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.
