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.
