual purpose? To the script’s credit Lucy does ask how he knows so much. Maybe the
first time anyone has asked an obvious question when it’s demanded.
- “Your kind ain’t welcome here.” What did Ma June mean by that? Cooper being a ghoul?
Cooper being a bounty hunter? How are ghouls tolerated at all if they’re all fated to go feral?
Ghouls could fit in to society in the first place because they weren’t a danger to others. How
would the Enclave know that Wilzig injected the core into his head? Cooper is willing to kill
Wilzig just to get his head. He doesn’t even know about the cold fusion core.
- First real action scene. Cooper takes several shots from pipe rifles. Is he on med-x? Should
have shown Cooper jacking up before the confrontation. Where does cooper stick Dogmeat
with the knife? In the head? Maximus says “ghoul” with a bit of stank on it. Does Maximus
share the brotherhood’s opinion on mutants?
- They had the opportunity to get a stimpak from the display case. It’s not like they were
desperate and forced. Wilzig wouldn’t have died if they had cauterized his wounds with a
stimpak.
- The chicken fucker’s serums actually do work, which we see with Thaddeus later on. So how
is he not known as a miracle worker? Why isn’t he the richest man in the wasteland? Too
busy fucking chickens?
- Cooper stabbed Dogmeat in the abdomen, gives him a stimpak, and Dogmeat is completely
fine. When Lucy used it earlier she had to staple her stab wound. What are the rules of this
stupid world? Is Johnathan Nolan an imbecile? Cooper must have raided the sundries store
for the stimpak, so shouldn’t such a store have ghoul juice vials? Even if ghouls aren’t
welcome they’re a valuable commodity. <addendum, it’s not certain that coop wanted to kill
Wilzig.
- And so exits Wilzig. Dead before we knew him. The most important unanswered question
about Wilzig is why he cared so much about bringing the core to Moldaver that he was
willing to cut his own head off. Wilzig knows Lucy’s name. Something he learned from Rose?
From Moldaver?
- The head is the one part of Wilzig that they need but also nobody stores it properly in a bag.
How does his head not constantly stink up the joint?
Episode 3. Johnathan nolan’s last.
- cooper = John Wayne & Reagan. Western scene is ridiculous with the inserted commie line.
Cooper ends up embodying the character he plays as written. A radical individualist who
exercises lethal violence at the whim of his own desires.
- Frances Turner is so fucking hot. Great chemistry with Walton Goggins. Inspired casting.
- So cooper does find Wilzig’s corpse. Has three vials of ghoul juice. Seems like a lot when the
effects of going feral take so long to fully turn. The show doesn’t establish how much is
needed to survive.
- Why isn’t Dogmeat bothered by Wilzig’s death? He basically raised her from birth. She
follows Cooper faithfully like she has any clue what’s happening. She’s a fucking dog. She
should be whining at Wilzig and refusing to leave his side. Cooper should have been in a
position where he had to drag Dogmeat away or give her a thing of Wilzig’s to follow.
- Vast swathes of California are desertified, but there was also the verdant forest where Filly is.
What’s up with the geography of this setting?
- The core emits enough energy for Lucy to receive a static shock through Wilzig’s skin. How
the fuck could he live with that in his head without immediately having a seizure?
- Maximus’s instinct is to lie and bullshit. He is actually a child. It’s illegal in all 50 states for
Maximus to consent to sex (this will come up later). Maximus initiates violence with the Filly
residents. At every turn Maximus makes the dumbest and most violent choice. It’s obvious
now why Maximus was being bullied at the barracks. It’s more than just hazing, he’s an
asshole. Does Dane pity him?
- Thaddeus’s arrival at Filly. Skyscrapers are visible on the horizon. Is Filly in walking distance
of the Boneyard? Maximus’s instinct was to kill Thaddeus before his conscience guided him
into fucking with Thaddeus instead. Maximus is a danger to society.
- High cleric says that whoever controls the target controls the wasteland, which means the
Brotherhood knows about the cold fusion core. How?
- Gulper scene. Lucy did put Wilzig’s head in a bag. Looks like her bedroll or blanket? Lucy is
still using the tranq pistol.
- The unmutated fawn implies a level of natural preservation that shouldn’t be possible in the
setting. Even mild exposure to radiation & atmospheric FEV can have radical consequences
for both flora and fauna. This is lore nitpicking, but the existence of the fawn only serves to
add to the eclectic environment and total lack of any time or place. The geography is
nonsense. Is every biome represented in the Boneyard?
- Dogmeat cares more about Lucy getting clocked with a pistol butt than Wilzig’s corpse.
- Chet is reassigned as punishment for the door. What was he reassigned to? Reg says that
the vaults are impenetrable but we know that isn’t true, or else the Master’s army couldn’t
have invaded Vault 13. You can’t just say the vaults are impenetrable and leave it at that.
Horrible writing. Enclave waited for a vault’s reclamation day in fallout 2 just to exterminate
them.
- First acknowledgement of Vault 31. Betty’s correspondence with 31 must have been with
Bud.
- Norm recognizes that there’s some hypocrisy in their treatment of the raiders. The council
talks on the issue as if it’s morally sound and settled, but they’re submitting the raiders to the
same system of control that the Dwellers operate under. Norm uses the council’s own
psychology against them to investigate the raiders.
- The raiders act like total animals. Probably not NCR remnants. Did Moldaver contract a
raiding crew? Only further proves that they should have conquered the vault and let
Moldaver leave with Hank.
- The way Thaddeus talks about ghouls comes off as a personal prejudice, but ghouls are also
an objective danger to others. Does the Brotherhood not care about mutants anymore?
There’s actual reason to be afraid of sentient ghouls now. Thaddeus does question ‘Tutus’s’
choice to leave coop alive. Indicated that it’s a brotherhood precept. “One day the
brotherhood is gonna eradicate every one of those freaks.”
- Cooper uses Lucy as bait. “Torturing a person don’t do shit.” Lucy did bust the vials.
- The premise of the fly farm doesn’t make sense. Any human settlement would produce a
massive amount of feces. They wouldn’t need designated “shitters” who specialize in
pooping.
- The plan to integrate the raiders: woke DEI joke. Intentionally ridiculous. Woody and
Reg propose the plan, which makes sense if they’re not from 31. Betty sets it up in a
rehearsed way, so she knew about the proposal. This is played like a joke but integrating the
raiders is a sound plan with the loss of genetic diversity with vault 32 and the attack. Betty
shoots down the idea to execute the prisoners even though she’s probably planned to
poison them already.
- Here comes the goddamned water chip. Pure fan service. This was Johnathan Nolan’s idea
too? What a fucking hack.
- Once again Maximus stands around like a dope. What’s with this guy? Dogmeat finds the
head.
- Cooper wastes water for the cruelty of it. He’s already wearing Lucy down for sale.
“Something like that.” Hints that Cooper was exposed to FEV in the vault?
- Vault-tec photo op. Cooper’s first advert? Really? Not smoking or anything else? Thumbs up
hints that Cooper was the basis of Vault Boy?
- God. These fucking sucked. Everything points towards liberal eugenicism. The showrunners
don’t understand the material, or the ideology, or even what they think they believe in.
This is just the Johnathan Nolan episodes. I'm not even half way done with reviewing the series. Here's a taste from episode 4 just to prove I don't hate everything about this:
- What is it about Cooper that makes him a great character? Walton Goggins elevates some sub par material by embodying the ghost of America. Without love in his life, Cooper has returned to what he was in the old world. An instrument of death and a tool of powers greater than himself. The spirit of America made manifest in a shambling husk. Cooper goes through life in the nihilistic pursuit of his own self interest. If he cares about risking that interest it is solely in the pursuit of ancient grudges and personal revenge. He believes in nothing but himself. A moral solipsist waging a one man war of revenge on humanity. The fact that we don’t see what the deal with Dom Pedro was is that it’s a perfect set up for establishing Cooper’s character. Cooper is in Mexico as an invader. Even after knowing the truth about America, he never stopped being an imperialist. Only now he serves capital I: Me.
- By dodging the issue of America’s relations to the world by rendering them into an amorphous adversarial blob, the tv show embraces the logic of the war on terror. It dodges the issues of American imperialism in Mexico, Canada, and China, supposedly to satisfy the Liberal discomfort with honest portrayals of American racism, but effectively to shift the blame away from American imperialism and onto the psychotic and nonsensical desires of a shadowy ruling elite, that conspires to act against its own class interests in the sake of sheer evil vanity. It’s a juvenile and reactionary understanding of the world. Johnathan Nolan is a coward and a mental infant.
Notes on Episode 4:
Episode 4 “Death to Management”
Directed by: Daniel Gray Longino
Written by: Kieran Fitzgerald
This is the point the series gets away from the direction of Nolan, Wagner, and Robertson-
Dworet. If the first three episodes were so bad it’s natural to conclude that the best parts
moving forward are from original talent and not the showrunners.
- The ghoul stuff. Good scene with Roger. Well acted. Shame the whole premise is stupid and
breaks the setting. Ghouls being destined to go feral contradicts the anti-racist thesis of
Fallout. Ghouls are now doomed by racial determinism.
- Cooper’s mercy killing shows that he has some sympathy for his fellow race, who share his
condition. Although he isn’t sentimental enough to respect the dead. He engages in
cannibalism without hesitation - hints that Cooper are people after the Great War? What is
Cooper’s sense of self in relation to humanity? As a ghoul? As a “mutant?” The boogeyman?
Or something worse than all the above? A human being.
- What is it about Cooper that makes him a great character? Walton Goggins elevates some
sub par material by embodying the ghost of America. Without love in his life, Cooper has
returned to what he was in the old world. An instrument of death and a tool of powers
greater than himself. The spirit of America made manifest in a shambling husk. Cooper goes
through life in the nihilistic pursuit of his own self interest. If he cares about risking that
interest it is solely in the pursuit of ancient grudges and personal revenge. He believes in
nothing but himself. A moral solipsist waging a one man war of revenge on humanity. The
fact that we don’t see what the deal with Dom Pedro was is that it’s a perfect set up for
establishing Cooper’s character. Cooper is in Mexico as an invader. Even after knowing the
truth about America, he never stopped being an imperialist. Only now he serves capital I:
Me.
- By dodging the issue of America’s relations to the world by rendering them into an
amorphous adversarial blob, the tv show embraces the logic of the war on terror. It dodges
the issues of American imperialism in Mexico, Canada, and China, supposedly to satisfy the
Liberal discomfort with honest portrayals of American racism, but effectively to shift the
blame away from American imperialism and onto the psychotic and nonsensical desires of a
shadowy ruling elite, that conspires to act against its own class interests in the sake of sheer
evil vanity. It’s a juvenile and reactionary understanding of the world. Johnathan Nolan is a
coward and a mental infant.
- Back to the vaults. The series is at its best when it uses the dwellers as representatives of
petty interpersonal social politics. However, this is also revealing of the author’s limitations in
world view. This is a socially aware mind that is nonetheless ignorant of both world history
and current affairs. A Liberal Savant.
- Betty’s warning to Norm is a pretty good representation of reactionary indoctrination. Betty
recognizes that because Norm is the only member of society with any initiative or curiosity
about the conditions of the world, he represents revolutionary potential that could overthrow
the secret order of vault tec exec dictatorship.
- Cooper is drying ghoul ass jerky on his backpack. . Nice attention to detail. Shows Cooper’s
nihilistic essence. Forcing Lucy to drink radioactive water is another exercise of self-
superiority. Cooper knows that Ghouls aren’t negatively effected by radiation. He’s wearing
her down in an attempt to reduce her to a commodity.
- Steph is clearly angling for revenge on the raiders but I’m not sure if this plot line goes
anywhere. Not sure who poisoned them.
- Ah the organ harvesting arc. The exchange rate establishes a market value on a human life:
2 months supply of vials. An important detail. The problem with it is that it creates incentives
for ghouls to be racially predatory. This episode portrays ghouls as victims but those people
need vials too. And where will they get it from? The market. If not by slavery and
meatshoppery, then by some other nefarious exchange. An objectively horrible fate for good
people which only arises from the imaginings of Anglo pigs who don’t even understand their
own eugenic worldview.
- Cooper and Lucy trading fingers is a great scene, suitably horrible considering the fact that
Cooper intends to chop shop her organs. The problem is that it’s inconsequential. Lucy
losing her trigger finger should have persisted for at least a couple episodes. If Lucy got a
replacement finger before the finale, it would have set up a great climax where she could
finally use her marksmanship with a real gun.
- Matt Berry as Mr. Handy is another inspired bit of casting. Cannot fault the casting choices
one bit for any of these characters. No matter how badly written, everyone is well acted.
Even throwaway characters like Filly Bob.
- The necrotic finger working perfectly raises a lot of questions. Perhaps Wilzig’s brain could
still be preserved in a robobrain like I suspected when the head McGuffin was introduced the
first time. By the end of the series Wilzig’s head is so necrotic there’s no way his brain is
viable, but who the fuck knows. If that is the case then everything is possible. Why not
resurrect the dead too? That would at least be a neat twist that derives from Russian
cosmism instead of more lame Americana.
- The stuff in the vials is never explained. Note the color of the fluid for comparison with the
chicken fucker’s serum: auburn, amber color. Clear fluid that resembles whiskey.
- Norm’s computer logs: RECORD OF PREVIOUS TRADE WITH VAULT 31; 33 spare parts
(generators), technical expertise >> << 31 medicine. ??? Letter martin Johnson feb 2095,
from 33 to 31: need critical parts, no replacement. Access to 32 records denied. Security
protocols overridden.
- Protocols being overridden means Martin Johnson wasn’t the overseer but a vault tec
executive, and that executives retain executive privileges when it comes to ruling the vaults.
The letter also implies that the record is faked. The exchange would have gone the other
way, since it was 33 who had a deficit in critical parts. This indicates that 31 is more than just
a bunch of cryotubes, it may also have a storehouse. Could also explain how the water chip
is resolved. Nonetheless water chip is fanservice. It would have been justified if losing the
water chip had consequences. Should have been one episode of rationing before
resettlement.
- Norm and Chet investigate 32. Great scene. Perfectly set up by the raider saying he didn’t
know what they were up to. The grain blight is proven a lie by showing 32’s ag fields have
gone fallow. Good detail.
- 32 dwellers all died two years ago. Question remains: how did they know about the
conspiracy? My theory is again Moldaver.
- The mouse utopia experiment on the tv is central to the world view of vault-tec. It views the
problem with resource competition as being driven by overpopulation rather than the
material culture of American political economy. The question is, isn’t this basically the thesis
on the Great War? Of the authors of this show. There’s no accounting for America’s context
in the world because there is only America and an abstracted other. An amorphous
“adversaries.” This is how the show implies that the haute bourgeois view the world. That
humanity is in competition with themselves. No, capitalists are in direct competition with
each other. They are each other’s enemies. We, the working class, do not compete with
them for resources. The capitalists control the resources already. We work those resources
for them and then pay them back for the finished goods we make. For the services we
render with our own skills, they claim rent. A relationship only possible through private
property. Indicates total lack of Marxist critique in the author’s (I mean this as a stand in for
the creative authorship, not any one writer) awareness. This is the fatal flaw in liberalism’s
understanding of capitalism, and exemplifies its tendency towards reactionary repetition.
- Snip snip scene, not a bad portrayal of the petite bourgeois I’ll admit. Note for later: total
lack of any real security in such an essential business. Why confine the ghouls if they’re
going to go feral? Are feral ghouls an essential part of the ghoul juice creation process? Was
Snip Snip carrying out this process automatically? Who in the wasteland knows how ghoul
juice is made? Are there no more vials without snip snip?
- 10mm pistol. Good prop.
- Lucy is beginning to understand that her ignorance has negative consequences. At this point
she’s ready to return to the vault after finding Hank. Retreating from a world you don’t
understand is sensible. However, fortune favors the curious. One of Fallout’s few themes
which the show gets right.
- Some 32 corpses were ritualistically hung with wiring. Lynching indicates class war. Were the
victims known to be executives, or were they merely in the government? How did the
dwellers all manage to kill themselves to the last dweller? Children too? Outcome is not
consistent with an uprising against the conspiracy. Do the authors think that revolutionary
violence is omnicidal? “Death to Management.”
- 32 main access terminal: entrance door was accessed from the outside with Rose’s pip boy:
definitely Moldaver. Moldaver also explains how the vault discovered the conspiracy.
- Lucy should be turning the tables on Cooper here but she doesn’t. Instead she’s effectively
rewarding him for leaving a trail of death in their wake. This isn’t a morally sound choice, it’s
bourgeois arrogance. Lucy needs expertise on the world, and nobody knows the world more
than ghouls. Lucy could have coerced Cooper into being her guide by supplying him with
vials, with the promise of the box full of them at the end when they find Hank. It would give
Cooper a good in-character reason to follow Lucy, and get a start on the party dynamic in
the first season. Maximus could be written in too. Wasted potential. Instead Lucy learns
nothing from the experience she just had, which got several people killed, to fall back on
moralism. I’m supposed to think this is a morally righteous actor? This is a social imperialist.
“Golden Rule” does not apply to manhunters. Christ-like sense of forgiveness is not real
justice. Those who commit atrocities must make amends to the survivors, not be left free to
their own predatory agency. Something Cooper demonstrates very soon.
- Cooper is of course a hedonistic animal once his need for survival is satiated. A real
American. “The Man From Deadhorse.” One of cooper’s movies. Summary execution of
communists on national television.
Much better than the first three episodes. As soon as creative direction gets away from the big
three there is vast improvement despite the material received. These scenarios could have
worked with rewrites and revisions, but instead all of the big twists conceived by the creators,
like nuking the NCR, the Cold Fusion Core, ghouls doomed to go feral, vault tec starting the
Great War and the conspiracy that did it, they all break the whole setting and all the plots that
try to fill in the gaps. The only thing that pays off is something with thematic resonance like
Cooper’s plot line. Maximus is pure buffoonery, and casting a black man to play the part is
another bit of evidence that the show is racist. And Lucy is a liberal feminist girl boss who
thinks she’s better than everybody else. These characters don’t develop at all as of my
recalling now. They’re the same at the end as they are at the beginning. That works for Cooper
because he’s already an ancient monster, but Lucy and Maximus should be going through
radical changes. In the end Lucy is just a bit more jaded, and Maximus has found someone
who could “make my cock explode.”
NOTES ON EPISODE 5:
Episode 5 “The Past”
Directed by Claire Kilner
Written by Carson Mell
- Thaddeus and Maximus’s dynamic is a better portrayal of military fraternal orders than what
we see on base.
- “He’s dead.” Maximus confesses then blames Thaddeus for stating the obvious, which is
that the brotherhood will find out about Titus. Maximus just fucking sucks. He immediately
tried killing Thaddeus when it wasn’t necessary. If he was based on bad players it doesn’t
work because he doesn’t fit into the setting. I don’t believe he’s real.
- Lucy is still jaded and suspicious after saving Maximus. Maximus lies about being Titus even
though there’s no point to it at all.
- Vault again. Chet posits that the logs could be falsified, which is consistent with what we’ve
seen already. Last 32 dwellers died trying to get into 31. Did the entire population die
because Bud implemented some kind of protocol like poison gas? If so why isn’t there any
evidence after a lack of cleanup for two years? If Bud was engaged with the uprising in 32
then the executives in 33 would know about it too. Is Hank actually in cahoots with
Moldaver? A dumb solution but anything is possible.
- Maximus sets up camp right next to radioactive barrels. Maximus says that “people say” the
vaults are full of monsters. Is this what the brotherhood believes? They should know that
vault dwellers are prime normals because of their past dealings with the NCR and the
existence of tourist vaults. Are the Brotherhood aware of the Vault Tec conspiracy and that’s
how the monsters rumor got started? Could also be misinterpretations of defunct vaults that
mutants moved into, but the Brotherhood should know the truth.
- Lucy thinks there’s some good in Maximus but really he’s a huge pussy and a coward. He
lied about being Titus unnecessarily when there was nothing to gain from it. It would have
worked if Lucy gave him the proposal and THEN he lied about having the authority to grant
her side of the bargain. The party forms.
- Overseer election starts. Betty is stumping on the PA system. Old guy tells Reg he’s voting
for Betty. Indicates that this is a managed democracy and not outright rigged. Reg votes for
Betty too. What were Woody and Rey’s platforms? They shared the proposal for integrating
the raiders so did they split their ticket? Vault politics shouldn’t be this trivial or unexplored.
- Here comes Maximus’s history lesson and shady sands. Maximus says some obvious stuff
which is the last thing that should occur to him. The character who comes up with nothing
but stupid ideas and plans immediately notes the flaw in Lucy’s logic? Probably because she
didn’t plan on killing everyone.
- Lucy’s memory teases the time they lived with Moldaver in Shady Sands. Lucy was six at the
time so shouldn’t she remember living above ground in civilization? Leaving the vault and
leaving the surface should have been the most memorable and traumatic events of her life.
Is the solution some dumbass amnesia drug or hypnosis? Or maybe the authors think kids
are that stupid and won’t notice being outside for real with all of its dimensions and horizons.
Norm should have memories of being on the surface too. Nobody’s age is clearly defined.
- Norm is checking trade records again. Trades received show that 31 vaulters sent to 33 were
all elected overseer. Including Hank, elected 2271-2297. Betty is elected overseer with 98%
of the vote as Norm finds out she’s from 31 in the logs.
- Weird exchange with Betty and norm.
- “Fiends” are cannibals now. Not sure if that’s a nod to new Vegas. Doesn’t matter if it is. The
hands up across the bridge is actually a great sequence that perfectly realized the setting.
Kind of wish there was no shootout so Lucy’s negotiation skills could actually matter. The
fiend immediately notices Lucy’s pipboy.
- Maximus immediately springs to action here but in previous scenes he did nothing and
stared. His reaction is justified by the tension of the scene, but shouldn’t he have acted
before? If Maximus represents impulsive players he actually lacks initiative.
- “When things look glum, vote for somebody from vault 31.” The old guy lost his election to
Hank because of a wevil famine. How would wevils be a factor in an enclosed environment
like the vaults? They weren’t trading with the outside. Obviously crisis is being managed to
guarantee 31ers get elected, but the fake crisis they came up with wouldn’t make sense to
the dwellers themselves.
- Chet is now basically the father of Steph’s baby. Chet notes that 31 has superior “resources”
and a better education system. Does indicate they have a storehouse. Norm says Hank
didn’t talk much about 31. Steph says maybe the mashed potatoes were better? If Steph is
a vault tec executive then why does it feel like she isn’t really engaged with running the
vault? She seemingly stands apart from Betty on the raider issue to the point she gives
Norm kudos, but does she act on her own?
- Betty announces a meeting on her initiative to resettle 32.
- Shady sands. Fuck. Lucy has an existential crisis over “reclamation day” and thinks it
happened without them. She’s not wrong. It already happened multiple times with the
control vaults, so what was vault-tec’s plan? Shady Sands itself was founded by vault
refugees. “It didn’t work out.” They walk straight to the crater lol. Shady Sands was in the
Boneyard? What’s up with the skyscrapers? Crater is way too fucking big, unless it was an
underground detonation. NOTE: rewatch the intro to see if there are incoming warheads or if
explosions just issue forth from the ground. Shouldn’t the area be insanely radioactive? This
was a recent underground detonation. “The same thing that always happens. Everyone
wants to save the world, they just disagree on how.” Objectively wrong on both counts.
Civilizations don’t always get obliterated, and Vault-Tec conspired to end the world and re-
ended it for the sake of their own vanity.
- “I wonder if anyone survived? - I did.” Shouldn’t Maximus know that there are other NCR
remnants and Shady Sands refugees? There should be more survivors like him in the
Brotherhood. Is Dane also a refugee? Why was the Brotherhood there to respond to the
nuking of Shady Sands so quickly? Why doesn’t Maximus remember anything before he got
put in the fridge? No vague recollections on family?
- Tooth bullet infection. Raid on the hospital that leads to vault 4.
- Betty leads everyone to the door between 32 & 33 but the inside of 33’s door still has blood
on it. 32 is completely spic and span with all new fixtures & everything. It would make sense
that parts came from 31’s storehouse but what about the labor needed to clean up the blood
and bodies? Did they thaw out a bunch of executives and put them back under? The vault
tec execs would also notice that the uprising was against themselves based on the remains.
Overseer’s terminal still busted.
- Betty says Rose’s pip-boy was buried with her. Nonsensical explanation for vault dwellers
and the setting. A pip-boy is a precious heirloom and irreplaceable. Nobody would be buried
with one, and they don’t bury their dead. Dead bodies get composted.
- Lucy & macimus wake up in Vault 4.
Cooper’s absence is really being felt. The other characters just don’t have his thematic
resonance and they don’t develop enough to be interesting.
Notes on Episode 6
Episode 6 “the trap”
Directed by: Frederick E. O. Toye
Written by: Larry Dornetto
- Episode tagline: what happens when the ranchers have more power than the sheriff?
Huh???
- Galaxy News stinger is nice. Thank god Cooper is back, holy fuck. Cooper is smoking in this
scene so we know there’s no prejudice against smoking in pre-war society. So why didn’t
Cooper do any adverts for toxic products? Not doing commercials is a weird point of
integrity that’s actually meaningless and places a ceiling above what can be done with
Cooper’s past. The orientation video notes vault 4’s model number: 96JQ1164; which
implies that construction or design of the vault began in 2064, 10 years after the start of
Project Safehouse, which is relevant because it would mean the vault wasn’t designed for its
eventual use.
- The Hawthornes are part of a scientific team of 80 settled in the vault five years before the
Great War started, which means experimentation had begun before the vault was sealed.
This only further shows that the Great War wasn’t necessary to run the vault experiments.
- Cooper has a chip on his shoulder over the design flaws of the T-45 at the Battle of
Anchorage. Says they were fighting the “reds” but won’t name China. Do the showrunners
think it’s “irresponsible” to make China the enemy when the whole point to start with was
that the United States are the bad guys? Pure cowardice.
- Bud Askins was originally a West-Tek developer who oversaw the rollout process for the T-45
but is now focusing on “HR R&D.” Again with the incestuous interpersonality. Everyone is
related to everyone and everything so that “fans” can do soy face and point at the screen
because they mentioned a power armor! “Human relations” research AND DEVELOPMENT
is also an inherently ridiculous concept. HR departments practice scientific management, it’s
not a science in itself. An HR department’s real purpose is to maximize profit by maintaining
worker productivity and avoiding liability in the form of an employee lawsuit. If America was
as fascist as it’s depicted in the games they wouldn’t need an HR department because the
Gestapo would be going around making threats to the workers, and it’d be illegal to sue.
- Bud says “the ultimate weapon in outsmarting your opponent is… time.” But long-term
thinking is antithetical to bourgeois interests. Capitalism is characterized by the constant
pursuit of short term gains at the expense of long term externalities that society will be
burdened with fixing for generations. Put simply, capitalists aren’t generational thinkers, and
they would hate the shit out of Bud’s Buds.
- “The future of all humanity comes down to one word: management.” This is not a novel
concept. All social systems incorporate methods of control to manage society and maintain
a stable equilibrium. Liberalism does the same thing. Are we supposed to believe the
authors are libertarians who would rather live in a tin roof shack in the desert putting sand in
a water filter, instead of paying taxes and dealing with the cops? The social awareness of the
show comes from Bizarroworld. This is the ruling class looking at itself in the mirror and
blaming the reflection for ruining the world.
- Barb says the Vault-Tec wrap party is at their house, which shows that she’s not
communicating important details to Cooper she knows he won’t like. This would have been
a problem that reoccurred throughout their marriage, and it’s a shame we don’t see more of
it.
- Cooper says he’d do anything for barb. Understandable. Frances Turner could convince a
guy to kill himself.
- Dog is named “Roosevelt.” Is he named for Teddy or FDR? The divergence in fallout’s
timeline starts in 1945, so both are relevant but would say different things about Cooper’s
character. Dog should have been named Teddy or Frankie.
- Cooper uses a lot of military terminology, which means he was thoroughly conditioned by his
war experience to be an American patriot who views the world in militant terms.
- Newspaper shows “Reds” losing territory. Troops deployed to the far east. > these details
made sense in the games because losing the war gave China a reason to launch the nukes.
When these facts are brought up in the show, it directly undermines the point of the Vault-
Tec conspiracy because the United States was winning the war! They would have been able
to crack China open like a lobster and devour their innards in the aftermath, but we’re
supposed to believe they were being fitted for blue jumpsuits so they could live in a
commune for two hundred to five hundred years!?
- Cooper starred in “A Man and His Dog.” Western nod to the real life as Boy and His Dog.
This is a great concept which we should have actually seen instead of the cliched cowboy
scene from “The Man From Deadhorse.” Adapting ABaHD in the context of pre-war fascist
Americana could have been great to see. Instead it’s wasted on a prop.
- Walton Goggins is so fucking cool as Cooper. They could easily salvage just Coop and make
a movie with him. Cooper has all the makings for a truly brilliant Fallout story but the
showrunners aren’t capable of fulfilling that vision.
- Bud is talking with some other suits about how the peace negotiations are effecting their
presales. Ideally, these interests would want the war to continue indefinitely. They wouldn’t
want to end it themselves.
- Matt Berry is great. Don’t really buy that the caterers would shoot him down hard. Sebastian
is anticommunist and says they arrested Charlie Whiteknife. Whiteknife was a veteran who
served with Cooper. Sebastian says Cooper understands that the world will be run by nerds.
I’m getting an impression of liberal cultural chauvinism here. The authors clearly resent
management as a cohort based on their past experiences despite the career success that
brought them to this point. Is the anti-management stance of the show a reflection of the
bourgeois fear of the middle classes? These are ultimately monsters of their creation, but the
show doesn’t recognize the distinction between management & capital with the conspiracy
scene. It views the people as the problem rather than the culture which produced them, or
the capital which political economy is oriented around. The total lack of Marxist critique here
leads to class confusion. Fallout TV is a perfectly realized false consciousness.
- Sebastian got chump change for his voice rights to the Mr. Handy. “The End of the World is a
product.” Sounds like something with resonance but it’s really not. There was no market
action behind the Vault-Tec conspiracy, it was basically a cartel. Vault-Tec was also a
government contractor, as were their fellow conspirators, and their conspiracy was
antithetical to the interests of the United States.
- The cops arrest Cooper and take the fusion core out of Snip-Snip.
- Camera cuts to vault 4’s entrance door, in case anyone was too stupid to figure out that’s
where the story is set. Again the entrance is totally exposed with its concrete casing sticking
out of the sand as the most identifiable landmark in the area. It’s in the greater LA area and
The Master never found it? The Brotherhood never found it? NCR never found it? The
existence of the entrance door undermines the need of the trap door, which is to bait test
subjects, because the experiments are supposed to be done in secret. The entrance door
isn’t even in the same biome as the hospital! This is a cartoon world conceived by
simpletons.
- Lucy has supreme faith in the capabilities of vault personnel. Birdie says she was a Shady
Sands refugee but how did they find Vault 4? Did everyone go through the trap door? Why
didn’t Hank investigate conditions in the other vaults if he knew things were going so badly
on the surface?
- Why would Lucy smell good? They haven’t been bathed, or else their clothes would have
been washed. “You want to have sex?” Oh man here it comes. “You mean use my cock?”
MAXIMUS DOESN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT MASTURBATION AND EJACULATION IS?! The
Brotherhood isn’t just recruiting orphans from the wastes they’re reproducing themselves.
They have bloodlines with lineal descent to the original soldiers who followed the original
Maxson. They would have sexual education, especially with mixed sex units. Is Maximus
actually a child in the mind? What kind of pervert conceived this character? We already have
a premise that revels in cousin molestation, and now we’ve got a main character who’s a
sexy baby too? The writers should have their hard drives examined!
- Lucy’s finger still looks necrotic with no explanation of how it’s working. If snip snip injected
her with stimpak juice shouldn’t the finger be healed by now?
- Maximus thinks they’re being trapped by a cult and Lucy tells him that the VDs are from the
surface. Maximus says that they’re a cult because everyone is smiling. Shouldn’t Maximus
know that the Brotherhood is a cult? He doesn’t believe their religion even though it controls
every aspects of their lives, and Brotherhood members are miserable from the regimented
lifestyle and religious control. A cult doesn’t stop being a cult because the members are self
serving cynics. That’s an essential element of how cults reproduce themselves in real life.
- Lucy holds Maximus’s hand and he catches feelings. Did that never happen to him growing
up in the brotherhood? Not with a single girl or even Dane? Nobody?
- Overseer Benjamin is a one eyed mutant. There’s no reason for nobody to acknowledge it,
even for mutants the native vault 4 dwellers are unique in the world. Mutants are almost all
ghouls or super mutants. There are no healthy humanoid mutants who can produce viable
human offspring. Dodging the issue is a bad joke at the expense of “woke” politeness. It
makes no sense for them not to acknowledge or explain it to newcomers. It also breaks
credulity that Lucy and Maximus wouldn’t question it. Maximus is already impulsive and
doesn’t think about what he says or does.
- “Stay out of level 12, obviously.” How is that obvious? Shouldn’t you explain it or promise to
explain it later when there’s time? Benjamin says they can ask Birdie questions, so why don’t
they? They could have asked her about the mutants at any time and it wouldn’t be rude.
They practically had permission. Birdie’s whole job is helping orient new people.
- Maximus: “Lots of people have one eye.” Does Maximus not even know what mutants are?!
This character doesn’t live in the world he grew up in. It’s like they transplanted the brain of a
suburban eight year old into an adult man in a different universe. He’s easily the worst
written character in the show. It’s impossible to believe he’s real.
- One of the mutants has the eyes of Ibad. Not bad.
- Cops are taking Cooper to the president’s shack in some nowhere desertified shithole.
- Flashback to Barv in the hot tub. Barb thought about leaving vault-tec but didn’t. Why does
she believe in Vault-Tec ideologically? Cooper wanted to buy a ranch up in Bakersfield. In
the games the nuking of Bakersfield produced the Necropolis. Did Cooper know Set and
meet the Vault Dweller?
- Bud licensed pip boy for vault tec use from RobCo. “Vault-Tec would exist with or without
me.” This doesn’t explain why she goes along with the conspiracy. Barb is desperate to get
Coop & Janey into the vaults, which means the vault-tec conspiracy was already conceived
and she knows about it.
- News acknowledges uranium shortages as the world tries transitioning away from oil to
nuclear energy. Something the United States had already done. Reporter says the
competition for uranium is driving allies against each other, but the United States had no
allies. It monopolized its resources for domestic use, occupied Mexico, and annexed
Canada to expand those resources. The US was a vulgar imperialist power, not the leader of
a capitalist world. The European Commonwealth had already fallen apart. The lead up to the
Great War was already operating within a Malthusian framework. The post-apocalypse is a
reflection of the dog eat dog nature of old world capitalism.
- Whiteknife acknowledges that the United States still views him as part of a conquered
people it uses to tell mythologies on its own construction, but he doesn’t have an opinion on
the communists they fought or being accused of being one. Cooper says they were fighting
for the “American Dream,” which he got to live. So why was he reluctant at all to do the
scene where he shoots a communist on tv?
- White Knife uses “fiduciary responsibility” to show why vault-tec is bad, but also
acknowledges that Vault-Tec is a government contractor. Vault-Tec doesn’t sell vaults to a
public market, they sell vaults to the government. Vault-Tec’s shareholders are happier the
more the government buys, and the purpose of the vaults was to run the behavioral
experiments. The control vaults only exist in case the Great War actually happened. Vault-
Tec didn’t need to make the Great War happen for the investors to get what they wanted,
because those contracts were already secured! The cause of the war doesn’t go away if
there’s a successful negotiation of ceasefire. The world is still resource starved, which was
the cause of the war to begin with. The United States refused to share its oil with China, and
the Chinese thought there was no alternative to invading and taking the oil. The existential
threat of nuclear war doesn’t go away. A return to a Cold War would only exacerbate
demand for the vaults!
- “The cattle ranchers are in charge, Coop.” Hm. Exactly like the NCR, which would have been
a perfect mirror for evaluating pre-war America. Too bad you blew it the fuck up!
- “Everything is a conspiracy?” Turns out it literally is. Turns out the writers are just as stupid
as Cooper thinks they are.
- Moldaver’s group meets in a mausoleum run by the “Hollywood Forever” company. How on
the nose is that? Could this shit get any more self-reverential?
- Cooper picks up a call from Barb’s new assistant and blows him off. Janey is reading Little
House in the Prairie to Roosevelt. Barb drops the bomb about no dogs in the vaults,
something Cooper didn’t know. Cooper hates the fact they have to give up Roosevelt
because he eats meat. It doesn’t make sense for the management vaults to have these
restrictions. 31-33 are the secret purpose of the entire program, so why wouldn’t they have
the excesses to fully realize life as a rural volk with pets and all that stuff? They already have
unnecessary fields with crops to give off the impression of volkisch living. By emulating the
Bethesda games so closely, the show limits itself in terms of scale. If any vaults were going
to be built to the specifications of executive privilege vanity, it should have been 32 & 33. Yet
they live austerely in a commune for the fun of it. What the fuck is up with these people?
They’re bourgeois Nazis who aren’t interested in excess or indulgence. These are cartoon
characters.
- Cooper seems to be the only guy in America who has a problem with living in a commune.
Barb tears him down and she’s right. Coop is full of shit. So why did he endanger Janey by
exposing her to the war? Cooper could have left on his own for her sake.
- Back to the vault. Benjamin was telling Lucy how to use a toilet and she says she’s from a
vault. Shouldn’t they have asked her about that when they found her in a vault suit with 33
on it? Benjamin says he’s a fifth generation native, which means the mutant uprising
happened relatively recently in the two hundred year timeline. Lucy doesn’t ask the obvious
question of why the natives are all mutated. The first thing that should be on her mind.
Benjamin has xenophobic prejudices of surface dwellers, but this ultimately doesn’t get in
the way of his acceptance of the refugees. Ben gives Lucy so many opportunities to ask the
obvious it drives me crazy. But Lucy can’t ask because woke DEI HR Science. The authors
are stupid jack-offs. Ben is racist too. I’m rolling my eyes here.
- Lucy doesn’t tell Benjamin what isolation is like. Why did Vault 4 take in refugees? Did they
have contact with the surface before Shady Sands was nuked? Shouldn’t they have been
NCR citizens?
- Lucy asks what’s up with level 12 and Ben gets offended. It’s not a secret that vault 4 natives
are mutants. It’s literally all over their faces! Ben could have given a reasonable explanation
without getting weird about it. Everything is contrived to set up the punchline.
- It suddenly occurs to Maximus that his armor still doesn’t have a fusion core. Asks some guy
where their power comes from and they show him. How is this not a bigger security breach
than being on level 12v Maximus impulsively goes through the process of stealing the core.
What a fucking idiot.
- Birdie convinces Maximus to indulge in domestic amenities. He loves the shit out of it. The
vaults loop footage of the natural world on their tv broadcasts. Maximus tastes caviar for the
first time.
- Lucy takes a nostalgic tour of the schoolroom. Dioramas of shady sands trigger Lucy’s
childhood memories a little. The chalkboard doesn’t need comment. It’s an obvious
continuity error that they scrambled to explain away after the fact. Oh the nuking happened
RIGHT AFTER the events of New Vegas? Way to trivialize the whole fucking point of the
game. NCR flag and new Vegas theme. Member that, you fucking hogs?
- Native dweller doesn’t tell Luxyvwhat happens in the ritual of Gen though she doesn’t know.
- “The Presidential Palace” is a repurposed BBQ joint. Sorrel and Cooper have a history
together. So much that sorrel is confident enough to untie coop. Cooper sews Lucy’s finger
on his hand? His own? “Looking for her.” Barb? Cooper dodges the issue. Sorrel declared
himself president. Of what?
- Cooper has heard “chatter” about Moldaver as if he isn’t familiar with her. Sorrel says
Moldaver is called the “flame mother” and is extremely dangerous. How long was Cooper
buried in the ground by Dom Pedro that he doesn’t know who Moldaver is? Has Moldaver
only been active as a bandit leader within the last few years?
- Sorrell says the Super-Duper organ mart is “under our protection.” What protection? There
were no guards at the super-duper mart. Nobody with old sheriff’s uniforms. Even the
conceit of a protection racket is nonsensical because the showrunners don’t know what
they’re doing. A protection racket is a “racket” because in a civilized society the cops
provide all the real protection. Gang protection is only needed to provide enforcement
beyond the purview of the police. NCR was nuked and there is no law anymore. It’s so
lawless that Sorrell declared himself “President” and is effectively collecting taxes with a
handful of guys in police uniforms. It’s actually impossible to believe. Sorrell doesn’t even
live in a community he rules, he’s just a fat pig in an empty diner.
- Sorrell has Troy disarmed even though his plan is to feed Cooper to the hogs. Why?
Professional courtesy? Cooper recognizes Moldaver from her bounty poster. Who is drawing
up these bounty posters anyways?
- Cooper drives a sick ass car with cool doors. This is an important contrast to Bud’s dinky
car we see in the finale.
- The tone of playing the flake mother cult scene and the meeting with Moldaver at the same
time is giving off weird vibes. Are the “communists” meant to be interpreted as occultic
followers of Moldaver? Why does blood need to be spilled to return Shady Sands?
- Lucy goes straight to Maximus instead of asking any pertinent questions. She wasn’t forced
to leave. The native dwellers think the ritual is weird, so they could have answered questions.
Aye carumba.
- “Do you want to make my cock explode now?”
- Lucy realizes Titus is settled in. And she has no proof that the dwellers are nefarious. Now
we investigate level 12. The ride is uneventful. Access door wide open. There is no security.
- Dead gulper in the specimen tank. Holotape was set to play the scariest part it could right in
front of the birthing tank. A woman gives birth to infant gulpers who proceed to devour her
like piranhas. This raises multiple problems, like why didn’t the gulpers eat her out from the
inside? If the actual purpose of the Vault-tec conspiracy is to run a long term eugenics
program, why make women bear human hybrid bioweapons? It’s the most dysgenic thing
imaginable. Why is Vault-Tec developing bioweapons in the vaults? It serves no purpose
other than being evil for the sake of it. FEV was a proprietary West-Tek development so why
is it being experimented on in vault 4? Is vault 4 actually a West-Tek facility? Why? Shouldn’t
West-Tek have their own facilities? Shouldn’t they have their own eugenics vault like Vault-
Tec pitched them?
- A native dweller is monitoring cryotubes with pregnant women in them. Presumably women
who would give birth and die if they’re thawed out. Lucy gets caught and throws acid in his
face. Not a bad display of Lucy’s martial skills. Birdie captures her and says something
cryptic.
It took me five whole hours to review this episode I had so much to think about. Every time the
show goes back to pre-war it finds a new way to break the setting and mischaracterize
capitalism to its ignorant audience of passive liberal subjects. The vault 4 stuff was my favorite
on first viewing and now I couldn’t possibly hate it more. It’s all so badly plotted.
Notes on Episode 7
Episode 7 “The Radio”
Directed by: Kilner & Toye
Written by: Chaz Hawkins
- Father/son scavenger team picking through sand in NCR armor. They’re picking coins but to
what purpose? Wasteland currency is still bottle cap based, so are the precious metals
being smelted for some other purpose? Cooper confirms that they’re actually lead farming.
Not sure why they’d be picking for lead in desertified nowhere then. It’d be easier to find
lead for recasting bullets at a shooting range or a military training camp.
- Cooper is waiting for them in their home. He was hosted by the daughter. Erik Estrada is
good in the role. Wasted on a bit character. The father describes Moldaver as a “mad
woman.” So far all we’ve heard about Moldaver is that she’s dangerous and crazy, and the
only substantial things we’ve seen of her followers is that they’re either murderous savages
or fanatics who worship Moldaver as their messiah. The show keeps hinting over and over
again that Hank & Moldaver are two sides of the same coin, but by the end of the season we
still don’t know anything about Moldaver’s band, what they actually believe, or what
Moldaver’s real agenda is.
- “There’s always some new little faction ain’t there?” Cooper doesn’t think the world needs
saving. He enjoys the freedom of action that post-apocalyptic chaos allows. Also can’t help
but feel like this is the attitude of the authors. Factions are treated as a total afterthought.
Only the Brotherhood has interesting things going on because they’re so iconic to the
franchise, but they’re underexplored and underutilized. Dane should have also been a POV
character. The authors’ attitudes regarding the factions reflects a more general skepticism in
the efficacy of political action and being part of a movement greater than yourself. This is
liberal individualism asserting itself over the realities of politics, and views the individual as
being a more rational actor than groups.
- Cooper had already killed the elder son because of his link to Ma June and the plot to
transport Wilzig. The younger son actually delivered the caps that secured the contract. So
why didn’t we see Cooper doing any of this investigative work? Last time we saw him he’d
just blasted Sorrel’s goons and was reminiscing over Moldaver’s wanted poster. So how was
Cooper able to get on Moldaver’s trail? He would have at least had to backtrack to Filly to
start from there.
- The younger son believes Moldaver is building something worth dying for, but what is it?
What’s Moldaver’s plan for the core? What was she telling her followers? Cooper is trying to
track down this faction and he’s not even curious about what’s up with them. The son
betrays the faction by telling Coop they’re at the observatory. Cooper baits the son into
drawing so he can kill him, in an echo of Shane. Another great scene that didn’t get bogged
down by any of the big twists. You could show this scene to anyone and it’d explain
everything they need to know about Cooper’s character.
- Flashback to the “Hollywood forever” meeting. Moldaver says the American Dream is a lie
and that they have more in common with America’s enemies than the ruling class. This is bog
standard communist rhetoric, which is why Cooper can’t handle it. Miss Williams calls
Cooper a snowflake for being triggered. Williams questions Cooper’s principles and Cooper
uses the self-serving logic of market exchange to excuse away why he endorsed Vault-Tec.
The problem is, we know Cooper has some principles even if they’re nonsense that
prevented him from accepting a corporate sponsor before, so at this moment he’s
bullshitting. Cooper calls communism an ideology that ends in “breadlines” but he should
also know from the state of the world that food shortages are everywhere. This is also
something shown in the games leading up to the nuclear exchange, but the tv show portrays
America as Leave it To Beaver Land.
- Williams says she knows Barb and Cooper immediately asks how. Holy shit a character with
a couple brain cells to run together! Williams says her research company (meaning she was
the proprietor, or just a researcher?) was bought out by Barb’s division at Vault-Tec (what is it
exactly?). She says that cold fusion is difficult to monetize because it’s near limitless power,
but for Vault-Tec and the government’s purposes it could have made the vaults last for
millennia and guaranteed a power source for the starseeding ship that the Enclave was
planning to flee Earth on. The introduction of cold fusion energy could have also saved
capitalism. Even if it’s impossible to extract profit from, there are so many other sectors that
would become profitable with cheap as free energy. It would have been in America’s interest
to monopolize cold fusion as a measure of global control, not repress it. Like “hydraulic
despotism” in the Dune series. Vault-Tec also left a paper trail of acquisitions the US
government should be aware of, and the Enclave has the core at the beginning of the series,
so one way or another the US government did come to possess the cold fusion research.
Showrunners have a total lack of imagination, do not understand capitalism, and etc.
- Williams says Vault-Tec bought up “every company I ever worked for.” But not Williams
herself? My theory: Moldaver eventually accepted a deal that got her a seat on Vault-Tec’s
board, and she was frozen in vault 31. Which would explain how she’s one of the only
people in the world to age like a cryosleeper. Williams gives Coop a big to spy on Barb.
- “I’m not a communist, Mr. Howard. That’s just a dirty word they use to describe people who
aren’t insane.” Liberals have this bizarre tendency to deny the validity of radical politics as if
they’re an affectation taken on by cynical actors who are fundamentally liberal at heart.
Communism doesn’t actually exist in the world of the tv show, it’s just a slur that
conservatives (who are also Liberal, I’ll add) use to smear liberalism’s reality based bias. Any
Chinese Communist would say that the United States is an imperial tyrant trying to decide
the destiny of the world through monopolizing its resources, and that this imperialistic stance
is endemic to capitalism itself, not an issue of bad actors at the commanding heights of
corporations & the government. If America was a petite bourgeois Nazi paradise of “small
business owners” it would still be warring with China for the same reasons.
- Back to vault 4. Ben & Birdie play Hawthorne’s last recording on the holotape. Hawthorne
was overseer when the mutant uprising happened, and insists that a society of scientists
with unregulated control is the ideal structure, and their failure shouldn’t be taken as proof
that the Vault-Tec concept is flawed. Hawthorne reveals that the actual purpose of the
research was crossing humans with radioactive resistant species to maximize human
survival. Hawthorne and his wife are dragged off by a gulper NOTE: this is gonna be relevant
with Benjamin.
- Ben says the creature in the video was “my great uncle Peter, on my mom’s side.” PAUSE:
are we supposed to believe that the gulpers are sentient and have human intelligence? How
did a gulper sire humanoid offspring that it didn’t immediately swallow whole? Why are there
wild gulpers that don’t produce any humanoid offspring? It’s completely unbelievable. Just
this one throwaway joke breaks everything established in the tv show up to this point.
Astounding.
- Ben asks Lucy what the experiment in 33 was and Lucy says there was no experiment.
She’s not wrong. The management vaults aren’t an experiment they’re an ideological project.
The dwellers should know about the control vaults too since they brought in Shady Sands
refugees who would know about them.
- Now they punish Lucy. Maximus takes the core. Yaddy-yadda. Lucy protests by saying “I’m
a good person!” Is she?
- Oh hey it’s Dogmeat everyone! Dogmeat has apparently been following Thaddeus for the last
three whole episodes off-screen. Thaddeus’s foot is completely fucked up after Maximus
stomped on it. It’s actually snowing at the red rocket. Why? Is it actually ash? What season
is it? Everything about the geography and climate is eclectic in this show. I thought
everything was taking place south & southwest of the San Gabriel mountains. Where the
Boneyard is.
- Thaddeus traps Dogmeat in a nuka cola ice box. Thaddeus chooses NOW to start to contact
the brotherhood after at least one whole day of trudging on his fucked up foot.
- Is Lucy’s trial meant to show how Moldaver conducts justice? Ben’s use of a Dao to cut
Lucy’s bindings is an interesting choice. A Chinese sword could only have come in with the
refugees, and they would have gotten it through trade with the Shih. So where are they? The
Shih were never incorporated into the NCR so they should still have a vibrant civilization in
San Francisco. So where are all the Shih in Southern California? As with communism,
Chinese people don’t exist in Fallout TV.
- I think I liked this so much the first time around because Chris Parnell does such a great job
as Benjamin.
- They give Lucy two weeks of supply for exile. Maximus fucks it all up. Lucy makes “Titus”
give back the fusion core. “Yeah but, I needed it for the armor.” Maximus is actually a child.
The armor suit is left at the entrance door, and they drop the core down the trap door. How
long of a walk was that?
- Lucy offers Titus a place in the vault and tells him about her recent past. “You’re the best
stranger that I’ve ever met. You’re a good person.” Lady, you just had to talk this guy down
from leaving an entire community to die of an energy shortage. This man is a self-absorbed
mo-ron.
- Maximus tells the truth. Denies he’s a good person. The first time Maximus shows any
integrity. Lucy immediately processes it by saying she just threw acid in a guy’s face. Now
they’re good like nothing even happened. *CLAP* hey lady! Remember the deal that
Maximus made with you? He promised an entire squad of Brotherhood warriors in power
armor to rescue Hank. The whole basis of your relationship was bullshit, and you
immediately move on. Hello? You should at least be a little mad about it. Maximus should be
forced to go through some contrition, but instead you’re letting him off the hook just like you
did with Cooper. And Cooper is a serial killer! This character isn’t a good person she’s lawful
stupid. I’m guessing that this is an issue of not establishing continuity between the writing
staff. I guess the writer wasn’t aware of or had forgotten the deal Lucy & Maximus made,
and nobody corrected it. That or the creative team are just total morons, or both.
- Fred Armisen plays DJ Carl, a parody of NPR type liberal radio, who only has fiddle records
to play. Actual Portlandia bullshit. Thaddeus is much worse for wear after lightening his load
at the red rocket.
- Chickenfucker is trying to blow his brains out with what looks like a small caliber pipe rifle,
until he sees Maximus walking by and wants to live just to scam another mark.
Chickenfucker’s office is a dilapidated pharmacy. Chickenfucker picks out a serum
seemingly at random and prepares it in an inhaler with brown glass. The brown glass makes
it impossible to compare with ghoul juice.
- Chickenfucker agrees to treat Thaddeus in exchange for his treatment. The serum is actually
in Chuckenfucker’s pharmacology suitcase, not the pharmacy. He has a number of
decoctions in the box, but the one he draws from looks like hydrated piss. Not at all like the
ghoul juice seen earlier. He also knows it’s a cure-all. Thaddeus’s foot practically heals itself.
At this point Thaddeus is ghoulified. Is the serum FEV? Thaddeus says that Shady Sands is
highly radioactive, yet earlier Maximus and Lucy were standing at the edge of the crater like
it was nothing. Chickenfucker says Thaddeus doesn’t have to worry about that, which
means he knows that the serum is actually a mutagen.
- Norm is still on food serving duty for the prisoners. The raiders haven’t calmed down at all
and are still acting like savages. None of them have been willing to talk either. Now the
prisoners are dead of rat poison with no prior indication of who actually did it. Steph had the
most motive but Betty also had the means, and getting rid of the raiders helps maintain the
continuity of the vault by insulating the dwellers from knowledge of the outside. Veronica is
arrested on suspicion of being the perp. Betty reiterates “words have meaning.” “We people
like to have something to fuss about.”
- Betty immediately issues the vault assignments. She almost certainly timed the poisoning to
coincide with the resettlement, so why have we spent so much time with Steph? Woody is
assigned to 32 while Reg is staying in 33. Betty is trying to split up the council. The old guy
is stoked at being ass igned to 32 because it gives him a chance to run for overseer again.
Steph and Chet are both assigned to 32. Betty is also trying to isolate Norm. Chet is ready to
give up on everything he’s learned for the security of donesticity. “You’re a coward, you
know that, Chet?” “We all are. That’s why we live in a vault. That’s why we live in a vault.”
- Chet’s line acknowledges how far Norm has come from a character who cowered in the
maintenance hatch, to someone willing to take extreme risks to discover the truth. Why is
Norm the only main character going through any kind of character development?
- NOTE: does resettlement resolve the water chip crisis? Are they going to seal the access
door and not exchange for three more years again?
- Cooper is on Thaddeus’s trail and finds Dogmeat in the icebox.
- Prewar again. Cooper is curious about the bug Moldaver gave him. He inserts the bug into
Barb’s pip boy. Coop dumps the earpiece in the trash. Cooper fishes the earpiece out of the
trash because he doesn’t like the no dogs rule? Probably not. Cooper was reviewing his
advert for Vault 4 and is curious about what vault-Tec actually does.
- Cooper says Dogmeat ain’t Roosevelt.
- Maximus and Lucy catch up with Thaddeus, who has gone to the DJ to use his radio tower
to contact the brotherhood. Hipster joke falls flat. Thaddeus dumps an entire mag at L&M
and misses all shots. He triggers the crossbow trap that sticks him in the neck. “Why am I
not dead?” Yeah, why not? Since when have ghouls been immortal? Thaddeus’s wounds
close up instantly. Why isn’t he going through necrosis?
- Brotherhood arrives for the head. Thaddeus flees because he’s a ghoul now and the
brotherhood will kill him. Leaves the head with Maximus. Maximus comes up with the fake
head plan, which is obviously stupid and won’t work. Lucy and Maximus kiss. At least
Maximus is showing some initiative now. The romantic relationship between M&L is
completely unearned. Feels like they just made it happen.
- Betty is giving orientation for resettlement. Woody has a panic attack and tries backing out
of being sent to 32. Betty says she conferred with the “high council” and Steph was picked
to be overseer of 32. Finally Steph has something to do other than be pretty and act weird.
Chet and Norm look regretful at each other over being split up. Easily the best character
dynamic in the show. Who doesn’t love a big guy-little guy team? They really are resealing
32. Doesn’t this mean the water crisis isn’t resolved? They never said the water chip was
resolved iirc. The population of 33 has been too severely depleted to maintain genetic
diversity between the vaults. How much inbreeding is actually going on in this eugenics
experiment?
- Norm sneaks into Betty’s office and hacks into her terminal to contact 31. Says Betty needs
to return. Bud asks if she’s compromised. Norm says mission not going to plan. Bud says to
come to 31 immediately. Norm goes through the access door. Vault door wobbles a lot for
something so heavy. 31 reseals behind him.
- There are three branching hallways in the access corridor, meaning there’s more to 31 than
what we see.
The episode got a lot better when it gets away from pre-war stuff to focus on the show’s own
plot threads. Everything wrong with the show all comes back to the big twists that break
everything.
Notes on Episode 8
Episode 8 “The Beginning”
Directed by: Wayne Yip
Written by: Gursimran Sandhu
- Tagline: war…
- Maximus is being brought to the clerics in a vertibird. The face-smashed head is so dumb.
- The Brotherhood have occupied Filly with assistance from an airship. Maximus is brought
before the elder cleric. Dane presents the head while they ask about Titus. Truth is out. Cleric
brings up Dane’s boot. The head is shown to have no core in it after passing a radiation
detector over it.
- Maximus is about to becexecuted when Dane says he did the boot to himself. Maximus says
he knows where the real head is. The elder cleric is impressed with Dane’s loyalty and
suspends the execution.
- Maximus is interrogated and says the truth about Titus running away. “Power is taken, not
given. A lesson you seem to have learned.” Cleric says they’ll take power with the core, and
promises Maximus a place as his enforcer. “You’ve been looking for a home? Build one with
me.”
- The conflict of interest here would be more compelling if there was any reason to believe
Maximus still cared about the Brotherhood over Lucy. Maximus acted like he barely had any
attachment to the Brotherhood to begin with. What he wanted was to help people and Lucy
tries to do that.
- Lucy arrives at the observatory compound. Pretty well fortified car junk wall and gate.
They’re growing corn on observatory grounds. Ghoul from mart serving soup. If you squint,
some of the remnants look like they have bits and pieces of NCR armor and uniform pieces
but nothing that looks fully put together like the ranger armors seen earlier. However, the
remnants don’t look much more put together than an eclectic raider band. Normal civilians
make it clear this is an actual community and not just an outpost.
- Cooper & Dogmeat walking through yet another desert. Flashback to vault-tec hq. Cooper is
driving Barb to work. And puts in the ear piece.
- Bud parks next to Coop in a retro Americana smart car with a bubble canopy. Bud feels
confident enough to drive a sissy little car because he lives to be a corporate suit. He has a
minimalist perspective and would prefer austerity & frugality to the kind of extravagance
displayed with Cooper’s car. This is also a visual hint at Bud’s future as a brain in a jar. A lot
of thought was put into just this car prop.
- The bug is interfering with Barb’s transmitter and she doesn’t get it looked at to make her
meeting. Bud tells coop about Bud’s Buds after saying he has no kids. Bud conceives of
Bud’s Buds as a kind of management program that can run generational projects that last
hundreds of years. That would be a novel concept for communists, but not capitalists. Why
invest into an idea that won’t turn a profit within a human lifespan? The sole appeal of Bud’s
plan is that vault-tec executives won’t be running the project, they’ll inherit it from assistants
like Bud. All the real work will be done for them by the end of the process.
- Bud tries asking Barb into going out with Coop so he can connect with him. Bud is a born
brown noser but his instinct for networking is clearly what brought him from West-Tek and
into Vault-Tec’s inner circle.
- Cooper loses the signal and goes inside.
- One of Moldaver’s guards seems to be wearing lamellar armor. Weird choice.
- The observatory has its wall blown out facing the city where the nuke hits. There’s an NCR
flag above the control console and NCR propaganda posters pasted around the room. This
is all meaningless nostalgia that is never ultimately explained. Hank is being kept in a cage.
Two of Moldaver’s goons have full combat armor suits (very nice). And there’s a female
ghoul, comlpletely desiccated and feral, croaking for sustenance at the fully spread dinner
table where Moldaver holds court. The ghoul itself is so desiccated there’s no way Rose
would still be alive. Even her eye sockets are hollow. In the games ghoul necrosis rotted
away excess flesh while retaining vital organs and musculature to maintain a state of
survivability. Ghouls needed food and water to live. This just means that ghouls are zombies
now. They can shrug off gunshots and heal getting staked in the neck and live like a Tibetan
mummy. Can you only kill ghouls with headshots too?
- Lucy says she thought about sticking a grenade into Wilzig’s neck hole. Would have been
more impactful to see that. “But it’s not really how I was raised.” Well la-ti-da, Princess.
Moldaver extracts the core without any sentimentality for Wilzig. But first Noldaver baits
Lucy with the truth about Hank.
- Cut to 31. Norm hears Bud doing some dumb shit. Bud was trapped by a mop that fell over
and his weak little roomba body can’t get out. I get why they made Bud a brain in a jar with
nothing but a dinky syringe for combat. It’s a big joke and it prevents Bud from being a
threat to Norm. However, Bud SHOULD be more threatening. There’s no reason for him not
to be a robobrain. He could have at least had manipulator arms to perform his job, which is
the one thing he cares about. Instead we get a bunch of unfunny schtick. So much of Bud
has been built up in an interesting way and this is the pay off?
- Norm frees Bud and Bud discovers Norm is Hank’s son. Bud tries stopping Norm but can’t.
All he can do is tell norm not to go where the secret is.
- A younger Betty receives Coop in a waiting room for guests. Betty says Barb’s new assistant
really wants to meet Cooper. The same guy Cooper blew off on the phone is “Henry,” later
revealed to be Hank.
- Coop puts in the earpiece and hears Bud starting the conspiracy meetup.
Conspirators:
Robert House (RobCo Founder & CEO)
Leon Von Felden (West-Tek chief researcher)
Frederick Sinclair (Big Mt title unknown)
Julia Masters (REPCONN CFO)
Barb Howard & Bud Askins (Vault-Tec executive & executive assistant)
RobCo: Computing & Robotics
West-Tek: weapons developer, created power armor & Forced Evolutionary Virus
Big Mt: research & development
REPCONN: aerospace & propulsion
Vault-tec: “the end of the world”
Lore problems: Sinclair was not working for big Mt, he contracted their technology for the
construction of the Sierra Madre. It would have been more effective to make one of the Think
Tank show up as a fish out of water. REPCONN was also acquired as a subsidiary of RobCo
and shouldn’t have a seat at the table. It would make far more sense to have Poseidon Energy
at the table. Poseidon Energy would also have fiduciary incentive to repress cold fusion, not
Vault-Tec. Their whole business model is based on scarcity of energy. Leon was the researcher
who developed FEV. his presence is questionable, but it would make sense for him to be there
as someone who would understand technicalities.
Transcript:
Sinclair: let’s call this what it is, *Bud*. Your sales aren’t up to snuff, and you need money.
House: you’re one to talk, Freddy boy. You could lose money running a casino.
Bud: [laughs] our sales are fine. Sure rumors of the peace negotiations have set us back a bit,
but we’re here to offer you an opportunity. We’d like to collaborate on some of the vaults.
Leon: I-I don’t get the vaults. When it’s time to come out, what if people are still alive on the
surface? (NOTE: !!!) they’ll be Stone Age creatures who will probably eat whoever comes out of
your vaults.
Bud: that isn’t an issue. Our vaults have the resources to survive for centuries. Meanwhile, our
competitors — you know, every other human who isn’t us — will be dead on the surface.
(NOTE: ???) because after all, what is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction?
Cooper & Bud: “Time.”
Bud: time is the apex predator. And in the event of an incident, “time” is the weapon which will
defeat all of our enemies. That is how we will win the great game of capitalism. Not by
outfighting everyone, but by outliving them.
House: even if you outlive all external threats, here’s my problem with the vaults. You confine a
bunch of rats in a nest a long time, they’ll start eating each other. So who’s to say your rats are
gonna survive better than those animals on the surface?
[all talking]
Leon: and you still haven’t addressed the fundamental question—
Masters: that is a little short-sighted I would say.
Sinclair: I don’t need rats for people on the surface.
[Bud is amused at the meeting getting out of order]
[Barb receives orders from a shadowy figure in the balcony on her pip-boy.]
Barb: if I could perhaps refocus the conversation.
Cooper: c’mon Barb, set ‘em straight…
Barb: when I think about the future, I think about my daughter… Janey. How do I provide her
with a better future?
Cooper: Yes.[sighing]
Barb: and how do we design our vault societies so our children can have that better future?
[camera pans to show more shadowy observers in the balcony]
Barb: I suggest we hedge our bets.
[insert flash forward to Vault 31; see below]
Barb: Bud here has an idea for three interconnected vaults. (NOTE: then the conspiracy wasn’t
necessary) But we need more ideas. We need your ideas. Because it was the spirit of
competition that made our companies great, and I propose we bring that same spirit of
competition to our solution.
[map displays planned vault sites with blue bulbs, one vault is in Alberta and one in the Baja
peninsula]
Barb: we have over a hundred vaults spread across America. Enough for each of you to claim
several, where you can play out your own ideas for how to create the perfect conditions for
humanity. Whatever you want to do. No one needs to know. And may the best idea win.
[another flash forward to 31]
Sinclair: we could, intentionally overcrowd a vault so people have to compete to survive inside
it.
Masters: we have been developing a robot that delivers milk to the front door. It’s quite
intelligent. I would like to see a vault governed by it.
Leon: what about using a vault to develop a super-mutant soldier using illegal immigrants?
Sinclair: we could pump psychotropic drugs into the air supply.
Masters: we could separate parents and children, and only the smartest kids reach adulthood.
House: it’s a fun idea. There’s a lot of earning potential with the end of the world. But we’re
talking about making a significant investment based on a hypothetical. How can you guarantee
results?
Barb: by dropping the bomb ourselves. A nuclear event would be a tragedy, but also an
opportunity. Perhaps the greatest opportunity in history. Because when we are the only ones
left, there will be no one to fight. A true monopoly.
Barb: this is our chance to make war obsolete. Because in our current societal configuration,
which took shape without intentional guidance, we have friction. We have conflict, and we have
war. And war, well… war never changes.
Note for flash-forward:
- Bud says he’s the overseer and does more unfunny woke HR jokes. Norm reveals the cryo
tubes arranged down an octagonal corridor. This is a huge reveal and Bud is doing more
unfunny schtick over it. Shut the fuck up for a minute, please! Only a fraction of the pods are
empty. About - 16. Based on what we know about 33 there are at least three executive-
assistants who are actively running Bud’s Buds at any given time for a vault, six total. Yet the
amount of empty tubes isn’t consistent with the timeline. Bud’s Buds are likely refreezing
themselves after staging their deaths so they can be thawed out for reclamation day. If all
empty pods are active Bud’s Buds then 8 were lost in 32 and Hank is gone. Assuming no
executives were killed in the raid, there are four other potential unnamed assistants in 33. If
this theory proves correct. Total cryo capacity appears to be 72-90. Possibly more. This
begs the question of how Bud’s Buds are inserted without arousing anyone’s suspicion at
the arrival of new middle-aged people they’ve never seen before. Most likely the Triennial
trades are staged by Bud’s Buds and the vaults are actually sent new managers. But that
would also mean that 32 and 33’s population aren’t trading genetics, they’re only receiving
new DNA from Bud’s Buds. However, the showrunners obviously don’t care about these
details based on the first episode, so who knows?
- Bud tells norm about Bud’s Buds. “America outsourced its survival to the private sector, but
it would have been insane to keep a failed nation alive. So, we kept Vault-Tec alive instead. A
well-trained staff of highly supervised junior executives from my own assisstant training
program. Because the future of humanity comes down to one word: management.”
- Bud says that 32 & 33 are vault-tec’s breeding pool. The “ultimate expression of HR R&D.”
They WERE meant to be bred with Bud’s buds to produce a genetically superior race of
super managers??? Norm looks as flabbergasted as I am. This would mean my theory about
the triennial trades is on the money. 32 and 33 were redundancies in case either pop was
compromised. Likely, physical trades also came from 31’s storehouse. The original
populations were genetically selected for people with positive attitudes and a solid work
ethic, which is consistent with everything we’ve seen about the vault dwellers’ behavior. Was
this the only thing the showrunners spent time thinking about? It’s the only plot that works,
even if the premise of creating super managers is stupid. The only snag is the conceit that
the true purpose of the vault was concealed from its inhabitants, but they selected for
genetics not ideology so that makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is positivity and go-
getterness having genetic markers. They could have only determined that through behavioral
screening, and behavioral experiments are what Vault-Tec actually does, not weirdo genetics
projects. Also, is 33’s sense of scale abstracted? Vault 4 seems way bigger, and presumably
the whole population was at Betty’s orientation. That’s not nearly enough people to maintain
genetic diversity. This is the most inbred population in the world. They’re all 3x Pimpy 2x
Bape.
- Norm: we wiped the surface clean?
Analysis of the conspiracy:
Where the fuck do I even start? It’s maybe the dumbest fucking conspiracy ever conceived.
Bud says that their sales are fine, which if true means that they don’t need the other
conspirators for the investments. That’s fine. Vault-Tec is a government contractor and the
contracts for the vaults are already secured. It also means that Vault-Tec is the only member of
the panel who has had slumping sales. The other conspirators aren’t feeling any squeeze from
the market or express any anxiety over their profitability.
Leon asks an extremely pertinent question about survivors on the surface when they come
outside, and Bud does not satisfy that question at all. “Time” does not explain away the threat
of survivors. People lived for hundreds of thousands of years before human beings even
developed civilization. 200-500 years does not guarantee the extinction of surface dwellers
without a control. Which vault-tec didn’t plan for. They weren’t even monitoring the surface or
the other vaults in 31!
Bud says that they’re winning capitalism but their objective is basically destroying it. Why even
recreate capitalism after reclamation day? The executives could live like god-kings with an
army of corporate compliant human relations officers. No population means no consumer
base, and no United States means no government contracts. All the conspirators are
government contractors, so Vault-Tec is pitching them on destroying their biggest client. Leon
calls out the fact that Bud didn’t answer the question but this thread is immediately dropped.
House’s objection based on the mouse utopia experiment also isn’t satisfied by Barb’s
solution. Brainstorming ideas for behavioral experiments doesn’t address the problem House
has, which is pertinent to the triune vault. You would be running these experiments BEFORE
starting a nuclear war to determine the best practice for long term isolation, but instead the
ultimate pitch of the meeting is to start a war, and most of the vaults are behavioral
experiments so they obviously didn’t care about figuring shit out before Vault-Tec pulled the
trigger.
Barb’s proposal is also pitching the conspirators on shit they already have. All of these
companies have secret research facilities. FEV was being developed at West-Tek facilities
before being moved to Mariposa. House has practically the whole Mojave for his playground,
where he had already developed several innovations in secret. Big Mt. has the Big Empty! This
pitch only has appeal if the experiments are beyond the purview of the government, but again
these are all government contractors. Why would they jeopardize their relationship with the
United States for flights of sociological curiosity?
Every member on that panel is either a genius or a driven business person, yet all of their
mental faculties go out the window at Barb’s proposal. They’re practically giddy with the
thought of all the Nazi experiments they can come up with. House even says there’s earning
potential in the end of the world, which is stupid. House would never say that. He was already
preparing for the end of the world based on his estimation that the Great War was inevitable! If
there was an opportunity to avoid war he would have taken it, and blowing the whistle on this
conspiracy could have pre-empted a nuclear exchange by setting up his own competitors as
sacrificial lambs. House is the only person on the panel who owns the company he represents,
and he doesn’t think at all like a capitalist! Almost nobody acts in their own interest, not even
the one guy in pre-war America who could see the end coming!
And to top all of this off, Vault-Tec doesn’t need any of the other conspirators to instigate a
nuclear war! They don’t need their help or consent to do it! All they’re doing is exposing vault-
tec to more liability by telling the commanding heights of corporate America that Vault-Tec
plans to destroy corporate America!
What Barb says about achieving a true monopoly also isn’t appealing to the other conspirators,
because it’s not really a true “monopoly” if they’re all around to compete for control of the
post-apocalypse. They should know that, and based on that knowledge assume that Vault-Tec
will fuck them all over to realize Vault-Ted’s ideological vision. Which they do!
Barb’s line about war never changing is also irrelevant to their whole pitch, and it
acknowledges that what they’re plotting isn’t a war, but a unilateral genocide waged by a
shadowy corporate conspiracy. To the writers of this show I say: FFFFFUUUUUUUUCK
YOOOOOOOUUUUUU!
Do I really have to explain how none of this works? This is the same kind of tortured logic they
had to come up with for antisemitic conspiracy theories, and the audience swallows this
horseshit because all they know is capitalism bad. Corporations bad. Without any Marxist
critique to clarify the actual structure and operation of capitalism, anti capitalist dissidents
must resort to conspiracy thinking to explain away capital’s excesses & externalities as the
consequences of bad actors choosing to do evil. This is anarchist fantasizing & Christian
paranoia of the devil. And the showrunners are just as ignorant on this subject as the masses
of undereducated Western hogs they look down upon!
I feel dumber for having picked this apart. I have the same look on my face as Cooper. When I
saw this for the first time I had ringing in my ears. It’s unbelievable. This one big twist totally
overturns the entire premise and thesis of Fallout, and it doesn’t even make sense in its own
terms! They literally blew up a perfectly good story about man’s drive to reproduce conflict, to
replace it with a reactionary conspiracy where society’s true villains are the middle managers?
The “Professional Managerial Class?” Are you fucking kidding me? This is unserious for a
clown!
- cooper meets Hank. Hank loves the scene in man from Deadhorse where Cooper shot the
communist, and asks for an autograph.
- Moldaver says Hank never told the truth to Rose. So how did Rose discover the truth?
Couldn’t be anyone other than Moldaver. Moldaver keeps baiting Lucy with more plot
threads.
- Maximus is suiting up with Dane in the brotherhood armory. The Brotherhood has an eclectic
mix of firearms. One guy looks down the sights of a ruger mini-14. The Brotherhood still
lacks weapons manufacturing abilities if small arms aren’t standardized. They’re also stingy
with the energy weapons this whole season. A few props shown look like laser and plasma
weapons but none are used. The power armor handgun looks like a laser pistol but is really
an automatic magnum.
- Dane is being sent into combat as punishment for hurting himself. Dane doubles down on it
to Maximus, which confirms to the audience that Dane really did hurt himself. But why do
this as such a late reveal? To show that Maximus is a good guy who’d “never hurt a fly?” He
obviously does! He’s a completely amoral simpleton whose first solution to every problem is
to engage with overwhelming violence. When the story implied that Maximus did the boot
razor it made him morally complex. It showed that he was driven to fulfill his dream of
becoming a knight even if it meant doing something traitorous and unethical. Now I seriously
think that Maximus wouldn’t know the meaning of the word “morality!” Worst written
character in the whole fucking show! And they cast a black actor to play this buffoon? You
better believe I’m not letting that go! Aaron Moten is a good actor. You can see it during the
interrogation scene where Maximus’s entire thought process is written across his face. And
this talent is wasted on a gormless oaf!
- Maximus tells Dane that he’s bringing the brotherhood to rescue Lucy, and they’re going to
leave together to go back to her vault, where they don’t have war. Implying that Dane could
leave the Brotherhood too. Dane looks regretful knowing that it’s impossible to take up
Maximus on that offer, and says nowhere is safe and there is no leaving.
- Brotherhood deploys in a vertibird squadron of six. Each vertibird can only carry a limited
number of knights, squires, and aspirants, and this will be important.
- Moldaver says Rose discovered that the vault’s water was being siphoned away, and
concluded ground water may be drawn up by a civilization. Hank thought it was ridiculous.
Rose concluded that Hank was hiding something and left the vault. This still doesn’t explain
how Rose left the vault without the door access codes. Moldaver probably isn’t telling the
truth. Even with the core in her hands Moldaver is still trying to maintain her cover story.
- Moldaver tells Lucy that Hank chased after Rose, took her and Norm back, and when Rose
refused to return to the vault, he nuked Shady Sands. Moldaver is leaving out any mention of
her relationship with Rose, and Lucy’s memory triggers a flashback where we can see
Moldaver meeting with Rose in Shady Sands. Rose of course turned into the ghoul at the
table, or so Moldaver claims.
- Moldaver tells Lucy about cold fusion and all the good it could do, but because Vault-Tec
made the technology proprietary, she needs the activation code from Hank. Why would
Hank have the code of it’s not in his purview as an executive assistant? Hank is telling Lucy
not to listen to Moldaver. Is this actually an elaborate kayfabe between Moldaver and Hank?
- Moldaver tells Lucy the ghoul is Rose. The ghoul is wearing Rose’s pendant but this really
doesn’t prove anything. The ghoul is so desiccated it could be anybody. Moldaver is
conducting an elaborate ruse.
- Lucy is distraught and tells Hank to give the code. Hank is reluctant to give up the code but
does it for Lucy. The code activates a reactor revealing that the cold fusion core wasn’t a
rock, but a miniaturized reactor itself that needed the code to start the fusion process. Only
problem is, this requires a level of miniaturization that shouldn’t be possible in Fallout’s
universe. Not unless it was a full sized reactor that they shot with a shrink-ray or something
dumb and campy like that.
- Norm tries to back out and Bud locks him in. Bud suggests norm should wait things out in
Hank’s tank or else he’ll starve. Bud also says he wishes he could go into cryosleep. Oh well,
Bud, this was your idea.
- Hanks says he did what was necessary to save the vault, and that Moldaver is no different
than him.
- The cold fusion core is activated, but before Moldaver connects to the power grid they’re
attacked by the brotherhood.
- Hank says he loved Rose but she stopped being Lucy’s mother when she took her into
danger. Hank is about to give his cliched villain speech over the battle between the
brotherhood and the NCR remnants. A horrible decision that saps all the fun out of the battle
while distracting from Hank’s speech at the same time.
- The observatory has heavy artillery, with SAMs mounted in the domes. Moldaver is running a
sophisticated military operation. The SAMs miss but a guy with a rocket launcher scores a
hit on one vertibird, reducing the BoS force by a full 1/6. Doorgunners rake the observatory
grounds with no distinction for civvie or combatant. The remnants have anti-air guns they
should have been using already but oh no the gunners domed. Now the brotherhood can
label and launch their assault. Moldaver takes command of the hmg while the battle turns
into a chaotic melee. A couple knights go down but it’s going badly for the remnants.
Maximus & Dane take cover behind the fountain. Remaining knights are able to push in to
the observatory with squires and recruits following. The knights mow down everything that
moves. At this point the Brotherhood has practically won. Superior firepower and power
armor carry the day even though Moldaver’s defenses were perfectly formidable against an
aerial assault.
- Meanwhile Hank is telling Lucy that he made the hard choice between a world of war and a
world of peace, and that the only way to defeat all the factions is to outlast them until there’s
no more war. The show keeps taking this weirdly anti political stance like it’s the factions
who are causing all the problems for the wasteland as if they’re all equally at fault for
reproducing conflict. The showrunners have forgotten that there is a faction that does
nothing but good for the wasteland and has a sophisticated political praxis: the Followers of
the Apocalypse.
- Cooper does the thing where he exploits the design flaw in the T-45 that was reproduced in
the T-60 to get critical hits and bypass DR. The only problem with this scene is that power
armor helmets all have lamp attachments. If any of them turned one on Cooper would be
hosed.
- A headless knight waddles in to the observatory before collapsing with Maximus coming
behind. Cooper must have taken out all the knights by himself.
- Hank says he’s Lucy’s father and Maximus blasts the lock on his cage. Lucy is too distraught
to realize what’s happening until it’s too late. Hank has already, somehow, opened the power
armor from a face down position, dragged out the corpse, and climbed in himself without
Lucy or Maximus knowing. So now it’s just Kyle McLachlan’s head on a T-60.
- Lucy tells Maximus that Hank did 9/11. Maximus attacks Hank in a blind rage only to get
knocked the fuck out with a power armored backhand. Maybe the funniest scene in the
whole show. Maximus is out cold and Lucy points his 10mm at Hank’s face.
- Cooper interrupts by asking “young Henry” if he wants an autograph. Cooper asks where his
fucking family is. Implying that Janey is still alive somehow. Barb is likely frozen in 31, which
means they probably never showed the triune vault to Cooper when he was endorsing vault-
tec.
- Instead of answering, Hank runs away with the arm jets. By the end of the episode Hank is
walking to New Vegas in the same power armor suit. Did he walk the entire distance from
Griffith Observatory to New Vegas in a power armor suit that smelled like bodily fluids?
- Cooper doesn’t shoot knowing he needs Hank for answers. Cooper tells Lucy that war never
changes, and no matter how chaotic things are someone is behind the driver’s seat. (This
wasn’t true at all for the 200 years before Hank’s wife left him) cooper offers to help Lucy find
her dad before the brotherhood shows up and throws her in a hole.
- The brotherhood is showing up for sure. A whole airship with a second squadron of
vertibirds.
- Lucy picks up the 10mm but instead of shooting coop she gives a mercy killing to “Rose.”
Right in the head. We’re really doing zombie rules huh?
- Lucy tearfully leaves Maximus behind.
- Maximus wakes up to the sounds of battle. Moldaver’s band is still being mopped up.
Moldaver stumbles in with a gut wound looking for Rose and fully activates the core. She
didn’t see Maximus when she came in, meaning that this wasn’t a put on. She really is
wounded, probably fatally, and she’s sentimentally holding the ghoul’s hand as if it is Rose.
“We did it, Rose.”
- The lights are coming on in the boneyard. Did Moldaver think LA could be resettled with the
core? The problem with that idea is that LA is too thoroughly radiated, has no arable land,
and no water. Is all of California hooked up to the Boneyard on the power grid? Questions
and more questions.
- Moldaver asks Maximus what he thinks the Brotherhood will do with infinite power. Good
question, Moldaver. Why didn’t you think of that before you turned on cold fusion for them?
Moldaver is bleeding out heavily and passes out from blood loss, appearing to be dead.
- The Brotherhood bursts in and Dane is first on the scene. He declares that Maximus killed
the enemy leader in front of their brothers. Maximus is guaranteed a place as the elder
cleric’s right hand man now and won’t be able to leave for Lucy.
- Cut to later. Cooper, Lucy, and Dogmeat were in a graveyard crypt, probably getting some of
cooper’s things. Hollywood sign is lit up in the background.
- In the closing shot of new Vegas there are a few minor shanty settlements on the outskirts of
Vegas. Two settlements are billowing single pillars of smoke, implying they’re inhabited. One
of the settlements is probably Goodsprings.
No closing thoughts. Need time to digest.
Notes on Creative Troika; Pre-Prep for Nolanverse Redux
IGN Todd & Jon interview -
- Nolan got into Fallout 3 in 2008. Doesn’t mention playing the other games when asked early
in the interview.
- Todd claims he wanted the show to stand up as a new story. Claims he talked with
showrunners mostly about tone. Todd claims the show incorporated everything from the
games.
- Nolan claims he approached the lore with “humility.” The most “excited” and “nervous” parts
to make were the flashbacks. Claims that they worked with Todd to make sure it’d all fit
together.
- Todd claims he had an emotional reaction to the proposition of nuking Shady Sands. Nolan
doesn’t contradict Todd, indicating it was Nolan’s idea.
- Todd on “fall” of shady sands: nuking happened “just after” the events of New Vegas,
doesn’t explain what the “fall” means.
- Nolan claims Todd worked hard to make the games “fit together” for the show, even though
the show invalidates all the endings of New Vegas. If they were so worried why not set the
show anywhere else?
- Nolan says “Geneva & Graham” pitched characters like Lucy. Nolan says Lucy has to hold
on to her “essential decency” as an excuse for why she has no character development.
- Nolan on BoS: Maximus is based on “my experience” playing the games where he was
morally compromised just to get cool stuff, and this is why nobody takes the Brotherhood’s
beliefs seriously?
- L&M: Nolan claims there’s a “genuine bond” (ed: but that doesn’t mean it’s romantic.)
- Nolan says doing the Vault-Tec retcon was the “most exciting” thing to do.
- “War never changes: Nolan says Graham is a bigger fan of Fallout and determined the “right
moment” to drop the line.
- Todd on NCR: “we’re approaching things locally” and “communication is difficult.” Doesn’t
explain why nobody acts as if the NCR was real.
- Nolan says he wanted to spend “more time” on Moldaver.
- Nolan hints that they want to cast Ron Perlman as a character. Nolan claims that they’re
“pacing themselves” despite the first season revealing practically nothing but the big twists.
- Nolan says Chris Nolan plays co-op games, hinting he’s not into fallout.
- Nolan claims there’s a multi season plan for the series.
Direct Extras timeline interview with Wagner and Robertson-Dworet:
- graham says they can’t answer which game they drew from the most (come on now) and
that they don’t want to play factions with Fallout fans? R-D says they wanted to be “true to
the mythology” but couldn’t commit to any one ending.
- R-D based the Vault-Tec conspiracy on how the wasteland is full of corporate detritus, and
that the power those companies had must imply they had a hand in ending the world. Which
was already well established in the games. They invented an unnecessary conspiracy theory
to tell a worse backstory than the games did. Graham says it’s about a world with Mega
corporations that didn’t work out, and here “we are now, adapting it for Amazon dot com.”
Not understanding that Fallout TV is a toothless critique of big business because it’s too
fucking stupid to take seriously. “Hope it works out.”
- On season 2: R-D says they had close collaboration with Beth to avoid stepping on Fallout 5
(no shit) and a bunch of stuff was cut out for the eight episode run time. “You can’t do justice
to all of it” yet they did justice to almost none. Graham: “we still beat Fallout 5 to market.”
Troika profiles:
Geneva Robertson-Dworet:
- Harvard educated. Wrote for the Harvard Lampoon.
- Only has co-writing credits on Tomb Raider, Captain Marvel, and Fallout tv with seven
upcoming projects. Presumably did mostly uncredited work touching up scripts and several
screenplays which were never ultimately produced.
- Mostly has experience adapting established IPs for film & TV.
- Parents unknown based on online info.
- Married to Hayes Davenport, a writer & producer who wrote Vice Principals (incredible show)
Graham Wagner:
- Comedy writer & producer. Did most of his credited writing work on 50 episodes of
Portlandia.
- No wiki page.
- Very little info online about Wagner’s background. Robertson-Dworet got tons of exposure
for female representation in writing and being an up and coming blockbuster writer, yet
Wagner is a seasoned comedy writer & producer with almost bupkis. No info on where
Wagner went to uni.
- Family and marital relations unknown.
- Nolan said Graham was the real fan of the games.
- In a GQ interview, Wagner claims they showed New Vegas in ruins as a sign that the
wasteland has “progressed.” ???
Jonathan Nolan:
- brother of Christopher Nolan, son of Brendan & Christina Nolan. Anglo-American.
- Wrote Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar. Since
Interstellar he wrote for Person of Interest and Westworld.
- Directed 3 episodes of Westworld and 1 episode of Person of Interest.
- Nolan’s stories focus on big mystery hooks that have huge 3rd act reveals, much like the
Vault-Tec conspiracy.
- Majored in English at Georgetown.
- Married to Lisa Joy, another writer/producer.
- Father Brendan was an Anglo-Irish copywriter and “creative director” although no info could
be found on what he was a creative director of or for whom.
Thoughts on the Troika:
- showrunners both have backgrounds as comedy writers, which makes it a wonder why
almost none of the jokes work in the show. This material was completely outside of their
wheelhouse.
- Nolan and Robertson-Dworet both have bourgeois or upper middle class backgrounds with
educations in America’s most elite academies.
- Nolan is known for stories that revolve around a “mystery box” plot, which the show realizes
through the vault-Tec conspiracy and Wilzig’s head.
- None of the troika have any background in political sciences or history.
- In a Hollywood Reporter interview Wagner & R-D were asked what their favorite fallout and
non-fallout games are but both dodged the question. In the same interview Wagner claims
that Fallout is a balance of drama & comedy.
- In same interview, Wagner said he had to turn off the part of his brain that says “you can’t do
that” to let Nolan and Robertson-Dworet swing for the fences.
- Jon Nolan is a fan of 3 but says nothing about the other games. It’s apparent that the vast
majority of inspiration came from the Bethsoft games if Wagner repressed his objections to
let Nolan & R-D run wild with their idea of Fallout being a dumb goofy theme park.
Return to the Nolanverse Episode 1:
(I was disatisfied with my notes for the Jon Nolan episodes since I was noting things down a lot more casually. Most of the problems with the show stem from here, which is why I had to go back and re-review).
Fallout tv Return to the
Nolanverse Review ReDux
Episode 1 “The End”
- Show starts at “The End,” October 23, 2077
- The apocalypse happening in October was acknowledged in Fallout 4 with all the scattered
Halloween decorations, but this is a normal summer day in LA, with no signs of the fall or the
holidays.
- President was nowhere to be found for negotiations with “America’s adversaries.” At this
point the President is mid-flight to the Poseidon oil rig. Does this hint that the Enclave knew
about the Vault-Tec conspiracy? This presents a few problems to be addressed next
episode.
- Cooper lies to Janey about what the dads are saying. Cooper’s instinct is to shield Janey
from reality, yet he’s exposing her to incredible danger by keeping her out of the vault.
- Janey is looking in on the birthday party, regretting that she can’t be a normal kid as she’s on
the job with Cooper.
- Cooper hides the truth about why he won’t do the thumbs up and tells her how to eyeball a
mushroom cloud instead.
- First strike hits LA. Why is the explosion in slow motion? Flash 4:42, shockwave 5:52. It
takes a full minute, approximately, for the shockwave to reach from downtown LA to the
mansion in the Hollywood hills. Downtown > HH is roughly 9 miles. Fallout’s nuclear
warheads were smaller yields than in megatons but averaged a range of about 500 kt. A 500
kiloton blast produces overpressures at 8 psi 9 miles out, which would be enough to destroy
the mansion. Overpressure also causes the blast to exceed the sound barrier, which
sometimes exceeds Mach 10. Even at Mach 1 it would take the blast 45 seconds to reach.
Detonations impact the ground but a simulation of a 300 kt ground strike wouldn’t reach the
Hollywood Hills from Los Angeles. A 15kt blast wouldn’t even get close. Other detonations
shown appear to be air bursts.
- Why do all of these details matter? Because the show doesn’t take nuclear bombing
seriously at all. This is the most terrifying event in all of human history, and it produces T-
Rated consequences in a show that later revels in excessive gore. 1:1 realism isn’t expected,
but the consequences are trivial. Nobody inside the mansion gets embedded with glass
despite the entire wall being made of glass. All those kids and adults should look like
porcupines. Even Fallout 4 has a more palpable sense of terror and urgency during the Great
War. In Fallout tv the effects of the bombs are trivial. Cooper and Janey must have looked
directly at three nuclear flashes while getting away ON HORSEBACK, without being blinded
or feeling any heat. LA doesn’t get set on fire from a heat wave. No death and misery, no
earth-shattering kaboom. If a British propaganda program for tv like Threads could portray a
more terrifying nuclear exchange in the 80s then what’s Fallout tv’s excuse? This is a
contrived scenario certain to be expanded on in season 2. We also know that LA was hit
with some ground bursts because of the craters seen later in the show.
- The show sets off on a bad footing and its failure to sell the horror of Fallout repeats
throughout the season. It depends too much on gross monsters and gross people to sell its
scares while not taking anything seriously. The horror only works when Cooper is being
inhumane, or during the gulper birthing scene; and the gulper birthing is undermined by that
episode’s horrible plotting and lame punchline.
- 2296, Vault 33: Lucy is pitching her skills to the council. Tag skills: repair, science, speech,
melee, unarmed, small guns.
- Norm was jaded and unenthusiastic about vault life before the events of the show.
- Lucy says no marriage partners are suitable since she’s related to everyone in vault 33. This
doesn’t stop them from being sexually active with each other doing “cousin stuff.” Lucy is
offering herself for marriage in the triennial trade. Council unanimously approved.
- Steph is helping Lucy get dressed and made up, and was with Lucy in the pipefitters
association. Lucy and Steph were friends for a while but at no point does Lucy express that
she misses Steph.
- Marriage ceremonies are corny affairs conducted like a picnic in the agricultural field.
Dwellers grow corn in rows to approximate rural living arrangements instead of performing
more efficient underground agriculture (this is consistent with Vault-Tex’s ideological aims).
- Lucy has a brief moment of hesitation when Lucy talks about raising their kids in the vault.
Lingering memories of the surface, probably.
- Seeing everyone working on the marriage spread with Hank brightens Lucy up.
- The Nebraska skyline is being projected in 3 directions from the ceiling.
- Hank DOES mention he’s from 31. Claims to have never stepped foot outside of it before the
triennial trade.
- Norm is trying to psyche Lucy out. “He could be a cannibal, or crammed with tumors.”
- Chet stalls at opening the door because he loves Lucy. “Messing around with your cousin,
it’s all well and good for kids, but it’s not a sustainable long term practice.” So really the
vaults are an elaborate incest fantasy.
- Moldaver comes in and Hank doesn’t recognize her. Moldaver’s cover story is that there was
a grain blight, but they leave the door wide open. Lucy’s hubby is named Monty.
- Vault dwellers have no idea there’s something off about the 32ers. They even sit at mixed
tables, yet nobody recognizes each other, nobody asks about 32, nobody gets rad spikes on
their pip boys, the bandits all have horrible table manners, one of the bandits has a neck
sleeve tattoo while others have scarring and so on.
- Hank says radiation levels are declining fast enough for Lucy’s generation to recolonize.
Lucy & Monty consummate. This is the most sexually charged scene in the whole show and
it’s rape under false pretenses.
- Norm is the only guy who checks out 32. Norm finds 32 abandoned and in disarray. Leaves
when he finds a dead body.
- Lucy can hear gunshots. The raiders are moving on the armory. Lucy uses her pip boy to
detect Monty’s rads. They fight. Strange to note after 2 other viewings that this is the best
choreographed fight of the season and it’s also the first. There’s a good sense of space and
action with convincing athletics and improvised brutality. It’s all downhill from here.
- Lucy is stabbed in the abdomen. She sticks herself with a stimpak in the bathroom. The
alarm has gone off in the vault with red alert lights. Raiders cleared out the armory and Lucy
takes the tranq pistol.
- The raiders kill without mercy and revel in the slaughter. The battle is a nonsensical melee.
Norm sneaks away.
- A couple dwellers are still bringing jelly molds despite the alarm going off. Woody tells them to
“get that jelly mold out of here!” This is the first big joke of the series and it falls totally flat.
Why would they ignore the alarm like that? And then they’re slaughtered.
- Moldaver is being escorted through the vault looking for Hank but takes no precautions to
protect the lives of Lucy & Norm, despite her previous relationship with Rose.
- Steph loses her husband and goes berserk. Loses an eye but takes out one raider while in
late term.
- Chet is closing the door to 32 while a raider bruiser carries a security guard up and takes a
hit of jet before attacking Chet. What was he bringing the guard into 32 for? The raiders
don’t end up claiming any slaves or hostages other than Hank. Guard trips the raider and
he’s split in two when the door shuts. Chet doesn’t have any inclination for violence despite
his huge frame.
- Lucy saves norm and leaves him in a maintenance hatch. Monty is back and gets brained by
hank with a shovel. Then gets drowned in pickle brine.
- Hank gets the inter-door breach alarm on his pip-boy. Again, why didn’t he get the alarm
when Norm was in 32? Is it the bomb blocking the door?
- Moldaver tells Hank “everyone knows who I am,” but we the audience still do not. Chet and
Steph are among the hostages. Hank chooses to save Lucy and is tranq’d. Moldaver gives
the hostages a chance to run before the bomb seals 32.
- Cut to Maximus at the Brotherhood. He’s getting his shit kicked in by a pack of superior
recruits. Including Thaddeus. Maximus is shown later to be a dumbass and an assholr so it’s
hard to believe this is mere hazing.
- Dane arrives to pick Maximus up. I don’t comment on Dane much in my other notes, but
Dane is a compelling character who is well acted by Xelia Mendes-Jones. The void of info
we get on the Brotherhood could have been alleviated by making Dane a POV character in a
mirror of Norm. Or rather, Dane should have been a main character and not Maximus. Dane’s
actions reveal that he has an aversion to violence and is willing to hurt himself to avoid the
knighthood career track. Dane’s support for Maximus is an expression of empathy which
Maximus is seemingly incapable of.
- “Flesh is weak but steel endures.” - a brotherhood tenet
- This brotherhood chapter is based out of a defunct air field. Destroyed military planes litter
the tarmac. Life is regimented in a permanent barracks culture. Quite similar to war
communism, in fact. Children are seen on base. Women are also on base. The brotherhood
has produced their own children and recruited orphans from the wasteland. The Brotherhood
is likely operating out of air bases across America in order to set up an airship resupply
network.
- Brotherhood class. Cleric Felix is teaching the aspirants about the brotherhood’s purpose,
which is to find and secure pre-war technology. For what end is not stated. Maximus gets
switched in the mouth for not recognizing a diagram. The Prydwen arrives with a dispatch of
knights & clerics from the commonwealth. 5 knights are dispatched in T-60 power armors
with squires selected from the local aspirants.
- I have to admit my bias here. Fallout 4’s approach to treating power armor like a vehicle was
one of the best innovations Bethesda brought to the series, and seeing power armor
depicted as hulking metal killing machines that could stomp you to death was the right way
to go. If they had gone with the idea to make them cgi instead of physical props it would
have looked like shit.
- In style and culture the Brotherhood seems to have had a fundamentalist turn since Fallout
4. They’re no longer straightforward fascists with a historical mission but a militant cult like
they were in the original games. Although the Brotherhood does retain its fascist policies
from Maxson, such as its mutant exterminationism. However, the show doesn’t not explain
why the Brotherhood does what they do, only what. Nobody seems to take the
brotherhood’s religion seriously even though it’s a cult that indoctrinated them from
childhood. Even the highest ranking knights from the Commonwealth like Titus don’t give a
fuck about anything but themselves. Jonathan Nolan projected his nihilistic playstyle onto
the whole faction.
- The brotherhood is receiving transmitted codes that describe Wilzig as the target.
- Maximus is pulling latrine duty. Dane shows Maximus the power armors, which were left
totally unintended despite their sacred value. Maximus flashes back to Shady Sands. This is
the first of several times we see the clip of Maximus and the fridge. Brotherhood officers
take Dane to tell him he’s been selected as a squire.
- Brotherhood aspirants are playing basketball with bricks and a chain basket. Life on a
brotherhood is extremely austere & Spartan, with no toys or luxuries. Guy jerking off under
the covers in the barracks.
- Maximus is jealous of Dane for being selected. Dane says they’re being sent to the wilds.
Maximus freaks out while working latrines at night.
- Dane injures himself with a razor in his boot, but all suspicion is on Maximus. Maximus is
taken to be interrogated by Cleric Quintus.
- Back to 33. Everyone is engaged with cleanup. Dead raiders are being dragged into the
composting room. Lucy is stapling her stab wound, which for some reason wasn’t fully
healed by the stimpak.
- Lucy proposes to the assembly that they send a party to the surface to find Hank. Everyone
hates that. Woody says “there’s no bad idea in a brainstorm” but shoots it down anyway.
Betty says the vault’s security is their priority and they have to keep the doors closed. Norm
says they don’t want to find Hank because if they did then they couldn’t be overseer. Lucy
leaves the assembly to silence. Everyone heard Norm say that so Betty is already aware that
Norm is a jaded skeptic.
- Lucy is inspired by a vault boy poster saying “don’t lose your head” and resolved to leave on
her own. Norm immediately begins prepping to help Lucy. Chet collaborates since he has
the door codes and loves Lucy. Norm takes the opportunity to look down the elevator shaft
and it’s shown that the vaults are buried deep underground. Chet wants to go outside with
Lucy and she tranq’s him. The elevators close as Davey and Reg come up to try and stop
them. Lucy tells Norm she’s bringing Hank home.
- Lucy steps out into the brightness of the wasteland. The vault entrance door is exposed to
sunlight with dead bodies littering the entranceway. Bodies appear to be victims of the Great
War who could not make it inside. The vault entrance is within eyesight of the Santa Monica
Pier and right along the coastline, which places it directly west of the Boneyard.
- There’s an additional problem with the vault entrances being above ground besides the fact
the Master and anybody else would have found them. Being above ground with
standardized concrete casings makes the vaults an easily identifiable landmark from the sky.
Chinese intelligence should have been aware of these vaults and targeted them with ground
bursts to destroy the bunkers, like they did to “The Glow,” a West-Tek facility known to be
where FEV was developed.
- Back to Maximus’s interrogation. “Why did you join the brotherhood?” “To hurt the people
who hurt me.” Quintus refers to Dane as “they” when I was almost certain Dane was a trans
man. Kind of odd for the Brotherhood to have complex gender identities when they’re so
reactionary in every other regard. Quintus says the aspirants suspect Maximus hurt Dane.
Aaron Moten does the most acting he’s allowed to do the whole season as Maximus
struggles with his emotions. Maximus would never hurt Dane as a comrade but Maximus is
also glad for the chance at being selected for squire. Ultimately he can’t explain himself and
says that he was glad it happened. This is the first hint that Maximus is inarticulate and
incapable of communicating his inner thoughts. Quintus: “violence is merely a tool. We use it
to bring order to the wasteland, but violence against a brother of steel is a sign of weakness.
Are you? Weak?” “I don’t want to be.” Max expresses gratitude to the Brotherhood. “Eden or
whatever.” Affirms that he’d lay down his life if the brotherhood gives him meaning. Quintus
assigns Maximus as Knight Titus’s squire.
- It’s obvious now why Maximus seemed like a more complex character at the beginning of
the show. The serious and somber tone of brotherhood life keeps Maximus grounded within
a system where his actions are limited. Once he’s out in the wasteland and capable of
anything, Maximus is reduced to a bad joke. The showrunners let their comedy writing
backgrounds get away with them, and Nolan’s vision of Maximus as an impulsive player who
wants cool stuff ends up defining him more than the character itself as someone who
actually lives in the world and isn’t just a stand-in for how players approach Fallout.
- Maximus visits Dane in the medical tent and looks guilty. Dane mentions that they don’t steal
rations in Medical. “I told them you wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
- Maximus is branded with Titus’s sigil. The brotherhood sanctifies its questing brothers with
elaborate ritual. The brotherhood uses artifacts of no practical use as icons of worship. A
propellor engine is used in place of a cross.
- Quintus announces the objective of the mission. The brotherhood seems to know intimate
details about Wilzig, his plan, AND the existence of the cold fusion core. “May the shape of
the future be cut by your sword!”
- Somewhere in Mexico, probably the Baja coastline. A bandit is killed by the bounty hunters
with a junk launcher. They’re here to recruit Cooper. Coop is being held captive in a
graveyard by some desperado named Dom Pedro, who we never see. Honcho says Pedro
digs up cooper once a year to cut pieces off of him. Honcho says that he knew “of” Cooper
because his dad worked with him. This is an important detail to bring in because it proves
that Cooper has worked with others in the past, and Honcho’s dad left Cooper amicably
enough if he lived to tell about it. “How long has this asshole been moldering in the ground?”
[shrug].
- Honcho thinks feral ghouls are attracted to chickens because they can’t help themselves. Is
this a hint that Chickenfucker is a ghoul?
- They dig cooper up and bust him out of the casket. Cooper was being kept alive with IVs of
glowing liquid. Which begs the question of how Cooper didn’t go feral while being buried
underground? He wasn’t getting vials under there, and he’s been indisposed for years or else
he’d know about Moldaver. This is too obvious of a problem to leave unexplained, which is
why there needed to be a Dom Pedro scene. Cooper has to unstiffen every muscle in his
body from near-rigor mortis.
- “Is this an Amish production of the Count of Monte Cristo?” Cooper thinks everything is a
cruel joke and embodies that cruelty in how he conducts himself with others. Instead of
thanking his liberators he’s practically calling them freaks.
- Honcho is amused and introduces himself. Honcho tells cooper about the bounty. Cooper
licks his lips and calmly picks up the chicken just to fuck with them. Honcho says the bounty
is big enough to retire on even if they split it.
- Honcho has a hand-drawn sketch of Wilzig & Dogmeat. Honcho knows Wilzig is from the
Enclave and that he’s heading to Moldaver in California. “That’s where you from ain’t it?
Originally I mean.” Cooper doesn’t like this line of questioning. Honcho says that’s not
grateful and threatens to let Dom Pedro put Cooper in the ground for another 30 years.
Honcho doesn’t mention that Cooper worked with his dad, which was the whole reason he
even tried this.
- Big Problem: why does the Brotherhood know so much about Wilzig, and why does Honcho
know so much about Wilzig? The brotherhood is a big enough faction and long lived enough
to have spies in the Enclave, but Honcho is just a two-bit bounty hunter. The Enclave is the
only group who should know all this stuff about Wilzig, and they issued the bounties - which
means the Emclave announced to the entire wasteland about Wilzig, where he was headed,
that he was traveling with a dog, and maybe they even put the stuff about the cold fusion
core in the bounty notices too. The Brotherhood could have simply read about it. If the
Enclave knew that much about Wilzig’s plans already they could have hunted him down
themselves. They have vertibirds, armed guards, trained hounds. Should have been a simple
matter. Even an Enclave team inserted into Filly could have intercepted Wilzig. This is the
inciting incident of the whole fucking series, and the Enclave doesn’t even act
consistently with their own interests as a faction. The big hook that draws all the main
characters to Filly is bullshit.
- Cooper concludes that the bounty hunters don’t have their hearts in the game and he
dispatches them. Honcho is left chained to the casket as it falls back into the empty grave.
“Us cowpokes, we take it as it comes.
Shocking as it is to admit this I actually like this episode more now than I did on the first review.
Even if there’s some inconsistencies and the story breaks itself as soon as it introduces the big
hook, this episode actually took itself seriously and paced itself to let things develop naturally.
The jello mold tray is the only really bad joke I can think of. Compared to later episodes which
are non-stop goof fests where people act out of character just to set up a punchline, the
serious tone comes as a huge relief. The main reason I hated this before was because of the
lame PG-rated nuclear bombings.
Notes for Return to the Nolanverse Episode 2
Return to the Nolanverse Episode 2
It’s been a while since the last one so I’m coming at this with fresh eyes.
- the birth of Dogmeat. She can hear the ink spots in the womb.
- Pups weighing under 10ozs are incinerated, and Wilzig fudges the numbers to spare
Dogmeat. It’s not clear what the dogs are being raised for, but they are being trained. Likely
for a cyber dog program. Dogmeat’s designation is “CX404.”
- Wilzig singles out Dogmeat as an older pup for some purpose. The Enclave facility appears
to be a large warehouse with a glass and steel canopy. It’s significantly staffed. Guard in the
foreground has a fresh uniform, factory condition helmet, and a laser rifle. The Enclave has a
high level of technical capability still.
- Wilzig is stopped at a checkpoint and waved over with some kind of detector. So there is a
lot of security at the facility. Super mutant teased on the gurney.
- Wilzig is personally training and raising Dogmeat like a pet so she lacks the aggressive
conditioning of a dog from the program. Is he doing this in his own office? He hides her in
the wall behind a chalkboard.
- Wilzig is doing some investigation of the cold fusion core, which the Enclave has for some
reason. Wilzig injects the core into his head with a device designed for inserting implants. If
the core is flashing and can shock people through skin, then it’s emitting a massive amount
of energy. Wilzig’s brain should have fried in no time.
- Wilzig naps off the glowing capsule. A colleague walks in on Wilzig as he was hiding and
switches the alarm. Dogmeat attacks and kills him for pushing down Wilzig. So again, what
exactly was Wilzig’s plan? He didn’t intend to leave so what was he actually doing? What
was his plan with Dogmeat?
- So despite the alarm going off and guards buzzing with activity, all the actual security seen
before is nowhere now, and Wilzig reaches the surface without being questioned. Do the
showrunners and Nolan not understand how alarms work? if there’s no actual security then
Wilzig could have left any time.
- Wilzig is shot at by a minimum turret and all the bullets miss both him and the dog. This is if
anything too obviously a joke about the dice roll combat in the Fallout series, but it just looks
stupid and cartoonish in the context of a tv show. This is billing itself as prestige tv, not a
YouTube skit.
- Lucy wanders the Santa Monica coastline. It’s pretty convenient that the Santa Monica pier
has the same coastline whereas elsewhere the coastline has receded and left derelict hulls
baking in the sun.
- Lucy comes across the same abandoned coastal neighborhood that everyone seems to
travel through for desert transitions. She’s bewildered by a tumbleweed and comes across a
dead assaultron.
- Lucy wanders through a house and finds the bodies of a family who died when the bombs
fell. She picks up a brown glass bottle of Vault-Tec Plan B, a commercially available cyanide.
- This is a huge problem for the show’s whole premise because it confirms that Vault-Tec was
in the public consumer market and wasn’t just depending on the vaults. The conspiracy to
start the Great War is pitched based on its necessity for the vaults paying off as an
investment, but Vault-Tec’s market based business model was for consumer products. The
experimentation of designing the vaults and running trial studies spun off innovations in
consumer technology similar to NASA. A better show would be able to tie the commercial
cyanide to Nazi views of suffering and death in prewar America, but here it’s nothing more
than a setup for Wilzig’s joke later about banana flavored cyanide not being more popular.
Or, even more relevant to the show, Cooper could have prepared cyanide for Janey.
- Lucy makes camp for the night without putting out her fire. Wilzig comes across her with
Dogmeat. This has weird implications for the geography of the show. Santa Monica is west
of the Boneyard, but the Enclave facility was in the snowy mountains, which would be north
and northeast of Los Angeles, possibly as far as the Sierra Nevada mountains. If Wilzig is
heading for Moldaver in Griffith Observatory he’d be going north>south and not encounter
Lucy at all.
- Dogmeat saves Lucy from a radroach and Wilzig says a bunch of creepy shit about them.
Wilzig talks about radroach evolution to illustrate to Lucy that she has to adapt in order to
survive.
- Lucy asks about Moldaver and Wilzig ignores the question, even though he should
understand the implications of that. He knows intimate details about vault 33 but isn’t
curious about why a vault dweller is pursuing Moldaver. Does he already know that Moldaver
needs Hank for the code? Wilzig and Dogmeat walk off into the darkness. Lucy asks who he
is and there is no answer.
- The code for the core comes back to a problem I hinted at in the last episode: what is The
Enclave’s relationship to Vault-Tec? Cold Fusion was proprietary vault-tec technology yet
The Enclave is in posession of the core. Why would the Enclave have the core but not the
code? Vault-Tec is a government contractor so it makes sense why the Enclave would have
the core, but Vault-Tec keeping the code secret means that the Enclave and Vault-Tec don’t
share the same goals. If they were the same faction it would also be Enclave officials frozen
in cryo sleep and not Vault-Tec executives. This all implies that the Enclave wasn’t in on the
boardroom conspiracy. So much of the bad ideas in this show would make sense if it was
the Enclave doing them and not Vault-Tec. Even the incestuous eugenics of the management
vaults fits for The Enclave’s Nazi ideology.
- Maximus on the vertibird with Titus. Titus lords over Maximus like a peon. Maximus orders a
set down because he’s “bored” and wants to shoot something. In defiance of a direct order
from the high clerics. Do the Brotherhood only get things done on sheer stupid luck? They
literally stumble across Wilzig’s campsite without even looking for him.
- Titus orders Maximus ahead to investigate the Yao Guai and gets snuck up on. Maximus has
several opportunities to shoot the Yao Guai but doesn’t. He only shoots just before it kills
Titus. Titus correctly blames Maximus for getting him mortally wounded, but threatens to
have Maximus killed before he gets a stimpak.
- Maximus quotes a Brotherhood tenet to excuse letting Titus die. “It is a knight’s duty to
better this fallen world. You don’t deserve that armor.” Maximus thinks the brotherhood
won’t kill him if he returns with the target.
- Lucy encounters the water filter guy. The man too stupid to survive. One of the worst jokes
that people love the shit out of. Water filter guy was planting tatos in his front yard.
- Filly sits at the top of a hill in a patch of verdant forest springing out from the desert. It’s in
view of the San Gabriel mountains. Lucy hasn’t reached the Boneyard yet, which means Filly
is also to the west of The Boneyard. Why would Moldaver plan on transporting Wilzig from
north to southwest and then east to Griffith Observatory? Why not send a team to pick up
Wilzig and take him directly to the observatory? The entire inciting incident from premise to
plan is contrived so that the main characters all converge on Filly at the same time. This
script feels like a rough draft.
- Maximus climbs into the T-60 and goes on a power fantasy trip.
- Maximus encounters the chicken fucker. He accidentally discovers the arm thrusters to
enable Iron Man mode.
- The area around Filly is implied to be a landfill, with derelict cars left everywhere. The trash
forming the construction of Filly was fashioned from other derelicts, including plane parts.
Homes are suitably fashioned from repurposed busses and campers along with patched up
airplane fuselages. The production team had a good concept for what the outer market
would look like. Farmers walk around to sell their produce, including livestock. One shot
features a two-headed Brahmin, which Lucy is totally unfazed by even though she’s never
seen or heard of anything like it. Filly’s downtown is a walled shopping mall, with market
stalls and general stores.
- Cooper was able to hang out and sit in a rocking chair, despite Ma June saying that ghouls
aren’t welcome in Filly. Shouldn’t his mere presence have started an incident?
- Ma June’s Sundries store. A stimpak in the display case is shown in the foreground to the
audience. This show violates the Chekov’s gun rule with the one thing that could have saved
Wilzig’s life. More than that, Lucy sees the stimpak and knows it’s there.
- Dale Dickey gives the best performance for a side character in the show. Ma June is one of
only two characters that got a laugh out of me purely on line delivery.
- Ma June gets hostile when Lucy brings up Moldaver. Ma June is already contracted and
doesn’t want Lucy interfering in the plan.
- Ma June denies the importance of the vaults. “And when exactly were you planning on
saving America? The vaults were nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide
in, while the rest of the world burned.
- Lucy acknowledges her privilege.
- Ma June pulls out a rifle, “Fuck the vaults.”
- Wilzig arrives with Dogmeat. Ma June has ground meat ready for Dogmeat’s arrival. Wilzig
tells Lucy to go home but then gives her a reason to follow him by dropping intimate
knowledge of vault 33. This guy has no idea what he’s doing.
- Ma June uses Wilzig’s name in public even though the contract is supposed to be secret.
This of course tips off Cooper if he hadn’t already recognized Wilzig from the poster.
- Filly is known to be a dangerous location where deadly incidents happen regularly, yet there
are no laws and no sign of any enforcer class to maintain order in the market. Filly has no
apparent ruler or government. An impossible libertarian fantasy. No real life human being
would want to risk their inventory in such a violent and dangerous marketplace. Sorrell
declared himself president yet there are no cops in Filly. Nothing about this world is
consistent with itself. Just bearing in mind: Diamond City in Fallout 4 has a militia who wear
baseball catcher gear as armor. Bethesda’s empty wastelands are more civilized than the
TV’s Boneyard.
- Cooper announces that the bounty on Wilzig came through “all six agencies.”
- Cooper immediately blows Wilzig’s foot off so he can’t be transported.
- Ma June offers a thousand bottle caps to whoever kills Cooper, when realistically everyone
with a gun should know about the Enclave’s bounty, which is substantially higher. It would
have been a far more novel scene if the whole town started shooting at each other for the
chance to claim Wilzig’s bounty instead of just Cooper tanking shots with the ghoul’s new
Wolverine healing factor.
- Cooper’s primary weapon is a cool concept for a Fallout handgun. It’s a 4-shot revolving
cylinder shotgun with a pistol grip handle and a barrel sawed down to pistol length. Instead
of buckshot Cooper uses solid slugs, with an armor piercing sabot variant featured in the
finale. A genuine hand cannon. Of course, Cooper ends up shooting more than four shots
without reloading.
- Cooper shoots Ma June through the knee. Dogmeat picks now long adter Wilzig was injured
and with the firefight to attack Cooper. Cooper sticks Dogmeat with a knife.
- Lucy is looking through Ma June’s ledger for information on Moldaver, but feels compelled to
help when she hears Moldaver.
- Lucy looks at a rack of weapons and the camera pans up to hold on a junk launcher, but
Lucy doesn’t take any of them and goes out with her tranq pistol. That’s two Chekov’s gun
violations with literal guns now. This show lives wasting the viewer’s time and attention.
- Lucy tries engaging Cooper with conflict resolution methods. More HR woke jokes. “Fucking
Vault Dwellers, Jesus.”
- The tranq doesn’t affect Cooper. Now Maximus flies in. Maximus runs in T-60 armor to
intercept a bullet. At no other point does anyone use this dashing feature for the power
armor that can outrun bullets. Maximus doesn’t know how to handle a firearm with the
power armor and fumbles. He tries punching cooper to death. Cooper shoots blindly with
his repeating rifle to no effect. Cooper climbs up the stairs knowing power armor is too
heavy to follow on rickety wood planks.
- Ma June and Barv “treat”
- Wilzig without using a stimpak, even though it’s what they’re paid to do. The prosthetic foot
grinds off Wilzig’s stump with no tourniquet or cauterizing. This almost certainly made him
bleed out faster.
- Lucy asks if Maximus is a knight. She just so happens to conveniently be right to assume
that. Wilzig has Lucy transport him. Ma June reluctantly agrees and pitches Lucy on the
prospect of finding Moldaver. Lucy agrees and Ma June puts the coordinates into the pip-
boy.
- Maximus is tossing cooper like a rag doll. He flies little and gets stuck in a wooden plank.
The power armor should be powerful enough to wrest free of the floorboards but Maximus
doesn’t know what he’s doing. Cooper floats about “not reading the manual” and cuts a
hydraulic pump with his combat knife. Maximus can’t maintain balance and tries flying away.
Cooper hooks him with a tow cable and Maximus loses control, flying off.
- Chickenfucker is hawking serums as Lucy and Wilzig pass by. Has Chickenfucker never had
a customer? Is that why he’s not known as a miracle worker or ghoul maker?
- Cooper investigates and finds Wilzig already gone. He uses the stimpak on Dogmeat so she
can help him track her. This is the first instance where Dogmeat acts out of character for a
dog. From Dogmeat’s perspective, Cooper hurt her master and then hurt her with a knife, yet
she faithfully follows Cooper like she understands what’s happening. She should have
immediately bolted after Wilzig’s blood trail and left Cooper in the dust.
- Dusk has fallen and the town is cleaning up. Nobody seems fazed by the massacre that
happened just an hour ago.
- The satellite where Wilzig died is Soviet in origin, which implies that the Sino-American war
was actually a hot war with the communist world. The Soviet Union existed in the Fallout
timeline but was mostly focused on its own affairs in Central Asia until the Great War broke
out.
- Wilzig dies without revealing anything about his desires and motivations, or his plans. He’s a
walking talking mcguffin reduced to a rotting head. He doesn’t even explain why his head is
so important and she goes along with it anyway. Wilzig says she can change the future but
doesn’t say how or why. “This is the only way to get your dad back. I knew I could trust you,
you’re a vault dweller.” Shouldn’t Wilzig know that vault-tec was trying to repress cold
fusion? Hank McClean’s daughter is the last person in the world he should trust even if he
doesn’t have a choice.
Here’s where all the dumb fucking comedy writing comes in and the show starts falling apart.
So much stupid shit is just a set up to a punchline that isn’t funny. I believe for sure that
Wagner wrote 50 episodes of Portlandia while Robertson-Dworet wrote for the Harvard
Lampoon. This shit sucks ass.
Return to the Nolanverse Episode 3: Revenge of Georgetown
Last episode directed by Nolan. I’ve had time for a big head change so let’s see what’s up.
- THE BEGINNING
- Cooper is playing the scene from Man From Deadhorse. “There’s an old Mexican eulogy: feo
fuerte y formal”
- Cooper can’t stand the idea that his character would summarily execute a man begging for
his life.
- “They want to see that even a good man like yourself can be driven too far sometimes.”
Practically spelling out in neon letters what Cooper’s whole deal is.
- The studio fired the writer “Cadillac” Bob for being a communist.
- Cooper meets his wife at the catering tray. This is Bev’s first real intro. Frances Turner really
sells lavender taffy. Bev hands cooper a vault suit for his commercial.
- Cut to the present with Wilzig’s corpse. Lucy left Wilzig’s doctor bag with his corpse.
Dogmeat doesn’t seem to care about Wilzig’s body at all. Cooper is coughing and preparing
a ghoul juice vial. Dogmeat keeps following Cooper like she understands what’s happening.
Have none of the showrunners ever had a dog in their entire lives? How does anyone not
understand how to write a dog?
- Cooper and Dogmeat follow Lucy’s trail towards the Boneyard. The husks of skyscrapers
can be seen in the distance.
- Lucy is carrying Wilzig’s head by the hair. That thing must stank like Hell. Lucy wonders
what’s so special about the head and is immediately shocked by the core. Lucy plants a
tracker in the nose. Lucy is camping with an open flame at dusk which illuminates her whole
body. So much for Wilzig’s advice.
- Cut to Maximus retrieving the power armor from the mud with a chain pulley attached to a
derelict forklift.
- The Brotherhood tries contacting Titus through the radio. Maximus pretends to be Titus
saying that Maximus died. L and then panics, ripping out the radio from the suit. How are
you going to contact the brotherhood if you find the target now? The brotherhood’s
communications tent has a map of the Los Angeles area with no landmarks or points of
interest on it.
- Maximus has to go to filly to get a component fixed and has to sell a tooth for the caps. He
returns to find the local goons messing with the armor.
- Maximus doesn’t even announce himself, he opens by throwing a rock at Scavenger Tom.
Maximus gets his ass kicked. They manage to get the armor open. Maximus rallies and
comes back at them with a wrench. Through some contrived blocking, Maximus ends up in
control of an arm and crushes Scavenger Tom’s skull. The other goons run off.
- The vertibird arrives to insert Thaddeus as Titus’s new squire. Maximus hides in the armor
and poses as Titus. Thaddeus submits himself by taking a knee and Maximus instinctively
reaches out to crush his skull but reconsiders. Thaddeus begs for mercy and Maximus
realizes he can fuck with Thaddeus the same way Titus fucked with him.
- Thaddeus relays orders from the elder cleric. They’re not the only ones looking for the target,
which could change the wasteland.
- Cut to the Gulper scene at Hollywood Boulevard. Geographically, Lucy is in West Hollywood
right now, which has transformed into a verdant wetland. The unmutated fawn I’ve already
covered in previous notes. It’s a weird oversight to not make it a radstag.
- The gulper snatches the fawn before trying to take Lucy. Lucy shoots the gulper with a tranq
and it drags off Wilzig’s head. Lucy tracks the gulper and gets clicks on the pip boy’s Geiger
counter. She’s prepping to go in the water after it when Cooper finds her.
- Cooper clocks Lucy in the face with the butt of his pistol. Cooper deduces a gulper took the
head from its droppings.
- Back to the vault. Chet is being dressed down and reassigned (they never say what his new
job is after doorman). Gatekeeper must have been a prestigious position for Chet to feel this
much loss for it. Norm gloats to the council about how they can’t really punish him because
he was already jaded. Betty: “I’ve telegrammed with the overseer at Vault 31” definitely Bud.
Norm asks if the rules only apply to vault dwellers with a clear chip on his shoulder about the
raiders, which gives the council the idea to assign him to prisoner duty.
- Norm brings food to the prisoners. The raiders act like animals. It’s crazy that the raiders
never get any characterization. They’re always acting crazy for no good reason.
- Maximus is making Thaddeus climb a dead tree just to fuck with him. Thaddeus falls out of
the tree and has the wind knocked out of him. Thaddeus says ghouls are scary as shit. So
everyone in the wasteland knows about and should be terrified of ghouls now that they’re all
going feral. Thaddeus uses a radiation detector to pick up Cooper’s trail. They find Wilzig’s
corpse and continue following Cooper. They immediately assume Cooper must have
decapitated Wilzig.
- Cooper has Lucy strung up to a fishing crane to use as live bait for the gulper. Lucy tells
Cooper to stop because “torture is wrong!” Cooper says that according to a prewar study
torture doesn’t do shit. “And yet the practice of torture never vanished from the Earth.”
Cooper whistles to the gulper as he dunks Lucy. The gulper is able to overpower cooper and
flees when Dogmeat bites it.
- Lucy inadvertently smashed Cooper’s vials. Lucy tells Cooper about the golden rule. Cooper
tells himself that he has time since gulpers take so long to digest. At this point he’s decided
to sell off Lucy’s organs for more ghoul juice. “Wasteland’s got its own golden rule: though
shots get sidetrack by someone else’s bullshit every goddamn time.”
- Maximus and Thaddeus are taking a break. Thaddeus talks about growing up as a shitter for
a fly farm. Another gross joke too stupid to believe. Maximus asks Thaddeus to talk about
his memory. Thaddeus says it was his idea to bully Maximus and wishes he had enough time
to fit in and bully someone else.
- Cut to the vault meeting. Woody & Reg are pitching the proposal to integrate the raiders into
the vault, which only Norm and Steph seem to have a real problem with. A lot of the vault’s
government depends on popular participation and communal consensus. This makes it
really hard to believe that Bud’s Buds could always control their politics even with all the
genetic selection and ideological indoctrination in their favor. Rigging elections is one thing
but every point of consensus?
- The Dwellers start taking about all the advanced studies they could teach the raiders , and
this is played off as a joke. Like the raiders are too stupid to ever possibly understand any of
it. The show has this attitude for everyone from the surface. Surface dwellers are either ultra
violent degenerates, scheming grifters, or basically too stupid to survive. Idiot scum,
basically. It’s incredible that the writers have the gall to have such a classist take for the
common people of the wasteland, but Robertson-Dworet did go to Harvard and Nolan went
to Georgetown university. These are the elite of the elite, and all that academic training
resulted in this room temperature IQ nonsense.
- Norm scoffs and proposes executing the prisoners. “They didn’t know any better.” Steph is
impressed with Norm’s idea. Betty shoots down the idea out of hand.
- Steph is by far one of the most pointless characters of the season. We spend so much time
with her and she constantly acts like a ditzy bimbo who doesn’t understand what’s going on,
but she never actually has any agency or does anything on her own initiative. The subplot
with her hating the prisoners never goes anywhere, and we never know if she poisoned them
or if Betty did. Steph ultimately only exists to give Chet something to do. It’s hard to say
whether this was intentional or if Steph’s plot line was left on the cutting room floor. Either
way it’s ultimately a waste of time that underutilizes the Bud’s buds concept. Steph is
supposed to be a junior executive but never seems to actually do anything. “If your father
were here he’d do the right thing.”
- And here’s the water chip. It’s astounding that this whole dangling plot thread is never
resolved. By the end of the show vault 32 is resettled and resealed, but they never say if they
fixed the water chip for vault 33. They would still have to be rationing water by the end of the
season, but water rationing never comes up. So this is a totally pointless fanservice scene.
Betty seems genuinely concerned about the water chip.
- Maximus and Thaddeus track down the trail to the gulper. Maximus is practically useless for
the whole fight, seizing up at important moments and leaving Thaddeus to take on all the
risk. The gulper literally chokes on Thaddeus since Maximus won’t let him be swallowed,
and pukes its guts out. Literally.
- Dogmeat finds the head. Why didn’t she follow Cooper now? Why would she care about the
head but not the corpse? That’s three times Dogmeat acts out of character. At this point
Dogmeat should be following Thaddeus and Maximus for the head but she doesn’t appear
for another three episodes when Thaddeus reaches the red rocket. Thaddeus and Maximus
celebrate.
- Cooper is transporting Lucy through the desert transition zone. The geography is all out of
whack at this point. Biomes are all over the place with no rhyme or reason. It’s impossible to
tell where anything is without a street sign or an identifiable landmark. Lucy lost a boot to the
gulper and has to walk with one barefoot, but this is never actually a problem for her despite
the obvious danger it should pose. Cooper wastes drinking water in front of Lucy for the
sheer cruelty of it. He’s breaking her down so she won’t resist at point of sale. Lucy is
seriously tempted to drink radioactive sludge. “What happened to you? Radiation? -
something like that.”
- Cooper shoots out the face of the vault boy on a billboard. Hinting at Cooper’a resentment
for Vault-Tec and his support for the company.
- Flashback to the past. Cooper arrives in the vault suit for his ad shoot. Cooper says that he
hasn’t done an advertisement in his life. Cooper asks if the suits really block radiation.
“Absolutely.” Vault Boy’s thumbs up pose was Cooper’s original idea.
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