All the weird characters in the wasteland are right out of 2000AD. Especially small touches like “Jim’s Limbs”.
Speculation since I won’t be watching episode 3 until later tonight: the chip the doctor implanted in his neck contains information about unopened/undiscovered vaults that he was planning to sell to the raiders. He possibly also gave them Vault 32’s location as proof that he was legit.
There must be something special about Dogmeat too, since he saved that specific pup from incineration and raised her himself outside of the Enclave’s obedience program.
Guess we’ll see.
There are some details it just doesn’t pay to think too carefully about.
Maybe high radiation discourages/slows decay?
I had the sense that Knight Titus actively wanted Dan as squire and was screwing over Maximus either out of believing him guilty or maybe wanting to kill off Maximus to get a new/different squire… or maybe he’s just that much of an asshole. Or… maybe all of the above.
He’s a weird minor character who is there to show, in part, just how weird/screwed up/dysfunctional wastelanders can be.
That’s probably the canon answer in the games. Radiation in Fallout operates under retro-'50s “SCIENCE!” rules where it’s basically a magic McGuffin that does whatever the writers need it to do, which has carried over from the games.
In real life extremely high radiation does, in fact, slow or even stop decay… but it doesn’t magically allow you to survive the experience as for the Fallout ghouls. Rads high enough to slow decay are completely incompatible with life.
Well, OK, maybe not if you’re Deinococcus radiodurans or one of the other Deinococcales, but most of us aren’t a single-celled polyextremophile. It would be hard to make a game or movie with a compelling plot line about four-cell bacterial “colonies” growing on the interior wall of a nuclear reactor. Even if they are more radiation resistant than even the tardigrades.
And maybe there are some radiation-eating fungi. But, again, not fodder for a compelling storyline. Because they aren’t taking over other organisms or eating people. They’re just black smears on the walls or on rocks in high-radiation environments. They don’t do anything.
In sum: some artistic license required to be entertaining.
I honestly think it was self defense. Titus was obviously going to get him killed. Making him explore the cave sans armor was the turning point. It was pure selfish desire to protect himself and he clearly didnt expect hos squire to live long at all.
I’ve had to reevaluate my opinion on Maximus because I couldn’t help but come to a similar conclusion after I thought about it for a bit. Titus was a coward and deliberately sent Maximus to almost certain death in order to save his own skin. And that’s where I’ll have to stop because I can’t spoil anything from future episodes.
Wasn’t Titus saying that he was going to report Maximus to the Brotherhood and that Maximus would be executed as a result? I think that was the decision point because it had become a case of kill or be killed.
I think the implication was that if Maximus let Titus die he’d be executed for failing his knight. Max responds “Not if I bring back the target”, apparently assuming that if he shows them he succeeded on his own they’ll spare him.
That is how I took it…
I felt like Titus was saying he was going to report Maximus regardless just for taking so long, etc.
In any event, the lesson here is that if you’re dying, maybe don’t spend your final breaths calling the one guy who can save you a stupid dumbshit over and over again while expecting him to bring you a stimpack.
Titus sent his squire into that cave as bait to save Titus’ armored skin. Takes a special kind of jerk to red-shirt someone else when the other guy is just wearing a shirt and you’ve got power armor. Not sure how Titus survived long enough to be a knight given that apparently you have to be a squire first and Titus is a frickin’ coward.
But when Titus was there talking about how he was going to blame stuff on Maxiumus and get Maximus excuted then I think it becomes about self-defense for Maximus - and even that isn’t a certain thing, that Maximus can escape the situation with his life. Hence he flees.
^ This.
But that’s pretty on-point for the Brotherhood of Steel. They’re basically an entire organization of self-important entitled bullies. They’ve decided it’s their mission to preserve pre-war technology, and no one else is even allowed to use it. And they’ll use every scrap of that tech to kill you if you even try to compete with them.
I’ll play them in order to complete a storyline, but there’s no way they’re the good guys here.
Apparently chems are a thing (remember the raider using the inhaler of Jet) in the show.
Please tell me that they’ll do like everyone else did in the games and dope Dogmeat up on Psycho and let her loose?
I think that was just another way to hammer home the arrogance of the BoS and the way they thought. Titus was so convinced that Maximus would stay true to his training and bring him the stimpak despite the continual upbraiding and abuse, because that’s what BoS squires and knights do.
It never occurred to him that Maximus wouldn’t actually take to that sort of treatment, or that he wouldn’t do what he’s “supposed” to do.
That episode was way better than the first.
As far as Titus goes, I don’t see where Maximus had a choice.
Titus was talking about Maximus being hung by his lungs. The chicken shit idiot was bad mouthing and threatening the only person who could have saved him.
Also, with the strength and jump jets, how he couldn’t defeat radiation bear means Titus was too stupid to live.
In-universe they’re called yao guai.
Is anyone else feeling the nominal subject of the episode really didn’t get enough development? He was just a walking Mcguffin. Our one glance at what is called an Enclave facility of some kind, only shown in the slightest passing (and apparently no real threat to anyone, if the quality of the internal security operations is any indication). Not much like the Enclave of the game, even if they’ve been broken a couple of times.
And yet the Target seems to have an unnatural and inexplicable degree of knowledge about about Vault 33 and Lucy. That doesn’t make much sense if Wilzig were just a random Enclave scientist; Vault-Tec and the Enclave were never close allies.
I do hope they go back to explain these mysteries in S2.
Honestly, the fact that the Enclave is still around is kinda surprising - it was implied in New Vegas that the Brotherhood and the NCR had pretty much hunted them to near-extinction and there were only a few left, notwithstanding whatever’s left of the east coast faction after Broken Steel.
Incidentally, Fallout 4 is getting a free update this week that includes an Enclave quest chain.
There are strong indications in the game that someone is monitoring at least some of the Vaults directly and remotely. In Fallout 76 (which is better than it used to be, but is still not what I would have liked, and no, I don’t pay for the private server) there is at least one vault where the information on the in-vault research is being uploaded and utilized off-site:
Results will be transmitted via satellite to external facilities for analysis and deployment.
There are also multiple vaults where there are secondary/sub vaults that are actively monitoring what’s going on in the primary vault, so you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to what sort of monitoring is going on. Now, there’s a lot of discussion on exactly how intertwined Vault-Tec and the Enclave are, and which is pulling which strings, but assuming some integration and integration is pretty much a given.
As for the Enclave in general, they were largely destroyed in their West Coast primary facility, and their main East Coast base was trashed at the end of Fallout 3 DLC, but Fallout 76 establishes that there were a lot of different Enclave facilities spread out in secure locations.