Fallout Episode 8: The Beginning

Wait Shady Sands was not the Nuked during the war. It was an attempt to rebuild after and was working and was then destroyed. Maybe I am misunderstanding some of the discussion above but it sounds like that is what some people are saying.

If Coop loves his daughter, he needs to do everything in his power to keep her away from her mother. She’s absolutely not safe with that woman. If nothing else, he needs to make sure his daughter doesn’t grow up to be a monster like her mother.

But also, I don’t buy that Barb loves her daughter. Or Coop. Or is, fundamentally, capable of caring for other humans beyond what she can use them for. She is, I think, the same as Hank - “I loved your mother. Until she left.” At which point he dropped a nuke on her. Barb’s fundamentally the same: she “loves” her daughter while her daughter is at the age where her parents are her whole world. How does she react when her daughter is old enough to question her? To rebel against her? At what point does Barb decide, “As much as I love my daughter, she’s getting in the way and needs to be removed”? For a person as utterly morally depraved as Barb, that point comes sooner rather than later.

A lot of evil is just people being stupid, or selfish, or having poor emotional regulation. That’s not Barb. She’s cold-bloodedly setting plans into motion that will lead to the incineration of 6+ billion people, and actively consigning generations of survivors to lifetimes as test subjects to horrific scientific experimentation. And not just people in some “out-group” where she can convince herself that the she’s murdering are not really human. She’s doing this to her own friends and family - everyone she knows that doesn’t have access to one of the “good” vaults.

That’s not “banality of evil,” that’s a complete sociopathic disinterest in the suffering of other humans. That’s the sort of moral dysfunction that does not stop at the front door of the family home.

People are confused because they believed the show claimed shady sands was nuked in 2277 and Shady Sands is one of the main locales in Fallout: New Vegas which takes place in 2281. The timeline on the classroom in vault 4 can be interpreted in a different way though as it shows “the fall of shady sands” and the nuke being dropped on it as two separate events.

Nitpick: Shady Sands isn’t a location in Fallout: New Vegas, but the New California Republic, whose capital was Shady Sands, was a major faction in the game. If Shady Sands had been nuked prior to New Vegas, it would be unlikely the the NCR would be a major faction in New Vegas.

Word of God is that Shady Sands was nuked shortly after the events of F:NV, and the 2277 date was a production mistake.

Todd Howard, Bethesda’s Fallout boss, has stated that Fallout New Vegas remains canonical, implying that Shady Sands was not nuked in 2277.

“All I can say is we’re threading it tighter there, but the bombs fall just after the events of New Vegas.” [emphasis added]

ETA: As @Miller said

Editing further to add: this whole discussion makes me really curious to see which Fallout: New Vegas ending will be treated as canonical (i.e., the backstory for this part of the show).

I absolutely get the confusion but the Todd Howard explanation makes sense and I’ll just accept it.

“The Fall of Shady Sands” is now obviously a “in hindsight” designation. I’m willing to bet it would be the year when the NCR congress officially voted to head east to the Mojave. NCR survivors have no idea who nuked them and I believe another “word of god” pronuncement was that the Shady Sands nuke happened shortly after the end of FO: NV. They might have concluded that the bombs were dropped BECAUSE of the NCR excursion into the Mojave. I also could be wrong but I think in game some NCR tourists mention that the New Vegas war is becoming unpopular back home.
So that initial decision is when things started to go downhill in their eyes.

She believes that her family will benefit. She’s wrong, but acting on a sincerely held belief can lead to rational actions for an immoral, evil, or impossible goal.

Man, what a fun show! The fantastic production design and great acting more than compensate for any plot holes. Like most video games, the ride is more important than the story.

Having played all 5 main games, I don’t care if the timeline is fudged a bit or is a bit tight.

My guess would be the Mr. House ending - they’ve already introduced him as a character, and his ending is the only one in which he survives.

They only introduced him in a flashback, no reason he can’t die.

Well, it probably won’t be the NCR ending if they’ve collapsed, and if the Legion won then they cull the entire city, which leaves the Yes Man ending, and while I’m sure Dave Foley would be more than willing to reprise the role it’s gonna require a lot of explanation. Having House still be in control seems like the best way to reintroduce Vegas.

Chekhov’s Gunman: if he’s teased, he should have a role later.

The Legion ending to New Vegas has them keeping the city, and using it to pacify the Mojave:

It’s still there in that ending, and still a major power center in the region, although probably none of the NPC you meet there in the game survived the Legion take-over.

Word of God (well, Word of Todd, at any rate) is that the NCR collapsed shortly after the events of F:NV, so that ending is still potentially on the table, although having the Strip and Hoover Dam would have drastically lessened the impact of losing Shady Sands, so that’s probably out for that reason.

They don’t really have to do much explaining to justify the Yes Man ending - having Vegas patrolled by robots that look like video poker machines kind sells itself, and could be justified with a line or two of dialogue - “Mr. House made us to run New Vegs in the unfortunate event of his passing, which unfortunately came to pass X years ago.”

That said, the House ending seems most likely, because why else would Hank go to New Vegas if Mr. House isn’t in charge? It seems really likely that he’s going there because he knows there’s someone at least partially sympathetic to Vault-Tec’s plans, and that’s not going to be the NCR or Caesar’s Legion. Also, he’s too good a character not to put into the show if they have an excuse to use him.

Just watched this ep last night. What a great show. Just a really fun ride. A most excellent adaptation of the FO video game universe.

I didn’t mind the reveal that corporations caused the apocalypse. My take is that conditions already existed that had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war already, and the corporations just manipulated events to push it over the brink.

BTW, I caught some irony that a show about greedy, manipulative corporations becoming so powerful that they take on roles typically handled by the government is produced by…Amazon.

It may not have been an intentional reference, but when Lucy said that, I thought of O’Brien in ‘1984’ asking Winston Smith if he was willing to do whatever it takes, even throw acid in an innocent’s face, if it furthered the goals of the resistance.

It’s possible. Although Lucy wasn’t acting out of any sort of ideological motivation. She assumed the vaulters were doing horrible experiments and legitimately thought she was defending herself, given that nearly everyone she met had tried to either kill her or do horrible experiments on her.

I was going to start another thread discussing the same topic. But I think the old standard of 20+ episodes a season every year is more or less a thing of the past. Especially now streaming services and shows like Game of Thrones setting the standard for cinematic quality (and big cinematic budget) epic television.

Now you get 8-10 episodes you can binge watch in a day or so after which you have to wait 2+ years for the next season (if there even is one).

And the binge-watching kind of ruins the whole cultural zeitgeist thing IMHO (with a few exceptions like Squid Game). You just miss out on the entire audience picking apart each episode for a week after experiencing the Red Wedding or the opening of the hatch together.

Another benefit is fewer or no “filler episodes” that don’t really contribute to the story arc. Remember the hate for “Scar” and “The Woman King” in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica?

Yeah, this. Even the more “premium” shows like the Marvel stuff on Netflix had at least one or two filler episodes just to bump their episode count to 13. I don’t mind 8-10 episode seasons, I definitely mind the 2 year wait for a new season though. This started during the pandemic, which was understandable, and after that we got a strike. What is going on now that it takes 2-3 years to do what used to be done in 1?

My WAG - higher budgets, better produciton values, and more location shooting. Disney shoots its Star Wars TV shows almost entirely on green screen - Amazon went to Namibia to film desert scenes for Fallout.