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…
I love how creepy the vaults have become in this episode. Why are all of the overseers of Vault 33 imported? Where did the resources come from to (nearly) completely restore Vault 31 to normalcy? And what vault catches surface dwellers in a trap (while also taking the time to at least bandage their wounds)?
Maximus probably should’ve thought harder about how he was gonna break the news to Thaddeus. Right after branding him with Titus’ initial may not have been the best moment for it.
Dogmeat’s loyalty is pretty short-lived, innit?
Having a fusion core that can be removed without the user’s consent, and not being able to exit the armor without one, seems like a pretty big design flaw in power armor to me.
Yep, Lucy’s gone native. Took her long enough.
Oooooh Vault 31 also has a dark secret, and everyone who’s ever been traded from Vault 31 to Vault 33 has been elected overseer. WAG: 31 is a control vault staffed by the descendants of Vault-Tec’s C-suite, they send people to lead Vaults 32 and 33 under the guise of being just the same as they are and keep them from leaving or finding out the truth, and the 32ers found out during the late stage of their behavioral sink.
The 33ers are so accustomed to never questioning authority that they follow “When things look glum, vote 31” unquestioningly. Perhaps whoever’s pulling the strings at 31 causes things like “the great plague” and “the wheat blight” to ensure their person wins.
It’s been long enough that Reg was able to take off his neck brace, but it doesn’t seem like more than a few days have passed above ground.
That scene along the railroad tracks definitely wasn’t filmed in southern CA. For that matter, there definitely aren’t any rivers in urban LA as big as the one that trestle is passing over. The LA River is paved, for God’s sake, and even when it flowed freely it wasn’t anywhere near that broad.
Loved the standoff scene on the trestle. Reminds me of a similar scene from one of the Dark Tower novels.
Why does everyone prefer Jellocake to apple pie? It seems weird.
Wait, so now Shady Sands is in LA? That’s a serious deviation from canon - Shady Sands is supposed to be east of San Francisco on the far side of the central valley.
SHADY SANDS GOT NUKED? This must be what everyone was mad about.
Maximus is a survivor of Shady Sands. So he wasn’t joking when he said “The bombs fell when I was a kid”.
Charging into a building that could be inhabited by god-knows-what with only a vault suit and a 10mm pistol is classic Fallout.
The fact that the hospital door immediately closes as soon as they walk in feels like it could be an homage to how area transitions always work in Bethesda games. I’m pretty sure that goes at least as far back as Daggerfall.
They’re going to repeat the mouse utopia experiment with the new population of Vault 32, aren’t they? For that matter, they’ve probably done it more than once.
For that matter, Hank and Betty must’ve been responsible for letting the raiders into Vault 32 after its population killed themselves.
Break into a hospital for first aid, fall into a trap door, wind up in a fully populated vault (Vault 4, I’m guessing from the jumpsuits.) The Golden Rule of the Wasteland in action.
I suppose my complaint is more that there’s apparently no emergency-exit button in case your fusion core fails or gets taken out by a rogue squire. But then again, all those kind of things can easily be explained away as pre-war corporations not giving a fuck about safety.
In-game, it’s different. First of all, no one can just yank a core from a suit of active armor. Also note that Thaddeus had some kind of key that he used to disconnect the core, so it’s not like just any rando could depower your PA.
In-game, you can depower a suit of armor by targeting and destroying the fusion core. They’re not well protected, other than by being small, so their main protection is being hard to hit. But if you succeed in destroying a fusion core, the armor ejects it (and it explodes), and after the explosion the armor opens and ejects the occupant. Which is bad in its own way (now you’re unarmored in a firefight where someone has already shot you in the back once) but at least you’re not trapped in immobilized power armor.
I suspect that while Maximus is a survivor he’s not the brightest guy in the bunch. Also, I’m not convinced he has a lot of knowledge of social interactions/politics. He’s socially isolated due to bullying. Not surprised he sort of messed that up.
Dogmeat is a Wastelander and thus extremely pragmatic?
Yes, well, there’s a lot of idiocy between the Vaults, the Brotherhood, the Wasteland… A lot of stuff I look at and think “there was probably a better way to to do this.”
Maybe they found a stimpack for him?
Of all the weird things in this series that’s the one that stands out to you? Not the ghouls? The magic med tech? All the other weird stuff?
Actually seems like he’s incredibly loyal… everyone he travels with either has the Target’s head or will get Dogmeat back to the Target’s head. Wild-speculation–dogmeat and the Target are psychically linked even post-death.
Agree mostly. My overall biggest issue with the show is how bizarre the geography has been… So much that I really have no sense where they are at any time. Maximus encounters the yao gai and gets his armor in a forest…then is seen trying it out in the middle of a desert. There’s a LOT of open desert for a densely populated and built up Los Angeles. Was Filly supposed to be near LAX? I heard that referenced but was that just because of the planes?
Regarding that bridge scene, my first thought was the Inland Empire DOES have geography like that and that could represent the Santa Anita River. And its conceivable for them to take that route east and then head north toward Shady Sands as one of the suspected locations of Shady Sands is east of Yosemite.It seems like a dumb way to go… but… you know truncated video game geography?
It’s funny after Maximus said the “bomb’s dropped twenty years ago” that made my wife assume that the Vault had been lying about how long they’ve been down there–kind of a M Knight “The Village” situation.
This was the first episode that I liked Maximus as a character… he’s been a right dirtbag and dummy most of the show.
I was also hoping to see how Radaway works in reality—the implication from the game sounds is you take it and immediately urinate out the radiation.
Vault 31 Steph’s villain reveal was unexpected. I thought her, Norm and Bob would be the new triumvirate trying to take power from Betty, Reg and Woody.
For those of us completely and totally unfamilar with California (outside of seeing bits of it in movies and TV) this was probably nowhere near as jarring as for folks who know what the locations actually look like/are located in real life.
That is true for most movies/tv shows that are set in California. I still remember watching Charlies Angels in the theater and being pulled out of the movie when the racecar scene went from the California Speedway in Fontana to Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro (over 60 miles away) in a few minutes. I had just finished working a few jobs at the speedway, so I was very familiar with the layout of the site and the surrounding areas. I don’t care how fast your car is, you are not traveling through the inland empire, OC, and most of LA in anything less than 90 minutes during the day.
Los Angeles is a desert climate. I’d expect more chapparal and dry brush than the foliage we have been seeing, as you have to get quite a bit inland and uphill to find forests.
As for LAX, the large structure seen in the background near the end of episode 2 is clearly meant to be a retro-futurized version of the terminal there.
Not true. You can pickpocket a fusion core right out of a suit, disabling it. It’s not easy, though. Presumably the skill check includes some kind of lockpicking operation.
Right. In-game, it goes through the pickpocket skill check, not the lockpicking minigame, but the skill check can be assumed to incorporate various obstacles (like a lockpick). So not quite the same as yanking the core out with no effort, but it can be done. The only inconsistency is that in the game (Fallout 4, that is), the suit does open up automatically when the core is removed. Or at least the user has a means of getting out.
The show did show the message “STANDBY MODE” on the helmet display, so presumably there is some kind of minimal backup power source. You’d think they could use that to open the suit.
Technically speaking, Seattle is also a Mediterranean climate, but it gets about ten times more rain than LA does. Growing up in San Diego I was taught that we lived in a desert and it makes perfect sense to me.
A good point. It’s a significant plot point that he never got proper training. Maybe there’s a command buried in the menu somewhere. Though wasn’t he stuck for hours? One would think he’d have tried a lot of things by then. On the other hand, he isn’t exactly shown to be the sharpest knife in the drawer…
