Poor Dr. Chickenfucker. At least Freeside has been doing OK while the NCR and the Legion and “robots” fight over control of the now deathclaw-infested Strip and FISTO is still in business.
Meanwhile in the past, Mr. House thinks someone other than Vault-Tec is plotting to cause nuclear war, and that it’s somehow tied to Cooper’s daughter (who’s in the Vegas vault where Hank is fucking around with the mind control chips) and the deathclaw. Is he onto the existence of the Enclave, maybe? It certainly seems like Barbara was involved with FEV. His talking about using mathematics to predict the future is very Hari Seldon of him.
Norm comforting Claudia about her poor lost cat is straight out of a scene from Fallout 2. He BETTER not be dead.
We FINALLY get some payoff on this past-present stuff, with Cooper’s drunken fall from grace in the past paralleling Lucy power-fisting him onto a telephone pole in the present.
No updates on Max this episode, or on the continuing adventures of Chet and Steph and Reg and Betty. They really DO have too many plot threads going.
It depends on when you encounter them in the game. At lower levels, the deathclaws are big, powerful, and they’ll make short work of you. I thought it was a mistake in Fallout 4 to encounter a deathclaw so early in the game. In New Vegas, if you take the shortest road from the starting point to New Vegas, you run into a ton of deathclaws around an old mine, and they’ll eat your lunch.
I kept being pulled out of it by thinking, “Okay, the very first thing we see is a Deathclaw ripping a huge door off its hinges, and then destroying the doorframe by just standing up. So how is it that multiple Deathclaws have been living in Vegas for quite some time, but none of the other doors/buildings have been destroyed yet? Did the Deathclaws take a lot more care about opening doors before Our Heroes showed up?!?”
My recurring question this whole season is why they went to New Vegas. I had hoped that on some level, it would be justified. Nope; it’s mainly just because that is a popular location in the games.
I admit, though…it is really neat to see New Vegas locations.
I mean, I know who Mr. House is. I know he will indeed end up in that tube thing keeping himself alive. Do people who didn’t play even care about him?
In Fallout 4 I used to keep a suit of power armor in my settlement, attached to one of those rack things, specifically for Deathclaws. I didn’t really bother using it for anything else, but Deathclaws were not something I wanted to face without having a lot of armor.
As a nonplayer (and ignoring what I read here from people who know the game), Mr. House seems like the big bad, so yes I care about him.
Which is more than I can say for the other factions that just seem to appear and disappear randomly. The Legion? NCR? Kings? It’s obvious fan service and doesn’t really have any meaning or payoff unless you already know them.
I’m still really enjoying it, but this season seems much more geared toward people who know the game. I can follow everything, I just don’t know why I should be caring about most of it.
Would this have been helped by actually seeing more of Hank’s reaction to Vegas. I think a lot of people assumed Hank headed to Vegas because it was stable and/or he was looking for protection and thought House would provide it…. but they just really moved from him traveling there to getting to the secret hq Vault and going to work on the mind control experiments and seemingly not having anything to do with House…but we know he had to be in contact with Vegas….he literally had a nuke carried from the Mojave to Shady Sands.
I will also say I think everything around House has been great this season. Great performance. He’s much more off-putting (“oh this guy is weird”) than Rene Aubernois played him but it still works.
Regarding the factions thing– Honestly, this season is no different than last season. I think people going in cold are letting game fans influence.their perception. Like…. the show never presented the Kings as a faction. Elvis impersonator ghouls outside of Las Vegas…that’s all they were and all they were presented as. Could have easily just been a gag as being something from the games.The Legion…. no different than a faction that uses medieval church and knightly tropes for guys who run around in armor. You didn’t need to know WHY or HOW they got there…they are just there. The Wasteland is weird.
When the Ghoul talked about looking for his family in Vaults in California and Oregon, I was hoping they would have had a line about “been all the way to West Virginia, too.” The Ghoul has been added as an NPC to Fallout 76.
Some of the things in the show feel like disconnected side quests - it feels like a game, not a narrative, and it takes me out of the show a little bit because it’s so apparent it’s a game.
I didn’t get that feeling watching The Last of Us. For example, Silver Lake in that show didn’t feel like a one-off level you have to pass to move forward in the game. There was a narrative path – who are these people, what do they want, how will Ellie escape. The antagonists felt like real characters, not interchangeable NPCs.
Fallout overall has a more comic, over-the-top vibe, so jumping from weird situation to weird situation works for it. Like I said, I’m enjoying the show. But to someone who didn’t play the game, this season is a bit different than last season in how not knowing the game affects my appreciation.
They showed a scene where Hank received a confirmation that Shady Sands was nuked, clearly showing that it was at his order. It was shown right after the scene where the bomb went off. Here is an article talking about the whole thing.
Elsewhere in Fallout ‘s world, Hank MacLean washes his hands clean of the whole affair as he receives the notice that the Shady Sands detonation was successful on his Pip-Boy. He shakes off any ennui and heads off to read “The Wind in the Willows” to a young Lucy.
The trooper dragging it along was repeating “Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter”, so it’s certainly implied.
I’m not sure about the very end of this episode. Hank sends Dr. Chickenfucker to the Wrangler to tell them he’s unreachable and to offer Cooper his family’s safety in exchange for taking Lucy back to California. Cooper agrees and sends the messenger on his way, and then… Hank leaves the safety of his bunker to go to the Wrangler himself? What was he expecting to find, given that as far as he knows they’re both on their way back to California at that point? Perhaps Lucy is hallucinating.
Oh I see what you’re saying. I believe that was just an assumption based on the line from the guy who brought the nuke, “Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.” Which is a video game callback. I don’t think that means definitively that the bomb itself actually came from there.
The ending of this latest episode, to me, explains some of Cooper’s behavior. Why he was mean to Lucy. Why whenever they started getting along he’d do something asshole again. He couldn’t afford to life her if he was going to “sell” her to try to gain the safety of his own family.
It also explains why he made such an effort to rescue her as well. He needed her alive.
It makes The Ghoul version of Cooper Howard a sympathetic villain from my perspective.
Of course, said opinion could change in the next episode. Or the next.
Yeah, I remember her saying something like, “We were just starting to get along.” And he reluctantly muttered, “I know.” You could tell he hated doing it.
I know he was telling Lucy that he was trying to find his family to wake them up, but I’m not sure that’s the truth. Because Cooper was lying to her about a lot of things, and Hank wasn’t promising to wake up his family or anything. He threatened to harm them if Cooper didn’t get Lucy back to the vault. I believe the promise was that they’d stay right where they are, safe, as long as Cooper did what he was told.
So, it is at least implied that Cooper agrees with you. I also keep remembering him looking at his reflection as he drank, and thought he seemed disgusted with the kind of person he had become, and I assume he doesn’t want them to see what he has become either.