It recalls H. Beam Piper’s future history stories that mixed up all kinds of cultures. I recall one character named Hideyoshi O’Leary.
Yeah the kid ghouls looked like they were cosplaying scarecrows.
Saw an online post saying the show makes the Brotherhood ending of FO4 canon….but I dont think so. Xander seemed kind of full of shit. I did not believe most of his statements about the state of things. He showed up alone in a vertibird. The rest of the factions showed up with entourages. I’m starting to think maybe he wasn’t legit.
The Harkness name could have been nothing or a clue….and if its a clue it could support a Railroad or Institute ending. The Institute would definitely be interested in cold fusion.
Running commentary on episode 4 as I watch;
- The Battle of Anchorage! Neat. I’ve always wanted to see more pre-War war. The invaders are wearing a blank red badge and red stars on their uniforms and speak an indiscernible language, because Amazon wants to sell this series in China and therefore they can’t use the C-word.
- HOLY CRAP IT’S A DEATHCLAW. Looks exactly as formidable and terrifying as it ought to.
- Meanwhile, back in the present, Thaddeus has to impersonate Xander while not having power armor training and can’t figure out how to walk through a door. I guess that’s why it’s a special perk in the 3D-era games.
- So Cooper and Lucy are with the NCR holdouts… that Cooper sold out to the Legion in exchange for Lucy’s freedom. This isn’t going to end well for them.
- I LOVE how they keep using the little musical cues and sound effects from the games. This is probably the most lovingly-crafted live-action video game adaptation ever filmed.
- The dwellers of Vault 33 seem pretty blasé about the fact that they’re a few weeks away from dying of thirst. At least Reg’s club is doing well.
- Lucy’s a Buffout addict! I hope she finds some Fixer soon.
- “What’s the alternative?” “Do more drugs.”
- Oooh that’s a LOT of Brotherhood airships hovering over Area 51. They’ve apparently come a long way since they rebuilt the Prydwen out of bits and pieces of pre-War aircraft. Though based on the scene from the cold open, it’s apparently now the case that the US military was using Prydwen-type airships before the War, so I suppose they could be restored hulks.
- MAX IS DOING A COUP. Ballsy move. I like that Dane is letting their facial hair grow out.
- The staff of Golgafrinchan Ark B aren’t really cut out for wasteland survival.
- I’m starting to think they’ve got too many concurrent plot threads running to be able to keep things going at a stable pace.
- Steph and Betty are gonna wind up killing each other the way they’re being catty with each other.
- WE FINALLY MADE IT TO THE FIREWORKS FACTORY! And it’s abandoned. House’s securitrons are in heaps and the Kings have become ghoulified. I guess the canon ending of New Vegas is “nobody won and the Strip collapsed in upon itself”.
- “I am done with all the sidetracks and the detours!” Lucy still hasn’t learned the Golden Rule of the Wasteland.
- Are we sure Lucy’s on Buffout and not some cocktail of Psycho and Jet? “Cocaine Blues” was a great accompaniment to that montage, which apparently concluded with her headshotting the King himself.
- “Do you have any cigarettes? I’d like to try one!” “One addiction at a time.”
- Thaddeus wanting to bail out of this impersonation scheme while the Yosemite and Coronado elders try to outbid each other for Quintus’ head is a classic sitcom plot. Almost Frasier-esque.
- Turns out Quintus knows how to clock what’s going on in people’s heads. Good skill for an elder cleric to have, but isn’t smart enough to realize he shouldn’t stand on dogma when he’s got a gun pointed at him.
- …And now we’ve got a melee on our hands because Dane stole the relic. “Hey guys, can we go now?” So much for the Brotherhood. It tore itself apart because war… war never changes.
- Chet just found Steph’s pre-War wallet. AND SHE’S A FILTHY CANADIAN! Treason! Treason in the highest degree!
- The Strip doesn’t quite look like it did in the games, but then again the game version was cut into chunks because the PS3 and XBox 360 couldn’t handle larger open spaces. This presentation works for me. At least the power’s still on.
- You’re right, Coop. Those aren’t chickens. THEY’RE DEATHCLAWS. You can see the PTSD in his face when it opens the casino door.
- “Okey-dokey.” Chemmed-up Lucy is fun.
Good episode. We’re halfway through the season and I’m not really sure where we’re going at this point, though.
Closed captioning explicitly said they were speaking Mandarin and they were very obviously Chinese. Also I don’t think Cooper actually sold out the NCR, and if he did the implication was that those guys wiped each other out anyways. I hadn’t looked it up before, probably cause i never had a reason to, but I had no idea Deathclaws were pre-war creations. Apparently it is in the lore.
I thought it was pretty clear they were Chinese and as posted above the close captioning confirms it.
Cooper didn’t sell out the NCR we were just supposed to think he would for a minute. The explosions at the end of the last episode revealed what he really did.
I’m gonna guess that if you were watching it in China they’d be speaking Korean. I don’t have access to a VPN to confirm that, though.
Why? They’re not depicted as bad guys, or as incompetents. If anything, fighting against the America of the series makes them heroes.
Pretty sure in Fallout lore America is if not the bad guy at least the first aggressor. The war starts when we annex Canada.
I’m only three episodes in to season 2 and I have some questions:
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Is Mr. House alive in the present time period? Uh, I think I killed him at least once playing the game. Isn’t this after that?
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Are there two Legion groups because of what the courier did in the video game?
I know you can let Mr. House live, but you can also get his body out of a tube and kill it.
Mr. House is presumably alive, but we haven’t seen him yet. This show is set 16 years after the events of New Vegas.
The schism in the Legion is because nobody can decide who the original Caesar picked as his successor.
My theory is that the show happens in a timeline where the PC of New Vegas died when Benny shot them in the head at the beginning and events proceeded without them - so House’s securitrons never got upgraded, Caesar died of cancer, the Legion succeeded in killing NCR’s president, and they were able to conquer Vegas but couldn’t hold it because of the succession crisis, which is why it’s apparently now abandoned.
Huh, I am surprised. I thought the show wasn’t going to take sides on what happened at the end of the game.
Oh, I guess if the courier didn’t live, that would change things. We have not seen Benny, who I definitely shot every time I played.
I mean, they’ve been showing us Mr. House in flashbacks since the end of last season, and now they’ve introduced Victor, who was his messenger. I’d be surprised if they’ve been building him up just to tell us that he’s dead.
I don’t think Benny survives no matter what you do. If you don’t kill him at the Tops, he tries to sneak into the Fort with the chip and gets crucified.
House is probably alive with the amount they hype him up. You can aid him in one ending or kill him in three. Similar with Caesar, with the added wrinkle that even if you go full Legion, he’s dying of cancer, and if you fail that quest he dies. Usually Legate Lanius is the intended successor, we don’t know what happened to him except that that some of the masks look similar to Lanius’. Maybe he predeceased Caesar and the other two schlubs were left.
As for “correct” ending, they’re holding it close but there’s no the canonical ending can’t be some part of all of them. That reminds me of the Elder Scrolls games, the multiple endings of Daggerfall that relied on handing a single specific item to the faction of your choice end up being all simultaneously true due to trippy metaphysics of TES. More mundane in Fallout I’m sure.
It’s called a Dragon Break. Akatosh, the Aedric dragon god of time, is responsible for maintaining linear time and preventing Mundus from reverting to the alinear state of chaos that existed in the Dawn Era. The ending of Daggerfall, however, involves activating Numidium, the thousand-foot-tall brass god the Dwemer built and empowered by using the heart of Lorkhan, the dead Divine who created Mundus in the first place. Activating it is such an act of cosmic nihilism (it’s been described by Bethesda’s former loremaster Michael Kirkbride as “the ultimate no”) that it interferes with Akatosh’s ability to maintain linearity and thus causes multiple contradictory events to happen at once. Previous such events occurred when Tiber Septim used it to conquer Tamriel, which is why he has multiple backstories and names, and when it was first activated at the Battle of Red Mountain, which caused the Dwemer to vanish from Mundus altogether and produced the uncertainty about how who Vivec was and how he came to be and how Nerevar died.
There was one other Dragon Break, the Middle Dawn, which happened in the second millennium of the First Era, when the Cyrodillic priests of Akatosh attempted to perform a ritual to “purify” Akatosh by stripping him of the aspects of him that were tied to Altmeri religion. That particular Dragon Break lasted a thousand years before things settled back into place on their own - during which time women gave birth to their own mothers, Cyrodiil developed a space program and became an intergalactic empire, the entire planet of Nirn became an egg, several stars fell out of the sky, the sun changed color, the gods became mortal and walked among men and mer, and the Khajiit lost their ability to alter the nature of reality by singing at it. It was a mess.
But I digress, since the Fallout universe wasn’t designed by a guy who was REALLY into Kaballah and Vedic mysticism and Second Temple Judaism like Kirkbride is.
Thanks, I don’t think I knew that. Usually I meet him up in one of the casinos and then shoot him. And rob him, of course.
“What in the goddamn-?”
On the other hand my captions for the episode very clearly indicated that they were speaking Mandarin.
At the end of the prior episode I had the impression that Cooper instigated a final battle between the two Legion factions to eliminate each other rather than actually selling out the NCR, but I could be wrong. Probably intended to be a bit ambiguous.
If Cooper had actually sold out the NCR would he really have taken Lucy to their camp for medical treatment?
I don’t know the details in the game but the ID saying “annexed territory of Canada” is creepy in the context of what’s been coming out of the White House this week.
Basically, in the 2050s the world’s supply of oil started running out and the US invaded and annexed Canada to gain access to its oilfields. This was also why China invaded Alaska and why research into nuclear energy picked up in a big way, resulting in nuclear fusion being invented in the 2060s and consumer products like cars being powered by fusion cells instead of gas.
Okay, you did the lore dump! I think the Middle Dawn is new to me even.
Ways he can die:
- Old fashioned casino shootout
- Get him alone/convince his men to betray him
- Female courier can seduce him (it’s hilarious) and either kill him when alone, or do the deed and kill him in his sleep.
- If you either sleep with him and don’t do anything, or try the diplomatic approach, he takes off to the Fort.
- You can just kill him
- You can have them crucify him
- You can request an arena fight
- You can free him, pissing off the Legion. The one way he can “survive” but is basically gone from this point.
I usually play a male Courier and take both the Lady Killer and Confirmed Bachelor perks so I can be a flirtatious bisexual, but somehow the only action I ever wind up getting is from FISTO.