Anyone else notice Vasquez Rocks in the first episode?
Yep. I used to climb all over them when I was a kid - we used to go up there on weekends.
I’m watching right now and I literally did the “Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV screen” reaction when I saw them.
Mr. House has definitely been given a major heel turn here. New Vegas definitely portrayed him as calculating and authoritarian, but tricking blue-collar workers into becoming guinea pigs for mind control experiments is a whole new level of evil.
Novac is now Khans territory, so I’m guessing that however the Battle of Hoover Dam ended, the ensuing peace didn’t last for long. Lucy (with some awesome VATS shots) and Cooper slaughtering them to the tune of “Big Iron” was pure fanservice.
The “meanwhile in the past” segments still feel a little clunky to me. We already know Moldaver’s going to die, so why they keep drawing out the mystery of how she survived the war escapes me for now. As someone who grew up in a broken home, the scene of Cooper telling his daughter to pick “your three best outfits and your favorite toy” before they fled the house hit me really hard.
The scene with Hank strolling into Vault-Tec headquarters looked awful. It’s just so blatantly CGI on a green screen, and probably AI-generated to boot. These kind of graphics were acceptable in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but 20 years on they really ought to be able to do better. Kyle MacLachlan, however, is GREAT. The way he talks about completing the project and getting promoted as if it were still 200 years ago is some great dark comedy.
It looks like the players took the Bloody Mess trait.
As someone who has taken this trait/perk since Fallout 1 (where it didn’t give you any bonuses, it just made everything more gory) I heartily aprove.
Bloody Mess does change the ending in the first game (murder the Overseer instead of walking away).
I didn’t like it as much in the later games as it sometimes made corpse container retrieval harder.
I almost feel like the opposite is true, because you could loot an entire inventory off of any shred of gore 
More like when you gib several guys and you keep searching the same guy on every chunk of meat.
So that’s why I killed the bastard!, I approve even more.
The sweetest bit of fanservice in that sequence was this:
cars explode when you shoot them
Does anyone know if this week’s episode is dropping earlier because of Christmas?
Dunno.
What I do know is that I burst out with both disgust and laughter at the “flea soup” bit.
I think that position is odder. Yeah we know she dies 200 years post war….but ummmmm, how does the leader of the opposition pre-war end up around and active centuries later. Does she infilitrate 31 somehow? Secret cryo-vault elsewhere? Is she a doubleagent prewar?
Episode 2 thoughts:
- I’m still annoyed about this retcon that relocates Shady Sands into LA, when in the games it was due east of San Francisco in the Central Valley. I haven’t quite decided how to internally reconcile it. Bethesda, IMO, has never really understood rebirth and renewal as one of the central themes of Fallout; to them, everything has to constantly look like the bombs just dropped about fifteen minutes ago.
- “Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.” More pure fanservice. Max’s dad pulling on his jeweler’s loupe and trying to disarm the nuke is a great moment, but it appears he rolled a critical fail. His parents shutting him in the fridge really hurt hard.
- The scene of Max and his squadmates on deployment in their power is pretty much what I imagined when I first read Starship Troopers as a kid back in the ‘90s. You’re essentially a walking tank in one of those suits.
- The Brotherhood has… found Area 51? That’s not what I was expecting, but Area 51 being something that exists definitely fits into the Fallout-verse.
- I appreciate that they actually seem to be filming in California chaparral country for this episode. Too many of the scenes in season 1 you could clearly tell weren’t shot in the appropriate part of the country.
- Lucy has activated a sidequest! Hearing an ominous scream emanating from an abandoned hospital while hiking from Point A to Point B and dropping everything to investigate, while your asshole ghoul companion complains about it and Dogmeat happily trots along, is classic Fallout. “Affordable Al’s Hospital” is classic Fallout satire of American capitalism, but it honestly feels like the direction we’re headed these days.
- Radscorpions. I HATE radscorpions.
- Lucy’s naivete is gonna bite her in the ass again, isn’t it?
- Norm has apparently awakened Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.
- Vault-Tec apparently had a remarkably large supply of miniature office mouse habitats in stock. And where is Hank getting all these mice from anyway?
- The Greys are real! Wild Wasteland confirmed. Discovering a vintage cherry red convertible and immediately using it for target practice is right up the Brotherhood’s alley. Maximus is treating his squire with respect and trying to be a role model to him, unlike Mr. wash-my-codpiece was to him.
- The west coast Brotherhood includes a chapter from Coronado! My grandma used to have an office job working for the Navy there. I like how the chapters have demonstrably drifted apart ideologically over the years, with the Yosemite elder not putting up with the Canyoners’ mysogynist shit and dismissing the Canticle For Leibowitz trappings of the Boneyard chapter. (How is there a Grand Canyon chapter of the Brotherhood? Isn’t that Legion territory?) It especially makes sense that the west coast Brotherhood is fragmented and sectarian in comparison to Maxson’s chapter in the Commonwealth, since it’s the older and more prone to religious orthodoxy branch of the organization.
- “The Commonwealth pretty much lets the Canyon rule itself. So as far as we’re concerned, everyone else can go fuck themselves!”
”You just like that they let you fuck robots.”
”That was ONE squire, and he was well within his rights!” - The woman from the hospital speaks Latin. LUCY HAS RESCUED A LEGION SLAVE. I knew her naivete was gonna bite her in the ass.
- Yep. There’s the Legion.
- “I’m the product of 200 years of genetic engineering. Part of a race of super-managers.” Norm is passing his Speech check with gusto.
- “I signed up for Vault-Tec Premium Elite Plus.”
”Did you read the fine print?”
”Yes.”
”Well, I didn’t.”
Hank is gloriously evil. - The Legion actually look even more frightening in this incarnation than they did in New Vegas. I like how they’ve incorporated the tribal facepaint and animal trim into the Roman armor.
- “Ah, man, the mall’s gone.”
- The Coronadon knight who challenges Max to a “bareback” fight is played by Cale Schultz, previously best known as a stunt double for various action movies of the last 15 years. Man looks like an absolute beast. Max gets the victory in the classic “low STR, high PER/AGI” style.
- Well, hello there fake Jedi from Kenobi on Disney Plus. I wasn’t expecting you to show up wearing Arthur Maxson’s greatcoat.
We seem to be setting up a lot of pieces so far, but I’m not really sure where any of it is going.
I did find it weird that Hank’s destruction of Shady Sands was so….pedestrian (like literally)… he was so mad his wife left him he contacted his “boss” (it’s going to be The Ghoul’s wife, right? It being House seems disappointing but thats relying on game knowledge not necessarily show-specific)…”hey mind control an NCR soldier to literally walk a bomb back to the capitol of the NCR and blow it up, puhleeeease.” I had assumed he had some control over unused stocks of bombs and launched one.
It kind of makes sense that the Brotherhood factions are all…so dumb? I thought the young idiot rot we saw in this chapter was just young idiot rot but apparently leadership at all levels are just dips. But BRIAN THOMPSON was nice to see as an elder.
I don’t get why fusion cores in and of themselves are such currency for these factions though…this chapter doesnt seem to have any issues with sending multiple power armors out on routine missions. No lines about supplies running short that I heard.
That made me shake my head too. Like just make some aspects of FO: Tactics canon and have the weirdo mid-west Brotherhood be there. THAT would have been fanservice.
As soon as the Ghoul called them “Tunics” I knew they’d be Legion.
Also “Don’t want you to get raped by the wrong people.” is…..whoa boy.
I have to assume there’s a deleted scene somewhere because Lucy went from seeing the legion dudes watching her during the day to her getting captured at night.
Apparently the Brotherhood now has the Ark of the Covenant.
I laughed when the one dude’s leg flew off after getting shot. Very familiar!
Not a player of the games here.
S1 was entertaining with zero knowledge of the game world.
This season. Kinda boring. It seems like all the excitement is in the references to the game, but for itself … meh. I may give it another ep but if not more fun probably that is it.
Sure, they seemed to retcon the location but Fallout 2 also retconned the location of Fallout 1 (if NCR City is believed to be the exact same as Shady Sands, and nobody pulled a Khosrow I situation between games and show). In relation to SF it’s way to the east and a bit south, even past the valley.
I’m probably not the first to do this, but I overlaid the game maps with Google Maps. Fallout 1 map is all kinds of messed up, Necropolis/Bakersfield is absolutely in the wrong place. But as far as I can tell Shady Sands is west of Camp Nelson about here.
Fallout 2 map is a little easier to navigate, it’s near Indian Lakes Estate.
The aliens are “Zetans” and have had lots of references. This is just the newest fanservice.
Re: Simpsons I hope they make it to the Box Factory.
They’ve always been solidly part of the “weird” side of Fallout canon, though. The side that has the TARDIS and a Federation shuttlecraft and the Bridge of Death from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the skeletal remains of Indiana Jones in a refrigerator just outside of Goodsprings. Just feels a little weird for them to actually pop up on the show.
I haven’t replayed Fallout 2 in over 20 years at this point because the Temple of Trials can kiss my entire ass, but IIRC there are enough reused resources to suggest that NCR City in Fallout 2 is the same place as Shady Sands in Fallout 1.
I feel like the show is underselling how big a deal the NCR should’ve been. By the time of New Vegas, it’s the largest and most advanced polity on the west coast. It consists of multiple states operating under a sovereign federal government with a stable democracy. It has electrical power, running water, fiat currency, a standing military, and some sort of manufacturing base. It even has an air force, and it managed to fight a war with the Brotherhood and win! What we see of Shady Sands in the TV series doesn’t suggest the presence of any of that.