Spoiler policy: Anything in this episode and any previous episodes are open spoilers. Please do not discuss what happens in later episodes in this thread. Rather, go to the thread for that episode and discuss it there. Assume that everyone who is reading this thread has only seen up until the episode in the title. General discussion about the whole series after you’ve watched all the episode can go in the episode 8 thread.
Lore trivia/attention to detail: when Maximus pulls a pistol on Ghoul, that firearm is a Colt 6250 10mm revolver, which is canonical from the first two Fallout games. Which were set in California, so there’s geographical consistency in pre-war logistics.
Knight Titus was… disappointing. Although Maximus allowing him to die was harsh and definitely out of bounds for BoS expectations, it’s pretty obvious that (a) Titus deserved it as the cowardly dishonorable rat he was, and (b) he has to die because it’s Maximus’ story, not his, and Maximum wasn’t getting into that power armor any other way.
And (in keeping with canon) using power armor without formal training is supposed to be difficult and much less effective than after being trained. A point Ghoul made very well.
This part of the Brotherhood of Steel seems to be made up of those kinds of people. Maximus isn’t really a good guy. He may have booby trapped his friend’s shoe, I only say may because aspirants abusing one another seems par for the course from what we’ve seen, and then of course he let Titus die.
One thing I’m wondering about Maximus (and I’ve only watched about half thins episode so far, so maybe this is already debunked), but…
He said he joined the order to “Hurt the people who hurt me,” and we keep seeing flashbacks of what looks like a young Max being rescued by a BoS knight. But we haven’t yet seen what Max was hiding from, or seen the knight in the flashback actually do anything to help him.
I’m wondering if “Hurting the people who hurt me” refers to the Brotherhood itself, and he’s there to try to sabotage it somehow? It would put his (potential) sabotaging of his friend’s boot in a different light.
I don’t care if the dog’s name is CX404. I’m calling her Dogmeat. They even gave her a teddy bear just like FO4 Dogmeat has, and the scene where they’re running from the turret is a recreation of one of the drawings of Dogmeat from the first game;
I was sure Dogmeat was dead after the fight. Thank you Ghoul for saving her. This show does raise some questions as to exactly how stimpaks are supposed to work. I always assumed it was just some sort of super-amphetamine that keeps the body going until you can patch up your wounds, but then again the games themselves have been inconsistent with it, seeing as in most of the games you need a doctor’s bag to fix major industries but in FO4/76 a stimpak can heal a broken limb or a concussion just like that.
“Vault-Tec Plan D” being a bottle of banana-flavored cyanide is perfectly on-brand for Vault-Rec and I’m surprised they never thought of the idea sooner.
Lucy’s early walk around the wasteland really sells how desolate the wasteland should be. In the Bethesda-era games which emphasize detail over scale, there’s always a hub city within a five-minute walk of the Vault entrance where you can start asking the locals for clues that’ll point you towards your missing family member. Here, she has no idea where to go and it’s more like the Black Isle games where you’d be walking alone on a map screen for days or weeks before encountering a settlement.
That little pop-up Amazon has on the pause screen that tells you the names of the actors/characters and the song that’s playing is super-useful to keep track of who’s who. I could’ve used one of those when I was watching Squid Game.
I like that at least some of the wasteland is green and verdant, as opposed to the game where it looks like the bombs fell closer to 200 days ago than 200 years ago. Still a bit of that video game logic in the beach house, though - after two centuries of exposure to the elements, those skeletons should be a disarticulated mess in a barren field instead of sitting at a table in a mostly-intact house.
You’d think Knight Titus would care enough about the well-being of his human pack mule/codpiece cleaner to give him some Rad-X before sending him into a yao guai den full of toxic waste. What an asshole. At least that yao guai went down a lot faster than they do in the game - two shots with a 10mm pistol wouldn’t have put a dent in one of those things.
“I had an aunt, too. She got killed there once.” If this is the intelligence level of your average wastelander, then it’s no small wonder the people of the Commonwealth couldn’t get their shit together until the Sole Survivor started building water pumps and beds for them.
The scene where Maximus puts on the power armor really shows off how powerful those things are in a way the games don’t. A soldier in power armor basically is the equivalent of a heavy tank. I don’t know what the deal was with the traveling-salesman chickenfucker, but I like his moxie.
The LA area definitely shouldn’t be this lawless if the NCR is still around. I’m gonna guess the war in Nevada ended poorly for them in this timeline. I keep seeing “New Vegas” trending on Twitter and I’m afraid to find out why.
You know, ghouls call normals “smoothskins” as a slur, but the Ghoul’s skin looks a lot smoother than anyone else in the wasteland.
I love the design of “Filly”. The dentist and barber being the same business is a nice touch.
“It wasn’t under the defribrillators. Just sayin’.” “Jim’s Limbs - the veteran’s choice” is a great brand.
The Enclave scientist’s dying words imply that the Enclave had cameras inside Vault 33 and was able to observe them the entire time since the War. Was that canon in the old games? It’s on brand, but I don’t remember it coming up.
In the real world it’s about 10 miles as the crow flies from Santa Monica Pier to LAX, so Lucy didn’t cover that much ground altogether.
In most post-apocalyptic wastelands, the people you encounter are either hardscrabble survivors or hardened killers. You have them here too, but they’re outnumbered by the weirdoes and losers. That somehow makes more sense to me.
Fallout is, at its heart, a dark parody of American exceptionalism. “Absolute dumbass” is exactly the type of wastelander that should flourish in this setting.
Never that on the nose. Vault-tec was deeply embedded in the US government decision loop, in the most exaggerated traditions of “military-industrial complex”. And the Enclave is a fine example of a true Deep State: a government within the government, probably Vault-tec’s main patron, with Vault-tec working hard to further some of the Enclave’s objectives.
But note that the two are not the same entities and can be assumed to have some divergence in goals.
First episode I was sure Maximus did not sabotage his friend, after this one though I am not so sure. Titus was a complete asshole but he was thinking of betraying him right from the moment he got hurt.
Considering the amount of fanservice and love of the games lavished on this series it seems very off to call the dog CX404. I suspect they are teasing the fanbase and that he will glom onto the vault dweller and since she doesn’t know his lab “name” she will name him Dogmeat. Maybe right at the end.
Pretty sure the Ghoul only saved the dog so they would track the head for him. Still, I was mightily relieved. I even shouted “NO!” at the television when he got stabbed
I was wondering this about stimpacks in the context of the show. A stimpack injection did seem to be a miraculous cure for CX404 / dogmeat, who was on the brink of death after the ghoul stabbing, and perked right up and seemed to be good as new after a stimmie. But when Lucy got gut-stabbed, she injected herself with a stimpack, but still had to staple the wound shut. The stimpack didn’t give her super-regenerating powers like a Wolverine.
It’s got to be tough as a writer adapting video games, which have their own internal logic, to fictional quasi-reality. In a video game you get shot, beaten, stabbed, and your health meter goes down until you find a health token, which brings you right back to 100% if you find enough of them. If only reality was so simple.
The dose makes the medicine. A German Shepherd dog weighs less than most adult women, so one stimpack may be a double dose to a smaller creature.
Of course, that’s a fanwank. In game mechanics (depending on game difficulty mode) a stimpack heals a fixes percentage of the patient’s maximum health, so one stim should result in a lower final health score for a gravely injured target than for a moderately injured one.
Maybe The Ghoul learned advanced levels of the Medic perk? That boosts the effectiveness of a stimpack he administers. Rank 4 Medic allows a stimpack to heal 100% of the subject’s health, and CX404 certainly looked fully healed.
