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 episodes can go in the episode 8 thread
GALAXY NEWWWWWWS! Pre-war Cooper casually flinging his smoke off the catwalk is vintage '50s attitude. 200 residents is less than normal for a Vault.
“Bud Askis”? Pfffffft.
The ad in the corner of Cooper’s newspaper about the discontinuation of “New Nuka” is a nice little side joke.
Sebastian, aka “Bartholomew Codsworth”, is presumably the in-universe voice actor for the Mr. Handy model the PC owns in Fallout 4. Would’ve been cool if they got the same voice actor from the game, but alas no.
So are these guys in sheriff outfits supposed to be NCR? I guess the billboard that said Shady Sands was the “first capital” implies there must have been another one established after it was nuked.
Vault 4 appears to have their shit together, at least, even if they are mutant abominations the Brotherhood would probably kill on sight.
Filly is three days walk from Shady Sands? That doesn’t make sense at all given the geography. LA is hilly, but it’s not Alpine-mountaineering hilly, and it shouldn’t take more than 4 or 5 hours to walk from from the vicinity of Santa Monica to whatever part of downtown LA Shady Sands was in, since as far as I can tell they haven’t ventured any further east than, say, Dodger Stadium at this point. (I could see it being a full day if they were carrying a lot of weight and with allowances for a child having less endurance and a shorter stride, but still - three days’ walk from the coast, covering about 20 miles a day, would put you somewhere in San Bernandino.)
“You smell good.”
“What? Oh. You wanna have sex?”
“You mean use my cock?”
“Yeah.”
“I dunno.”
Flirtation is neither of these two’s strong suit. Brotherhood knights being chaste would be new lore, but I’m gonna write this off as Maximus being socially awkward and not knowing the mechanics of sex.
IS THAT CHRIS PARNELL? CHRIS FUCKING PARNELL IS A ONE-EYED MUTANT OVERSEER. I was not prepared for Jerry Smith/Cyril Figgus to pop up in my post-apocalyptic high camp black comedy. His being focused on foosball reservations and pencils is classic Parnell. I wonder what’s up with the bathrooms. They don’t use the three seashells, do they?
Cooper’s wife knew about the true purpose of the Vault project. Charlie had an inkling too. I believe it was implied in one of the pre-Bethesda spinoff games that nobody remembers that Vault-Tec itself instigated the Great War in order to get their experiments underway. Is that where this is going?
Barb was one of the founders of Vault 31, wasn’t she?
5 generations isn’t long enough to be the descendent of an original Vault Dweller. The original 4s must have either left or died off not long after the War.
Chris Parnell being a happy-go-lucky racist is not what I was expecting.
The fusion core console is straight out of FO4. It never seemed like they provided enough power in and of themselves to run a vault.
“When you say ‘hot shower’, what does that mean exactly?” Maximus really doesn’t have much experience with life outside the Brotherhood. When he gets into his room he starts playing with the faucet the same way Monty did back in episode 1.
That welcome basket of food is giving me serious Troll 2 vibes.
The classroom in Vault 4 with its memorial to Shady Sands looks a lot like Lucy’s classroom back at 33 with its memorial to the war.
Shady Sands was nuked in 2277. Now THAT must be what people were mad about, because that’s 4 years before New Vegas, and there’s nothing in that game to suggest that the capital of the NCR was destroyed. I suppose it can be reconciled somehow - there was something in the backstory about the value of the NCR dollar collapsing in the years before that game, so maybe that was the fall of the capital and the NCR we see in that game is just a rump state making a play for Vegas to reestablish itself as a regional power.
I guess “The Govermint” is what’s left of the NCR in LA. It’s no Republic of Dave, that’s for sure.
Hollywood Forever is a real funeral home and mausoleum in LA! Neat.
Maximus was right. This IS a cult.
Moldaver is from before the war and she’s a blood god worshipped by the Shady Sands survivors and the only reason Cooper has kept on living for 220 years is to find her. WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL. That came out of left field. If she turns out to be a Daedric Prince I give up.
“You wanna make my cock explode now?”
“What? No.”
“Sorry. Intercourse?” I guess what they say about oysters is true.
What the hell was that monster in the tank? It doesn’t look like anything I recognize.
Faces in jars and women giving birth to live piranhas that then eat her? Even by Fallout standards that’s DARK. And a bunch of Vault 101 pods full of more of them and Dr. Nose protecting them with a harpoon gun.
I’m kind of wondering how they did the make up for things like the Vault 4 cyborg overseer and The Ghoul’s face (which has to be part CGI with the lack of nose).
That’s my guess, too, given that in an earlier episode showing the Brotherhood bunk room for the aspirants has a dude in one corner obvious masturbating under a blanket. While Maximus doesn’t even seem to understand masturbation they aren’t all that ignorant.
Er… I don’t understand your point here. This is supposed to be taking place 220 (more or less) years after the great war. If you had someone who was the offspring of people having children late in life it’s possible to have five generations in that span. Have one or two men fathering a kid at 60, 70, or 80, sure. Probably aren’t a lot of people living that long on the surface but down in the protected vaults? Yeah, it could happen.
Also, you have a wacky range of lifespans among the characters in this milieu. Who knows how long mutants can live?
The operation of a flush toilet may not be obvious to someone who has never seen one. Also, given the logistical problems with toilet paper in a shelter like that they might use bidet toilets, the operation of which, again, might not be obvious to someone used to pit latrines or the nearest bush/fencepost.
The guest spots on this shows have all been top notch. And I assumed the focus on bathroom usage had mostly to do with the fact that they take in people from the outside, who are probably not familiar and used to making a mess.
No. They are “The Govermint” (or however it was spelled). The new President is just a crimelord trying to sound official.
It was a gulper…and we watched a swarm of them getting born in the mutations lab. Now we know why it has human fingers in its mouth.It’s the product of this mutations vault.
Well, that’s profoundly weird even by Fallout standards. It’s almost more disturbing than the pre-war human experimentation that created the Super Mutants (who I’m surprised we haven’t seen any sign of).
Another thought: if Vault 4 is breeding humans with abominations to produce giant axolotl monsters with mouth-fingers, then the caviar and oysters from Maximus’ Troll 2 gift basket were probably produced by those hybrids.
Well, it looks like my guess in the ep5 thread that Lucy and Maximus had been kidnapped by Vault 4 for breeding stock because V4, like V33, was also too interbred, was wrong-- it’s far more weird than that.
Still, based on the “A Man and his Dog” poster that Coop had in his place we saw in this ep, pointed out by @Miller in the last thread, I gotta believe that in a general sense, either the show writers or the original game designers had to be influenced by either the movie ‘A Boy and his Dog’ or the Harlan Eliison novella it was based on:
Awfully lax security in Vault 4 for such a weird, secretive experimental place. Maximus was able to walk right in to the control area and almost snatch a fusion core before being interrupted. Lucy was able to take an elevator right to level 12. Shouldn’t they at least have needed a screwdriver and a bobby pin to break in? Or guess a password on a terminal?
Nice eye for detail- I missed that. I suspect I’d be missing several little in-jokes and Easter eggs if it wasn’t for these threads.
The actor did mention to Coop at the Vault-Tec commercial after-party that he did voice work for Vault-Tec for the robot. And then of course Vault-Tec screwed him on his fee-- instead of the agreed amount, they paid him a fraction of it plus a Mr. Handy. “Now I have to listen to a robot talking to me in my own voice”.
Speaking of Vault-Tec, the conversation between Coop and his former actor buddy about how Vault-Tec has a ‘fiduciary responsibility’ to their stakeholders, not to the U.S. Government, and therefore have a financial interest in nuclear war, was some nice world-building. I like how the show is really digging into the lore and darkly parodic aspect of the games, and is not just a mindless actiony shoot-em-up.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Coop threw out a number like 10 million for what he thought he should have been paid for his voice rights, and then Sebastian pales and said that he only got a little over 100k pre-tax. Coop says he should have asked for more and Sebastian says he did, but all his agent was able to negotiate was a free Mr. Handy.
Yeah, I likely misheard. The main point was that Sebastian got ripped off by being paid a fraction of what his contribution was worth, plus a robot he didn’t even want. But apparently he was screwed pre-negotiation, not post-negotiation.
I was absolutely delighted to see Matt Berry as the actor who voiced Mr Handy, since I recognized his voice as Mr Handy in whichever episode that was.
In the two series Toast of London and Toast of Tinseltown he plays a bad actor whose only reliable work is doing low-paid audio recording studio work at the start of each episode. Which made it hilarious that his character here was essentially the same role.
I know! It makes me wonder what connections there are that I’ve missed! And that’s not even counting the ones that are connected to the game, which I haven’t played.
I posted in that thread that Fred Armisen played Matt Berry’s landlord in Toast of Tinseltown. I didn’t know about his stand-up bits about music, though.