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.
