Spoiler Alert: Fallout
Season 2, Episode 2: The Golden Rule
It’s been a little over a week since Episode 2 was released. I apologize for the delay but with the holidays and the children, I finally got to sit down and watch it now. Between it being too mature for the children and more than my wife can stomach a lot of times, it’s hard to find the time to view it by myself. Without further adieu…
The episode opens on a flashback of a prospering Shady Sands where Maximus’ father has created a way to remove radiation from water to make it safe for use. The town is the first capital of the NCR, or New California Republic, which we know from the games. Things don’t stay cheery for long as someone pulling a cart is traveling into town repeatedly muttering “Patrolling the Mohave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.” The phrase is from the Fallout: New Vegas game and is actually said by a member of the NCR. That’s a fun little easter egg. Maximus’ father, who happens to be a doctor, is called to help the man after he collapses in the middle of town. He discovers he has a Vault-Tec little black box on the back of his neck and Maximus’ father senses danger. He checks the wagon he’s pulling and reveals a nuclear bomb. He’s fearless in this moment. He sends everyone away and attempts to disarm the bomb. When the bomb’s failsafe is activated, he realizes there is no hope and runs to save his son. This heartbreaking moment is the preface to a scene we witnessed in Season 1. Maximus is put into the family’s fridge so he survives the blast, but his parents wouldn’t be so lucky.
We quickly find out who was responsible for the nuclear bomb… Hank MacLean. His pip-boy confirms the detonation of the nuke and then we hear a young Lucy calling her dad to read her a book. Hank, a loyal Vault-Tec employee, wants their company to rule over the wasteland. The NCR, another faction looking to grow and expand, was seen as competition and had to be “dealt with”. Brutal. When Hank sits down to read with Lucy, she requests the book “The Wind in the Willows”. This is an interesting choice by the show because the book follows the stories of four animals whose adventures intertwine. Notably, there is a gentle Mole character that leaves their underground home and makes friends topside. Sounds like Lucy MacLean to me.
We now join Maximus on a mission to find something crucial to the success of the Brotherhood. He’s fighting feral ghouls on his way to discovering “the key to our new home” according to Elder Quintus. It doesn’t seem like he’s enjoying himself at all. He’s emotionless while he’s mowing down the ghouls. He’s doing his job, but his heart isn’t in it.
After he brings the relic to the elders, it’s revealed that the item is being used to create cold fusion and craft fusion cores, which are used for power/energy. They use a core to power fans that reveal a Brotherhood base and lots of fun items that had been buried in the sand. While the interior didn’t scream Hidden Valley from the New Vegas game, the blowing fans reminded me of trying to find the entrance in the blowing sand while dodging and fighting radscorpions.
Speaking of… we’re now on the trail with Lucy and the Ghoul aka Cooper Howard. The inclusion of the “Lazy Day Blues” by Burt Weedon in this scene warmed my heart and immediately brought me back to the hours I played on Fallout: New Vegas. I love the song choice so much that I’d appreciate it if you played the song while you read the rest of this post so you can get the full experience. Enjoy.
Like I said, we’re on the trail with Lucy and the Ghoul. They’re passing the comically named “Discount Hospital” and we heard a yell for help. Lucy, following the Golden Rule which just so happens to be the name of the episode and the topic of the lecture she’s giving the Ghoul, decides they need to go in and answer the call. I took special note of the Ghoul’s response: “Empathy’s like mud, you lose your boots in that stuff.” I have to imagine he’s full of wisdom like this because after you’ve reached a certain age, you’re full of these automatic answers to certain situations and it’s been established that he’s over 200 years old.
We’re now inside the “Discount Hospital” and this screaming is starting to feel like a trap. They finally reach the source of the yelling and it’s two members of what the Ghoul refers to as “the tunics”. While I don't believe they’re named in the Fallout: New Vegas game, they do look an awful lot like the lower members or slaves of Caesar’s Legion. As Lucy starts tending to the wounded woman, the Ghoul approaches the wounded man with her and kills him. He takes a bite of him and then quickly spits it out when he realizes it tastes off. He rolls the man over to reveal a wound on his back and immediately starts surveying the area for danger. I’ll be honest, when I saw this scene, I thought they had been bitten by feral ghouls and the wound was the site of a bite. I’m glad I was wrong because it meant we got our first look at radscorpions! Little ones at first and then an enormous one after it figured out how to use the double doors. The Ghoul used the tunic woman as a human shield when the radscorpion tried to sting him, which was a real dick move. Then when the large radscorpion found its way on top of the Ghoul, Lucy didn’t help him. I thought that was interesting and an important moment of character development. They eventually blow the radscorpion to bits with a twist on a method I’ve frequently used in the games. In the games, you can sneak a grenade in other characters pockets and then get to a safe distance to watch the fireworks, but in this case, the Ghoul stuffed the grenade into the beasts hungry mouth.
The real character change in this scene comes after the battle. Both the tunic and the Ghoul need a stimpak(basically a health boost for those of you who aren’t familiar with the games). Lucy gives the stimpak to the tunic, which is the right choice, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. The Ghoul will survive without the stim and the tunic wouldn’t have, but when the Ghoul throws her golden rule lecture back in her face, she tells him that rule only applies to people. In the games, there’s a lot of division between Ghouls and Humans. It reveals itself in a similar fashion as racism. The people don’t consider the ghouls to deserve the same rights as them and the ghouls just want what the “smoothskins” take for granted. If you ask me, the way Lucy handled that was classic Tenpenny Tower “smoothskin” behavior. (That’s a Fallout 3 reference. If you know, you know.)
We’ve rejoined Norm (Lucy’s brother) in the cryochamber where he’s decided to reanimate everyone. Everyone wakes up and wonders if it’s Reclamation Day. They’re all a little panicked and it looks like Norm is getting the chaos he asked for at the end of episode one.
Before we get a good look at everything the Brotherhood of Steel had hiding in their sand-covered hangar, we check in on Hank riding around Vault-Tec on a golf cart and playing with a yo-yo on his way to torture and kill mice in the name of testing the mind-controlling black boxes. The man is truly a psychopath with no empathy whatsoever. He’s exactly how I would’ve envisioned a Vault-Tec employee.
Now off to the hangar where two Brotherhood buffoons open an icebox to reveal an alien body, only to dispose of the alien because they’re so excited to see the icebox. I was so excited by the inclusion of the alien because of the madness of the side missions in the games that revolve around alien crash sites and abductions, not to mention the alien blaster weapon.
We start to see that Maximus has matured and has become a role model to his subordinates. As shown in season one, the elders he dealt with were total assholes and it looks like he has decided to break that tradition.
It looks like civil war is on the way for the Brotherhood of Steel. The Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Coronado divisions of the faction have been called to meet by Elder Quintus and the Commonwealth division has been intentionally left out because of their apparent overbearing ways.
During this meeting, one of them mentions a squire who “fucks robots” and that is such a hilarious easter egg that I had to address it. There’s a mission from Fallout: New Vegas titled “Wang Dang Atomic Tango” where you’re tasked with hiring a few escorts for the Atomic Wrangler Casino in Freeside. One of the clients requests a robot. You find a suitable robot (named Fisto), program it, and when it comes to life it requests you “assume the position” to test its capabilities. It’s one of the funnier quests in the game and I’m really glad they bring it up on the show.
The Brotherhood of Steel have figured out cold fusion and can now produce fusion cores. They plan to use it to declare independence from the Commonwealth BOS faction. To use an ever-applicable and famous Fallout quote: War, war never changes.
We move to Lucy on the road with the Tunic, who describes Lucy as “a kindly profligate” and hopes “they” go easy on her. This its when we get our first glimpse of the Legion. It’s brief, but it’s intimidating. It’s an expected bummer that the Tunic didn’t warn Lucy she was walking into danger even after Lucy saved her life.
Norm has figured out a way to motivate the vault dwellers: lie. He’s lying about being a super manager (I think?) but in doing so, is actually being a pretty good motivator and manager. I think we’re going to see some pretty powerful things from Norm before the season is over.
Now we’re back to psycho-pants Hank MacLean doing his evil thing at Vault Tec headquarters. He gets the idea to awaken a human subject after driving past the “Premium Elite Plus” wing. We get a little more Golden Rule justice, despite it being from an evil man in Hank. It’s revealed that Steven Winthrop, our newest test subject for the mind-control devices, was a well-off guy who only sprung to save himself and not his family when the bombs fell. Truly heinous stuff, but Hank blows his head to bits testing out the black box so I guess that’s the dose of Fallout justice he had coming.
Johnny Moore’s “Ac-Cent-Thcu-Ate The Positive” is the soundtrack to Norm’s band of recently awakened vault dwellers making their way up to the ventilation system to escape. The ascent is accompanied by some ominous music but Norm climbs the human ladder up to the actual ladder and exits the vault via a large vent. They reached the sandy ruins of southern California and now Norm has a team with him. He sees the beauty in the same view his sister laid eyes upon in season one.
Now we're at a power armor boxing match. Why didn’t we see this in the game?! Imagine the fun of gambling on a power armor boxing match every time you had to visit the Brotherhood for info on whatever “relic” they had you chasing. Maximus finds himself challenged by some jacked dude who wants to fight him simply because it’ll help him make a name for himself. This is the kind of idiocy Maximus keeps running into in his daily life with the Brotherhood. He ends up killing the other guy in the fight, but after witnessing the crowd cheer for him after the win, he realizes how stupid it all is. You get the feeling he’s going to rebel against the Elders to make the Brotherhood a more civilized organization.
Right before the episode ends, we get our first interaction with Kumail Nanjiani as Xander Hardness, the representative from the Commonwealth who has gotten news of the threat of civil war.
I’m really enjoying this season thus far and these outros are so packed with easter eggs that I can’t look away. What was your favorite part of the episode? What did you think of Lucy abandoning the Ghoul?
Episode 3 is out now but my recap will have to wait until the end of the week because I’m off for a much needed vacation with my family!
