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1) Um, what, Lucy's dad has access to nukes? How? From where? His wife and kid go to Shady Sands and so he nukes it?! Wth? This ridiculous 'get rid of the competition' thing that'll come up at a later point.
So, as noted, the theory here is that no non-Vault-Tec controlled civilization is allowed to form on the surface. Now, whether the NCR would have risen the level of 'nuke it' or they'd have just ignored it until it came knocking is unclear, but at the point when Hank found out about it, he arranged to have it nuked. The implication is, he did that as revenge, after retrieving his kids, while Vault-Tec did it because they're *****.
2) That commie woman, the leader of the NRC remnant, what a psycho. She wanted to kidnap Lucy's dad. Because she was the leader of Shady Sands, he nukes Shady Sands, so she wants to capture him for trial/revenge, okay, but then she infiltrates the vault with raiders who proceed to massacre innocent people, as well as putting Lucy in direct risk (remember the flashback scenes of this woman smiling and picking up little kid Lucy? Fast forward 20 years and now she's fine having her killed/SA'ed by her raider boy goon). Wth, this made no sense. She could have infiltrated with her NCR troopers in disguise, pull out guns, capture Lucy's Dad and leave with him. Instead they go through that whole charade...I dunno, I don't understand that.
Tend to agree, this is my objection too.
3) Why didn't Lucy's dad recognize this woman the moment she stepped out of the shadows in Episode 1? Why? He knew who she was, they had history together, but he just acts like it's all good in the hood and it's nothing to worry about and goes through with the wedding anyway knowing that no one can be coming from Vault 32 because they're all dead.
It's not at all clear they did, actually. Moldaver was a figure in Shady Sands and knew Lucy's mother, but there's no indication Hank and her actually met (that I'm remembering). She knows who he is from his wife, but vice-versa doesn't seem to be true. He recognizes her eventually, but that could be from a 20 year old campaign poster, for all we know.
4) Um, since when did Ghouls become invincible? Maybe they're just putting in an easter-egg like "health bar" where we see the Ghoul get shot multiple times to no effect...yet later he uses a knife to cut pieces off another ghoul and the flesh seems just as vulnerable there, so why does him getting shot multiple times not effect him? We see just 1 bullet kill living people, so it's not like everyone has 'health bars' or something.
Ghouls here seem to be operating on Zombie rules. A shot to the head seems to kill them, a shot to the body does diddly squat. I think? I'd need to rewatch the feral ghoul scene to confirm. You could justify this in universe based on different radiation levels in different areas, as I believe ghouls are healed by radiation?
5) I'm no Brotherhood of Steel fan, but they really did the BoS dirty in the last action sequence. The lone ghoul against 4 power-armored units + squires with guns an the ghoul kills them all?! Without a scratch? One bullet kills a guy in power armor cos he "knows where to shoot" - well why didn't he do that earlier in Filly when fighting Maximus in the power suit? The BoS looks like they lost 9 knights in power armor to a couple dozen NCR troopers with machine guns. If powered armor is that useless then why invest all the resources to maintain it in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Lore-wise the Power Armor was supposed to be a war-changer, and their deployment to Alaska won them the campaign, and they were being used to drive deep into China. But here they go from bullet-proof to ridiculously vulnerable as the writers need, there's no consistency.
I tend to agree. The final episode was fine as a stand-alone, but makes a mess of the overall plot.
6) Maximus and Thaddius.
Dude, wth?
When questioned by Thaddeus about what happened to Titus, Maximus should have said something like "Knight Titus died fighting a mutated bear, can you see the scratches on the suit? *Gesture to scratches* I buried him, put the armor on and now I'm finishing the mission we started."
That's not what he says. Instead he's like "He died..." then looks super suspicious and instead of allaying Thaddeus' fears, he straight up tries killing him.
I believe they're drunk and as a result, there's a miscommunication which results in violence. Maximus is trying to avoid admitting he let Titus die, which leads Thaddeus to believe Maximus killed him. Thaddeus is warning that the story Maximus is giving won't pass muster with the BOS, which it won't, which Maximus interprets as a threat to out him and reacts as you might expect to a threat to have him killed.
7) Ummmm, why did everyone in Vault 32 go crazy and kill themselves?
Why?
Because they found out that Vault 31 were the cryogenically frozen managers from Vault-tec pre-war so the natural reaction is to murder and hang themselves?
See when they first showed that Vault 32 was like this, I thought the show makers were bringing in the Vault Experiments. Vault 33 was a control group that got to live nice lives, while Vault 32 had some flaw, and the two vaults were being overseen by a 'master' Vault 31 that was using the data to make their lives better.
Instead we get a mystery around Vault 32 with no answer. And who cleaned up all the corpses and made the place nice and livable again? In ONE night? I was convinced Vault 31 was bigger and had more people in it, but it's just a little brain-bot roomba. You're telling me that thing that was stuck for years, cleaned up Vault 32?
Did the new overseer send people to clean it up? We saw no hint that she did. So what gives, how'd it happen?
So, Vault 32 as a whole is extremely confusing at this point. Given that we've still got POV characters in the Vault, I give this one a pass until we see how they actually explain it. I do think it's especially confusing given that Moldaver (presumably) apparently accessed the Vault years earlier?
8) Speaking of which, what was that coup talk in the vaults?
When Vault 33 is having their little meeting to decide what to do with the raiders and the residence/council are showing unbelievable naivity (which is in character), Norm is like nah waste them all they're irredeemable psychopaths, which is true, we get this moment afterwards of the blonde, pregnant girl secretly approach him and say she agrees with him, and that she hopes when the time comes he'll do the right thing. Cue sinister music.
Later, when Norm is on prisoner lunch duty, he talks to the black girl behind the computer, and she echoes similar concerns.
I thought they were slowly building almost a coup-like situation in the vaults, with the naive vault dwellers vs the the vaulties that are like nah waste the raiders, look what they did to us.
But it...kinda fizzled out, and went nowhere. I mean, it's clear someone poisoned all the raiders and the black girl gets blamed for it (she claims innocence), but if so, what's with the almost conspiratorial vibes to the whole thing?
Speaking of which...
So, the clear implication is that Norm did it, as he's bringing them food. But it seems about equally likely that either of the two from Vault 31 did it, to get them out of the way. I don't think there was ever any suggestion of a coup coming, just that Norm wanted the raiders dead and that didn't fit the Vault's standard protocol. The question was, would he accept that, or not and we still don't know the answer.
9) That blonde pregnant woman.
This character. I dunno.
She starts off as a good character. She's the archetype vault dweller. She's young, pretty, she's pregnant (as girls that age would be in that situation) she seems like a genuine friend of Lucy's. She seems to playfully put her hubby down, but it didn't seem serious (maybe I'm just reading it wrong). During the raider attack she's seen mourning her husbands death, genuinely in tears over it - she might have made fun of him, but she seemed to genuinely love him, or at least his company. She then goes nuts, takes a fork to the eye, but still keeps fighting and machineguns some raiders down, while pregnant.
Good stuff so far.
Then she secretly approaches Norm (as I mentioned above), and the sinister music plays while she's telling him that the raiders murdered her husband and she'll have his back if he's going to 'do the right thing'. This is good, this shows she's grown: she seems to genuinely mourn for her dead husband, realising what she lost in him and wanting those who took him from her, took her childs father, to get what's coming to them. She's no longer the naive, bubbly blonde we saw in the opening, she's more cynical and hardened now.
Then she turns into an almost caricature of a manipulative housewife. She goes from mourning her husband to now just crapping over his memory again, making fun of him again and shacking up with the gatekeeper. The latter I can understand, she wants to move on, so she secures a tall, good looking husband for herself. But then she becomes this manipulative, bossy nag out of nowhere. Then we're told she's from Vault 31, and it seems as if the show is making her out to be in on the big secret, especially as she gets appointed Overseer of recolonised Vault 32, and she seems to embrace it - and that just opens up a whole 'nother line of questioning. Does she know what happened there? She's from Vault 31, right? She looked like she was low-key telling Norm she'd back him if he chose to murder the raiders sneakily or almost coup the place.
Is she a pre-war Vaultec exec? Maybe the early 20s daughter of an executive? Her character seems inconsistent and...I dunno. It's another point of confusion that I'm not sure what they're going for here.
As stated, yes, she is. So, I missed this too, but remember the 'executives' in there are 'Bud's Buds' IE the Vault-Tec management folks in Bud's training/mentorship program. Hank is the PA to a Vault-Tec executive and quite young himself in the flashback. The theory here, though it doesn't make a lot of sense, is that the entire Vault is basically a giant eugenics experiment to create either the perfect middle manager, or the perfect worker, or both, by controlling who is breeding with who and introducing Vault-Tec managers to the breeding pool when desired.
Given that, they basically have to be young and let out early. They marry and have kids with the inhabitants of the vault, then when they're older either create, or take advantage of a crisis to ensure they're elected overseer and maintain control of the vaults and the trades. But due to the deaths in 32, she's getting made overseer early and without an election. I think part of the issue here is that the show seems to have real issues with showing scale. It looks like there's basically as many survivors as there are raider prisoners (stated to be 16), but that's obviously not correct, as if it was, the raiders would simply have won. My assumption is that it's just standard scale issues in a show and there are hundreds of additional occupants just off screen.
10) The Vault Experiments.
They HINT at this during the final scenes of the last episode, that the new investors will get clusters of vaults whose conditions they can change to measure what they want. But instead of being a part of the 'vault experiments', which were actually testing people under different circumstances so Vaultec could use that to escape the planet safely and recolonize somewhere else, it's instead this attack on the management class or something?
So, arguably that? But more it was a matter of competition. I think the theory was that the most successful vaults would be the ones to survive and prosper, proving some theories correct and others wrong. Others are clearly just curiosity, sadism, or a god complex, but that's always been true of the Vaults.
11) The Management Class and Capitalism.
As a bit of a free market lover it annoys me to no end when people confuse capitalism with corporatism. What the Fallout world has pre-war, is Corporatism. That's where big companies use their influence in the government to pass laws favourable to themselves while hindering their typically smaller competition, and overtime they entrench these further and further, thus helping them secure either monopolies or huge, cartel-like cooperatives over important segments of the economy. This is not a free market where someone with an idea, know-how etc can start a small business and either grow it via good/wise decisions or get it to a stage they're happy at while employing others. This is crony capitalism, and I hate it as much as the next person.
So use that.
The pre-war Fallout US government is broke, and in exchange for contracts and $$ and support from these huge companies, the government is passing more and more regulations and laws that are favourable to them, entrenching their power over every day citizens lives. The actor, Cooper, as someone deep in advertising, can see this and it's disgusts him because the country is losing its way and becoming as authoritarian and controlled by a pyramid-tip at the top, much the way the communist reds are, thus making him open to going along and listening to a group who want to bring that system down - surprise, they're actually communists, and even though he hates them and tries to back out it's too late he's been associated with them and his career is wrecked.
See, that's how easy it is.
Instead we get this...weird, "Time is the biggest weapon", and "Our management will outlast the others", and "Let's start the war ourselves". Now that last part is a theory from the games, as no one knows who shot the bombs first, it could have been Vaultec...but the show is saying that peace threatens Vaultec's bottom line, which is true, but nuclear annihilation also threatens Vaultec's bottom line. Their most profitable course of action is to keep the fear of nuclear war high, so they can sell more vaults while enjoying their parties and the world infrastructure. It doesn't make any sense for Vaultec to want to end the world.
However.
We do see some mysterious, shadowy figure in some elevated, hidden viewing room looking down at the Vaultec secret meeting, the one Cooper's wife is at, and she looks up at this mysterious figure as if receiving some body language go ahead from him. So I think what is going to be revealed is that she's actually a member of the Enclave.
As far as I can tell, we haven't learned how they broke up or what happened with Coopers family.
My guess, is that his wife is actually a member of the Enclave, and she's putting that "We can drop the nukes first" idea out there. She doesn't actually care about Vaultec, she's a member of the Enclave who welcome nuclear Armageddon because it'll finally rid the world of communism for good. They helped create the vaults to create the vault experiments, the data they gather from which was going to be used to help them leave for space and colonize another planet. However, that didn't happen and I'm rambling on fallout lore here, but you get the idea.
But yeah, TL:DR this angle made no sense to me and it was just confusing and convoluted. Vaultec are an evil company, but it would've been so much easier to show them entrenching themselves with the government via Corporatism, and not wanting the war to end because it'll impact their bottom line. However, Coopers wife (Barb I think her name is) is a secret member of the Enclave and pushes the idea of dropping the bombs first. That would make more sense to me.
Eh, Coop's backstory clearly isn't over, neither is his wife's, neither is Moldaver's. We see him at the start, divorced and performing at kid's parties, blacklisted for being a communist. He ended this season, married, but discovering his wife is a monster, but still a spokesman for Vault-Tec and movie star. We're clearly going to see his fall from grace and his wife/daughter going forward, so I think this is still explicable.
I don't love Vault-Tec as an overarching villain either, though I'm not getting into the RW issues you touch on, but given the Enclave clearly exists, as we've got a classical Enclave scientist here, and they've got the tech which Moldaver expressly said Vault-Tec bought up, I wouldn't be surprised if we get more connections between the two groups.
Honorable Mention: "Would you like to have sex?"
The Vaults are supposed to be microcosms of 1950s Americana. Some things can get changed around for the circumstances, but under none of those circumstances do I envision a young woman from that culture willy-nilly offering sex to someone she's only known for a couple of days. Especially not one the show has been portraying as rather principled and suffering for those principles but mostly sticking by them. Her jumping the raider as soon as she's married makes sense and is fine. But this is some alien-pretending-to-be-a-human level of out of character, to me at least.
They kinda hint at this in the opening scenes where she's telling the committee that her "reproductive organs are in working order" or something cringe, but even that felt out of place.
It felt even weirder hearing Maximus not know what sex was, referring to erections as pimples or something outlandish. You're telling me all those young people training to be soldiers, in the barracks together, all those hormones and testosterone raging and no one knows what sex is? Gtfo here, for real, no, don't buy it.
I agree about Maximus, especially given that we see a sight gag in the barracks shot of someone clearly masturbating under a blanket. On Lucy...it seems like the Vault has changed somewhat on sexual/social norms over the centuries, given the acceptance of 'cousin stuff' so long as you marry and procreate with someone else. Frankly, given their very limited entertainment options and activities, that makes a lot of sense to me, but your mileage may vary.