389: Fallout TV S2 Ep5 - Easter Eggs, Lore Connections, and Everything You Might Have Missed

0:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Fallout lorecast. [SPEAKER_01]: The podcast that explores the boundaries of our knowledge about the world of Fallout. [SPEAKER_01]: wastelanders and vault dwellers welcome back to the follow lorecast this week's episode of the fallout tv show episode five season two is one of the most interesting episodes we've had yet with a really close look at free side which is a location many of us know very well from fallout new vagus and there are all sorts of plot twists and turns things that are revealed and little details that [SPEAKER_01]: I picked up on that many of you might have noticed as well, but just in case I'm going to be going over each of those things this week in order to fill in some of the blanks and make sure that you didn't miss anything plus of course I've got some more theories about where things are going and who certain people are actually working for and what their agendas might actually be.

0:56 [SPEAKER_01]: So if you still had too much buff out in your system, go grab that addict all because you're not going to want to miss any of this. [SPEAKER_01]: Here we go. [SPEAKER_01]: This is the first episode that opens up with a continuation, a direct continuation of last week's cliffhanger, and instead of going to a flashback or something like that, we just get to see what happens with Lucy and the Google and the death claw.

1:26 [SPEAKER_01]: That by the way, I should have pointed this out last week, when the death claw comes out of Gomorrah, which is, of course, one of the casinos. [SPEAKER_01]: it stands up and there are flames painted on the walls and they keep talking about these death claws as devils and this one basically comes out of hell and stands up and scares our heroes.

1:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Or at least that's what the fire symbolism around it seems to imply. [SPEAKER_01]: Turns out there's actually three male death claws, by the way. [SPEAKER_01]: And again, you can tell the gender by the direction the horns are facing. [SPEAKER_01]: Front facing, pointing horns, that means males, back facing horns, that means females.

2:07 [SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that we already saw some broken eggs. [SPEAKER_01]: implies that this was a nest at one point and there might still be a mother death claw around here somewhere. [SPEAKER_01]: And later on in this episode, when they get to free side, somebody says that these death claws moved into the area from query junction.

2:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, if you've played Fallout New Vegas, you know that query junction is just north of the area where you start and is along the path [SPEAKER_01]: strip, but it is infested with death claws and a mother death claw. [SPEAKER_01]: And there's other things that go on there as well, including a questline where you have to go find death claw eggs for a character named Red Lucy.

2:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Now does that play into how these Death Cloud eggs got to the strip? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't know that we're sure yet. [SPEAKER_01]: We could assume that they just moved in on their own. [SPEAKER_01]: That may have been the case, but they would have needed to break down all the defenses that House had on the strip in order to do so.

3:12 [SPEAKER_01]: So was there something else going on here? [SPEAKER_01]: And as we know, not every character in Fallout is a reliable narrator. [SPEAKER_01]: So I guess we're just going to have to wait and see. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, dog meat noops out right away, runs underneath the little gate that they came through.

3:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And this leads to some logistics problems with the way this scene was shot. [SPEAKER_01]: The gate they come through is not from free side, but it appears to be the same gate they exit through, which then leads to free side. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that there were just some editing changes or maybe some even scene changes, because now they're in the dark here, and then next time we see them, [SPEAKER_01]: It's like the middle of the day again and they're standing looking at the gate that they just came out of.

3:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, were they standing there for hours? [SPEAKER_01]: Did they take a nap and get back up? [SPEAKER_01]: Probably not, but I'm guessing this was a post-production editing thing and they cut out some bits and pieces. [SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a little bit of editing in continuity. [SPEAKER_01]: Is that a word?

4:11 [SPEAKER_01]: But it's really not a huge deal. [SPEAKER_01]: The closer you look at any TV show, eventually you'll notice things like this. [SPEAKER_01]: Another fun detail about the death clause is that they had practical suits that they were using to puppet the death clause around. [SPEAKER_01]: That's part of why they look so good.

4:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Now it's not just that they are practical. [SPEAKER_01]: They are practical plus VFX. [SPEAKER_01]: You have the person puppeting the suit, so the actors can actually react in real time to a nine-foot tall costume that looks like a giant monster. [SPEAKER_01]: And then they clean it up with VFX later in order to make sure that it fits directly in the scenery and everything looks as good as it possibly can.

4:49 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think the results are pretty solid here. [SPEAKER_01]: These death claws are formidable. [SPEAKER_01]: And there's definitely a joke to be made here about when you follow the main quest line, but you don't go on any side quests, so your character doesn't level up enough to deal with some of the things they come across.

5:06 [SPEAKER_01]: And they hit them too soon. [SPEAKER_01]: And then they have to find a way out of the situation. [SPEAKER_01]: We've all been in that situation in a video game. [SPEAKER_01]: And well, the goal and Lucy make it out, but just barely. [SPEAKER_01]: So now we're in free side and you can tell that they followed so much of what is in the game directly in order to influence the way they built this little downtown looking area.

5:31 [SPEAKER_01]: You have a number of locations that show up in Fallout New Vegas. [SPEAKER_01]: Now they aren't in exactly the same locations. [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, there isn't a welcome to the Vegas strip kind of entry way that directly connects free side in this location. [SPEAKER_01]: to the strip.

5:45 [SPEAKER_01]: It's not laid out exactly the same way in Fallout New Vegas, but the iconic land marks are here and I think that's the most important part. [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't really matter that, for example, the school for impersonation where the kings were originally based and we don't see any kings.

6:01 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think in any of the footage here. [SPEAKER_01]: So it implies that maybe they're all gone, maybe they are all [SPEAKER_01]: but that location in Fallout New Vegas doesn't actually lead directly to this gate. [SPEAKER_01]: It's in fact on a very different side of free side, but that's not the only one.

6:18 [SPEAKER_01]: You can clearly see Mickey and Ralphs, which was a location in New Vegas where you could buy weapons from Mick, and you could also buy consumables from Ralph. [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see in a little bit where the Google goes into the Wrangler casino that that's here as well, and it does look a little different on the inside than it does in the game, but it feels close enough to me.

6:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, here's one you may not have noticed. [SPEAKER_01]: You can see behind the Google and Lucy as they're looking at the gate, golden globes, and then the final word gets cut off, but it clearly starts with a PO maybe an R and then another letter. [SPEAKER_01]: This is a location that does not show up in New Vegas.

6:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Underneath that, you can see adult books, XXX movies, [SPEAKER_01]: This is the Golden Globes studio from Fallout 2. [SPEAKER_01]: In Fallout 2, of course, we don't go to New Vegas, but you go to New Reno, and that's where this studio, we'll call it a movie studio. [SPEAKER_01]: This movie studio was still functioning.

7:14 [SPEAKER_01]: in the wasteland now there's probably no chance we're going to new Reno anytime soon so it's kind of a fun little easter egg to drop this into free side and who knows maybe they opened up another location in free side and just i don't know used a lot of the same old signage and just moved it over from Reno who knows but it is a fun callback [SPEAKER_01]: Plus, it does something that we wouldn't be able to do because of the strip being kind of locked down and nobody's walking around in it.

7:41 [SPEAKER_01]: In free side, we see kind of a, well, first of all, it's busier than it is in New Vegas, but we also see a lot of different people walking around here. [SPEAKER_01]: Some of them wearing more typical wasteland clothing, the remnants of the pre-war clothes that might still be wearable, but are absolutely destroyed.

8:00 [SPEAKER_01]: But then we also see characters who look like they fit into some of these vaults. [SPEAKER_01]: People walking around who looked like they may have worked at Gomorrah at some point, which was... [SPEAKER_01]: Similar to Golden Globes, a little bit more adult-focused for a casino. [SPEAKER_01]: But then there's also people walking around with a variety of different outfit types.

8:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Some of them look like they were very fancy clothes. [SPEAKER_01]: Some of them look like cowboys. [SPEAKER_01]: You have this really interesting mix, and it seems to imply that the people who used to live on the strip all now are in free side. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's in the scene when we get this really interesting dialogue from Lucy.

8:34 [SPEAKER_01]: She says, I'd ask why it is that my dad ran into a den of giant monsters, but he'd probably just tell me to shut the fudge up. [SPEAKER_01]: She says to the Google, now this along with so many other things on the show so far that I've pointed out has a double meaning. [SPEAKER_01]: First of all, she seems to be thinking that her father would have run into the strip itself, which is now occupied by these death claws, these giant monsters, [SPEAKER_01]: but that that would be weird, which it absolutely would be weird.

9:03 [SPEAKER_01]: We come to find out that Valtek, based on the Google's research, has many of these special vaults for their employees, and he's been to a number of them and can't seem to find his wife and his daughter. [SPEAKER_01]: And so he's now assuming that there must be another one of these below the strip.

9:24 [SPEAKER_01]: But there's a double meaning here. [SPEAKER_01]: Why would her father run into a den of monsters? [SPEAKER_01]: Who's more monstrous than some of the corporations and individuals who led to the destruction of the world? [SPEAKER_01]: People are the real monsters, as one of those common themes in these types of post-apocalyptic shows and movies and books.

9:44 [SPEAKER_01]: And due to some of the reveals in this episode, I'm starting to believe that more characters are actually working for the on-clave than I originally assumed, including probably Hank. [SPEAKER_01]: But more on that in a little bit. [SPEAKER_01]: Now you'll notice that some things going on with the characters in this scene.

10:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Lucy is trying to get past the whole addiction thing. [SPEAKER_01]: The goal recommends that she goes and gets some addictal from the store. [SPEAKER_01]: He gives her some caps. [SPEAKER_01]: He's being very nice to her here, which is not typical for him. [SPEAKER_01]: So there's something going on.

10:17 [SPEAKER_01]: He's having some difficulties. [SPEAKER_01]: And we can clearly see that by wanting to drink an entire bottle of alcohol. [SPEAKER_01]: Now later on the episode, we find out that his plan all along was to use Lucy as a bargaining chip with Hank in order to try to get his family back. [SPEAKER_01]: But maybe there's more going on here.

10:34 [SPEAKER_01]: He seems to be warming up to her. [SPEAKER_01]: And this is something that happens when you do nice things for other people. [SPEAKER_01]: You start to actually like them more. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a psychological thing. [SPEAKER_01]: It's real. [SPEAKER_01]: But my theory here is that her struggling with moral dilemmas, what is right and what is wrong, is something that he hasn't had to consider for so long that it's bringing him back, that the flashbacks we're seeing aren't just for us, their things that he is reliving in his mind.

11:03 [SPEAKER_01]: He's thinking back through the events that have caused [SPEAKER_01]: so much of the terrible things that happened in this world and we'll see more of that in his conversation with House and how he handled these things and I think he's starting to see that he wasn't just a victim of all of this that he was a player and part of it all along.

11:22 [SPEAKER_01]: These scenes seem to be alluding to the fact that his internal emotional conflict is not just based on the fact that he was kind of fooled by vault tech and became a face for their advertising and was a big part of what helped them grow in their popularity and bring people into vaults. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure he has some regret about that, but there's probably something else going on as well, especially when House mentions that his calculations for the end of the world were shifted [SPEAKER_01]: had their daughter, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

11:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Cooper heads into the Atomic Wrangler, Casino, and sits down and gets a drink of an entire bottle. [SPEAKER_01]: And the bartender starts to have a conversation with him about not really caring about who's in charge as long as they don't tax him. [SPEAKER_01]: And this is interesting because it, again, does two things.

12:11 [SPEAKER_01]: It reflects the mindset of many of these wastelanders who feel like they don't ultimately have any real control about the powers who seem to lored over them, whether it's the NCR, or the Legion, or House, but it also echoes something else later. [SPEAKER_01]: He had a very similar conversation with Mr. House.

12:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And then we see the goal, look in the mirror, as if he's seeing himself again for the first time, reflecting literally on who he has become. [SPEAKER_01]: So this ends and we get a galaxy news radio update. [SPEAKER_01]: And this is great because this old graphic goes way back to like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.

12:47 [SPEAKER_01]: And there's a reason for that. [SPEAKER_01]: The interplay studios logo also had a orbiting rocket around a planet, well, earth probably. [SPEAKER_01]: And this is very similar. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like they took the same style and design and they just made it work for fallout. [SPEAKER_01]: Now this news reel gives us a little update about all of these powerful corporations, West Tech and Rob Co.

13:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Vault Tech and the Big MT. [SPEAKER_01]: are discussing the future of this country and notice the ones that are put up on the screen here. [SPEAKER_01]: House Runs Robco, Vault Tech, that's that one's obvious. [SPEAKER_01]: West Tech is responsible for the FEV, the forced evolutionary virus, which we'll get to a little bit more later.

13:24 [SPEAKER_01]: And then Big M.T. [SPEAKER_01]: Fallen New Vegas has an entire expansion focused on Big M.T. [SPEAKER_01]: Old world blues, and they are another one of these corporations that was doing unethical experiments on human beings, which seems to be a commonality among all four of these. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, it's also in this episode where we come to finally get confirmation that the reason there are two houses is because one of them is a body double, which was something I speculated about earlier on in the season.

13:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Some people were arguing, no, that's house's brother. [SPEAKER_01]: Definitely a body double, and he shows up in an image standing in front of what appear to be the legs of a giant robot, just like a picture that we get from Fallout New Vegas. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, another little detail here, those giant legs are not exactly the same as Liberty Prime's giant legs, but Robco was definitely involved with the making of Liberty Prime.

14:19 [SPEAKER_01]: which was a giant robot that was contracted by the U.S. government in order to serve in defense of the country and probably offense of against our enemies, but it never actually worked before the war because they had a hard time powering it. [SPEAKER_01]: This was something that was solved at the end of Fallout 3 and then again in Fallout 4, we get to witness Liberty Prime stumping on communists or whatever it is that you pointed [SPEAKER_01]: Now, maybe these legs in this picture were a prototype, or another giant type of robot, who knows what other machinations exist in the wasteland hidden in bunkers and places that nobody remembers anymore.

14:57 [SPEAKER_01]: And then we get the line in the advertisement where he says, where I come from, which is America, the house always wins. [SPEAKER_01]: I almost expected it to be Las Vegas, but nope, but this echo is something that shows up in Fallout New Vegas. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, as Koop and Barb are getting on the plane to Las Vegas, Hank is there as well, and Hank has tied, well, a chain to his wrist, a box.

15:20 [SPEAKER_01]: It seems to be heavily implied that this is cold fusion. [SPEAKER_01]: It's discussed at another point in the episode that they are trading, cold fusion for the bombs, or at least this seems to be what Moldaver thinks is happening here, and if all tech gets the bombs, then they can drop them.

15:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, younger Hank says that he is a target of assassination, which seems to imply again multiple things. [SPEAKER_01]: If Hank is working for Valtek, and he's just carrying a very, very important item on him, then maybe there are people who know this and might be looking for him, and so therefore he's [SPEAKER_01]: It feels endangered on the trip until he's in a place that's safer.

15:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Secondly, we know from the earlier episodes that he tries to contact somebody when he gets to this hidden vault. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, I speculated that that was house himself, hoping house was still alive, and that maybe he had been working for house all along. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm starting to think that Hank isn't actually working for Robert House.

16:16 [SPEAKER_01]: He's working for the on-clave. [SPEAKER_01]: The shadow government behind the United States and many of these corporations, we know that on-clave members are seated throughout many of these corporations and in different levels of power usually pretty high up. [SPEAKER_01]: But that also means that not everybody at these corporations is also 100% in-line with the on-clave.

16:38 [SPEAKER_01]: If some of the higher ups at say vault tech or Mr. House himself were to realize that the people that he had working for him or he was negotiating with had other intentions and were working for somebody else, then that would cause problems. [SPEAKER_01]: And as we know, all of these individuals are pretty cutthroat.

16:58 [SPEAKER_01]: Now Cooper ends up with a conversation with Moldever just to phone booths away and she of course is giving him what appears to be some sort of poison to use on house. [SPEAKER_01]: She truly believes that if Cooper were to take out house then that would solve the problem, but Cooper is not 100% sure about this and turns her down.

17:17 [SPEAKER_01]: This is a typical trolley problem where she says what would be the problem with killing one person to save countless lives. [SPEAKER_01]: And we get this really subtle situation where she says that the ends justify the means, and Cooper says that people have been saying stuff like that for years, and then looks at Hank talking to two of bud's buds.

17:38 [SPEAKER_01]: implying that this is exactly the same reasoning that Hank will use in the future in order to destroy shady sands and continue doing the other things he's doing. [SPEAKER_01]: Cooper knows that it's often justifications like this that lead to terrible decisions. [SPEAKER_01]: In the next scene, Cooper is getting out of the car in Vegas with Barb, and on the way into the hotel, Casino, we see a few things happen.

18:02 [SPEAKER_01]: First of all, the song that's playing is rags to riches by Tony Bennett, which implies some of the ideas behind Casino's, right? [SPEAKER_01]: This idea that you could be a poor person and better little bit of money, but win a ton and then all of a sudden you're rich. [SPEAKER_01]: But I think it might also imply something else.

18:16 [SPEAKER_01]: This idea that, again, gets seated later on in this episode, that somebody like Cooper [SPEAKER_01]: on a farm, and yet he has become very wealthy, and also influential in ways that he doesn't expect. [SPEAKER_01]: Now he runs into Mrs. Welsh, the US representative, who seems to be fighting against all of the terrible things the United States government is doing here, and he kindly helps her stand back up.

18:42 [SPEAKER_01]: She laments that fighting the good fight is the series of humiliation, but then he says keep at it. [SPEAKER_01]: And she smiles at him. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, this is the second time she's shown up. [SPEAKER_01]: And the first time she shows up, it's kind of a goof. [SPEAKER_01]: It not only confirms that people are not paying attention to the other people in America who seem to be a little bit more level headed and sure about things going in the wrong direction.

19:05 [SPEAKER_01]: but that plays as a goof and this again kind of plays as a goof and normally in a show like this and a script you wouldn't see to character like like this into two separate scenes in two separate episodes with the same goof unless that character is more important. [SPEAKER_01]: Now the more important bit might be reminding us that Cooper is on the same side as she is.

19:30 [SPEAKER_01]: They both want the best for America and don't want the bombs to drop or us to do terrible things. [SPEAKER_01]: But it may also be more than that. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe she's a more important character and the show is making sure that we definitely remember who she is by putting her in front of us a second time.

19:47 [SPEAKER_01]: So maybe she's more than she seems, maybe in a good way, maybe in a bad way. [SPEAKER_01]: But I have a feeling we'll find out more about that soon. [SPEAKER_01]: So Cooper goes in, and of course gets summoned by Mr. House, we find out that the other Mr. House is a body double. [SPEAKER_01]: We see the elevator up to the top of the tops, and Victor is there, echoing some of the things that were discussed when we saw the Google run into Victor previously.

20:10 [SPEAKER_01]: And House is sitting there in front of his gigantic CRT monitor, which by the way would have weighed something like 4,000 pounds, and would have been basically impossible to make due to cathode rate technology only being able to create gigantic screens like that. [SPEAKER_01]: So big, but anyway, it doesn't matter if it's possible, it matters that it's incredible to look at, and absolutely matches what it looks like in Fallout New Vegas.

20:34 [SPEAKER_01]: And House is sitting down there at his console, [SPEAKER_01]: including Cooper. [SPEAKER_01]: He knows that Cooper was sent to kill him. [SPEAKER_01]: He knows that he's a very important person. [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, he was inside or at least was able to detect things that were happening in his T-45 power armor back when he was in the war.

20:53 [SPEAKER_01]: And that's because although West Tech created the power armor, Robco was still involved kind of like with Liberty Prime. [SPEAKER_01]: But I'm getting ahead of myself. [SPEAKER_01]: Before we get to all of that, we have the chicken lover or the snake oil salesman, whatever you would like to call him.

21:08 [SPEAKER_01]: And he's on his way to Las Vegas. [SPEAKER_01]: He walks over a sign that says 50 miles. [SPEAKER_01]: And then we get a scene of him with, well, let's call him a fan favorite. [SPEAKER_01]: Fisto, while the music luck be a lady tonight plays, which seems to apply things. [SPEAKER_01]: And then the conversation between them seems to make things pretty clear.

21:25 [SPEAKER_01]: And if you haven't played Fallout New Vegas, Fisto was a robot that was reprogrammed in order to be a, let's call it an adult companion, which is hilarious and terrifying all the same time. [SPEAKER_01]: Then the scene transitions back to Hank in his very special vault tech, a management vault, I guess we'll just call it that.

21:43 [SPEAKER_01]: And you can see more of the cryogenic containers, including the names of Barb and Genie, [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we don't see their faces though, and that's another movie in TV trick where you try to convince the audience of something, but then you don't fully confirm it. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, like when somebody you think is dead because they fall off a cliff, but you don't actually see the body.

22:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, maybe they're there, or maybe they're not. [SPEAKER_01]: We don't know a hundred percent, but it does look like those cryo chambers are in use, so somebody's in there. [SPEAKER_01]: Then the previous scene continues with the chicken lover who was hit on the head by Hank, uh, now in the vaults, and Hank has put the mind control device on the back of his neck, and they fake us out.

22:23 [SPEAKER_01]: They make us think that his head is going to explode again, and it doesn't. [SPEAKER_01]: But why does it work? [SPEAKER_01]: I think one thing that's implied is that Hank has continued to try to work on the technology and may have made a breakthrough, but I think that there's something else going on here as well.

22:38 [SPEAKER_01]: This individual was picked up from the wasteland because the experiments were not working on people he was waking up from cryogenic stasis. [SPEAKER_01]: There's probably something going on with wastelanders that seems to make them more susceptible to the device. [SPEAKER_01]: Was it the tough life that he lived?

22:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Is it all the drugs and things that he's done? [SPEAKER_01]: Is it the idea that people in the wasteland have been irradiated more than regular people before the bombs dropped? [SPEAKER_01]: Or there's the potential that FV got out into the environment, which is a debated topic in the series.

23:10 [SPEAKER_01]: And maybe some people are slightly influenced by that, and therefore slightly different evolutionarily. [SPEAKER_01]: I've seen some speculation out there, and there are a lot of people who are speculating things in order to kind of try to plug other stuff into the show, other lore that they would love to see show up, like the Enclave who make synthetic people and replace them in the wasteland, is this a synthetic human?

23:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Is that why this works? [SPEAKER_01]: Because it's able to tap into his brain in a way that doesn't work for regular humans. [SPEAKER_01]: But I think this is a slim theory [SPEAKER_01]: hints at these types of things that you in retrospect can look at and go, oh, that's definitely leading somewhere I just missed it.

24:00 [SPEAKER_01]: In this case, especially with the conversation with Fisto, he just kind of implies that he's powered up and ready to go the same way that Fisto is, but it's not a really strong connection in my opinion. [SPEAKER_01]: because it seems to be implying that they're both robots, but one of the big things about synths is that they don't always know that they're robots.

24:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Unless they purposely leave the institute and retain their memories in which case maybe he's looking to get those things wiped because that's one of the things that synths do is they're happy to have their memories wiped sometimes so that they can live a brand new life and not have to fear or be bothered by the life that they left.

24:36 [SPEAKER_01]: It still feels a little tenuous to me. [SPEAKER_01]: So then we get an update on Norm in the 31 Vultures. [SPEAKER_01]: I guess we'll just call them that. [SPEAKER_01]: And they've made their way to a vault tech building where all of these people worked. [SPEAKER_01]: And Ronnie points out that Jan is still at her desk because she was a kiss ass.

24:52 [SPEAKER_01]: One of the other guys responds with that. [SPEAKER_01]: And it just goes to show how even these middle of the road vault tech employees from the pre-war [SPEAKER_01]: are not empathetic at all. [SPEAKER_01]: They find out that the place is now inhabited by Majoon and Barv, which every time they say that I think it sounds like Barv.

25:10 [SPEAKER_01]: And Majoon has a conversation with Norm and what's important about this is that she will first of all, she thinks that Lucy is probably dead because she understands how dangerous the wasteland is and she understands how naive all of these vault dwellers are. [SPEAKER_01]: So she gives Norm the same advice, go back to your vault, you're not safe.

25:27 [SPEAKER_01]: But even when leaving the scenario here, she mentions that she's trying to be a better person which implies that Lucy and her attitude about trying to be a good person seems to have made a difference. [SPEAKER_01]: Then we jump to Lucy and she's in the store trying to, well, she spines away to sneak her way in.

25:44 [SPEAKER_01]: and the guy behind the desk goes upstairs and she steals some edict all because it's so expensive she definitely can't afford it. [SPEAKER_01]: Then she steals a power fist which is a weapon that's been in the series for a long time and is a lot of fun to use when you're doing a melee build and then she notices there's a body in the garbage and the guy behind the counter has clothes that don't fit and she murders him in self defense but she still murders him.

26:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, she's still under the effects of buff out, so it's not 100% her fault, but this is the first time she's acted leafily towards another living person. [SPEAKER_01]: And the scene is set up in a way where we understand that he's a bad guy. [SPEAKER_01]: He's not a good person, so we don't lament this too much.

26:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Also, he was about to attack her and kill her, so it is self-defense. [SPEAKER_01]: But it's enough. [SPEAKER_01]: to show that she might be going too far and she starts to realize that. [SPEAKER_01]: So in this episode, both Lucy and the Google are coming to a realization about who they are and who they've become.

26:43 [SPEAKER_01]: And also how what seemed to be little tiny decisions can lead to bigger problems. [SPEAKER_01]: So then we flash back to Cooper and his conversation with Mr. House. [SPEAKER_01]: And some interesting things are revealed here. [SPEAKER_01]: First of all, Mr. House has been tracking everything.

26:58 [SPEAKER_01]: That's his goal to know everything. [SPEAKER_01]: And he claims that he's been calculating the date of the end of the world based on all of these different variables, but there are some hidden variables that he's been struggling with. [SPEAKER_01]: One seems to be Cooper, and why the birth of his daughter changed the equation.

27:15 [SPEAKER_01]: And then he goes on about how there's still another variable that he's unsure about, which I think is implying the on-clave. [SPEAKER_01]: Because they've done a really good job of acting from behind the scenes so far in influencing the government and influencing these other corporations without actually revealing themselves to be a high of mind that's in control.

27:37 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, I've seen some pushback online and just the few hours it's been since I watched the show and have been working on this recording that people are saying that, well, of course, you can't calculate the end of the world. [SPEAKER_01]: He's putting too much trust on this Cooper is right.

27:51 [SPEAKER_01]: He is insane. [SPEAKER_01]: And you have to remember that there's a very fine line between genius and insanity. [SPEAKER_01]: And in Fallout New Vegas, we find out that he was correct about the date the bombs would drop [SPEAKER_01]: twenty hours less than a day. [SPEAKER_01]: It happened sooner than he expected, and so he wasn't a hundred percent ready, but he was still really, really close.

28:15 [SPEAKER_01]: So something he was doing to calculate this date actually worked. [SPEAKER_01]: So in this scene, I don't think we should consider him to be an unreliable narrator or somebody who's gone off the deep end who is just hallucinating these ideas or something like that. [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, he seems kind of crazy.

28:32 [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, he's a megalomaniac who wants control of things and doesn't trust other people. [SPEAKER_01]: He believes he's smarter than everyone else. [SPEAKER_01]: And most of the time he probably is. [SPEAKER_01]: And in this scene, I think it absolutely is telling us that there is something else going on.

28:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Why is the birth of Janey so important? [SPEAKER_01]: And I have a guess here. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not because Janey did something. [SPEAKER_01]: She's a child or she was a child when the bomb dropped. [SPEAKER_01]: It's because had she not been there, Cooper or Barb or both of them would have made different decisions.

29:07 [SPEAKER_01]: And this is something every parent knows. [SPEAKER_01]: You live your life a certain way when you are single and then you get married and you still mostly live your life the same way. [SPEAKER_01]: You have a certain level of, well, willing to risk things because it's just you or it's just you [SPEAKER_01]: But once you have children, your decisions change.

29:26 [SPEAKER_01]: You start making decisions less about yourself and more about your family and that well-being of your children. [SPEAKER_01]: And so this is going to change things. [SPEAKER_01]: And we see a scene right at the end after Cooper is drunk. [SPEAKER_01]: And he's laying on the bed, and Barb is trying to help him feel better, where he says, we need to talk.

29:44 [SPEAKER_01]: And that might be the moment on this day where the birth of their child causes them to have a conversation that they otherwise would never have had. [SPEAKER_01]: This also does something else. [SPEAKER_01]: One of the patterns we've seen with Cooper and the Google is that he is basically not very good at having conversations with people.

30:05 [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't answer questions. [SPEAKER_01]: He implies a lot of things. [SPEAKER_01]: He holds a lot of his feelings in. [SPEAKER_01]: He is not a good communicator. [SPEAKER_01]: And many of the problems in his life, both before the war and after the war, seem to come from the fact that he could have done a better job simply communicating with the people [SPEAKER_01]: that he cared about, or the people that he was working with.

30:26 [SPEAKER_01]: But in this scene, right at the end of the episode, he is attempting to actually communicate with his wife. [SPEAKER_01]: And this may have changed the world. [SPEAKER_01]: Now another fun detail in the scene is that we see how's put on this weird device on top of his head. [SPEAKER_01]: This is the same exact device that we find on his deteriorating body in New Vegas when we come across him.

30:47 [SPEAKER_01]: He's basically stuck in a chamber with the device on his head. [SPEAKER_01]: And people have been asking about this online. [SPEAKER_01]: My assumption here is that that device is a brain link directly to the machinery that is eventually going to keep them alive, but also keep him in control of all of the technology, all of the robots, all of that.

31:06 [SPEAKER_01]: It may have been part of how he was able to experience what the power armor suit was doing was through this mental interface. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, he also mentions in the scenes where he's talking with Cooper that his plan is to survive the bomb's dropping, which is exactly what he does in New Vegas.

31:22 [SPEAKER_01]: He sets up a defense grid and is able to keep most of Vegas protected, including himself. [SPEAKER_01]: But in this dialogue, he mentions that he will do this by [SPEAKER_01]: becoming basically an automaton by putting his mind inside the technology, not by keeping his body alive. [SPEAKER_01]: But we know that that's not actually the case once we get to the events of New Vegas.

31:45 [SPEAKER_01]: He is able to maintain his body, although in a very deteriorated and kind of weak state. [SPEAKER_01]: So maybe he had some sort of technological... [SPEAKER_01]: Updates that allowed him to do that, but what I think is more likely is the fact that because he was wrong about the date the bombs were going to drop.

32:03 [SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't able to interface early enough to transfer his mind fully into the computers. [SPEAKER_01]: and so he had to get into a pod which was probably his backup plan because he has plans upon plans upon plans in order to preserve himself when the bomb dropped in order to control the defense of the city and he realized that that was good enough or he just ended up stuck there.

32:25 [SPEAKER_01]: So maybe his initial plan was to transfer his mind completely into the computers, but ended up still being a biological entity. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not 100% on this. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there are multiple ways you could probably interpret this. [SPEAKER_01]: I think the worst way is probably, oh, the writer's messed up and they missed something.

32:41 [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't know. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that there's probably more going on here and there's always more details. [SPEAKER_01]: And again, plans upon plans upon plans with Robert House. [SPEAKER_01]: So we go back to Norm and he is uncovering what's actually going on with Valtek and the phrase future enterprise ventures, which I did miss on the last episode.

33:00 [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have subtitles up, but a lot of people on the internet caught that future enterprise ventures matches FEV forced evolutionary virus, which raises a lot of questions. [SPEAKER_01]: Are they planning to turn the people in the vaults into super mutants? [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that that's likely?

33:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Norm finds the computer, logs in, puts in future enterprise ventures into the vault tech system, and it does not return anything, which either implies that it didn't exist at all, or that he just didn't have the clearance to get to that information. [SPEAKER_01]: But then it recommends that, well, it's similar to FEV, which would have been documented by Valtek because as we know, they are aware of all of the different experiments happening in all of the vaults and they are connected to these other corporations and they are aware of a lot of the things that they're doing.

33:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Also, the FEV was a response to the plague that happened and an attempt to fight to the plague. [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a long story about how FEV evolved and changed over time and why it was being used to make super mutants and all of that. [SPEAKER_01]: But what we know more about FEV than anything is that it was...

34:07 [SPEAKER_01]: designed and used by West Tech and in cooperation with the U.S. government in order to make supermutes, it was not leveraged by vault tech to do so. [SPEAKER_01]: So you add together the fact that future enterprise ventures does not show up in their computer system and Ronnie was the personal assistant to bud.

34:27 [SPEAKER_01]: and Hank was the assistant to Barb, and now you have assistants who may have been planted into Valtec by the Enclave. [SPEAKER_01]: And in my mind, this perfectly lines up. [SPEAKER_01]: Ronnie was there in order to make sure that he furthered the will of the Enclave with Bud, who was an important person at Valtec.

34:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Hank was there because he was pushing enclaves agenda with Barb. [SPEAKER_01]: And we're getting more and more proof that Vault Tech were not the ones who dropped the bomb, although in the previous season we saw that that was something they were considering doing. [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of the fanbase jumped on top of that, they were like, oh, we know who dropped the bombs.

35:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And I kept saying, we don't know. [SPEAKER_01]: We know that they had a plan to possibly do that, but we don't know that they actually did it. [SPEAKER_01]: And more and more evidence seems to be pointing to the fact that the uncleve was behind all of this. [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, there are individuals who work at each of these corporations that are terrible human beings, that lack any empathy for other people, that are megalomaniax like house who want to take control of things and believe they're the only one with the right answer.

35:35 [SPEAKER_01]: But the real- [SPEAKER_01]: villain behind all of this. [SPEAKER_01]: The wars that happened before the bombs dropped, the death clause, the super mutants, West Tech, and Valtek being manipulated. [SPEAKER_01]: All of this points back to the enclave, and it's a puzzle that House has been trying to solve, because he still doesn't quite know who exactly the enclave is.

35:58 [SPEAKER_01]: So then we end up with a big final scene. [SPEAKER_01]: Lucy returns to the ghoul at the Wrangler, and we find that the chicken guy, the snake oil salesman, has been fully controlled by Hank, and issues a bargain. [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, he says that the ghoul needs to take Lucy back to her vault, otherwise he will never see his family again.

36:19 [SPEAKER_01]: But now the ghoul has confirmation about where his family is or at least seems to, if Hank is telling the truth here. [SPEAKER_01]: and before we get to how this plays out, think about what this implies about the vaults having something to do with supermunes. [SPEAKER_01]: Why would Hank, if he knows about future and surprise ventures, which we're not 100% sure about, but he probably does, want Lucy to go back to the vault if they're planning to turn all of those people into supermunes?

36:45 [SPEAKER_01]: So, either, he doesn't know about... [SPEAKER_01]: future enterprise ventures, which would mean that he isn't actually on the same side as bud, or at least as informed as bud was about what was going on, which is possible, but seems unlikely to me, or the Enclave wasn't planning to use the FEV on these vaults, or at least not everyone in the vaults.

37:07 [SPEAKER_01]: There's something else going on here, and I'm not 100% sure about it yet, so if you have some theories, let me know. [SPEAKER_01]: So we see the Google tranquilized Lucy, and I think there are two [SPEAKER_01]: First is, he completely gives in and he realizes that he needs his family and he's willing to do something terrible in order to make sure that he gets them back because that was the plan all along, but he seems to have had second thoughts about that throughout this episode.

37:29 [SPEAKER_01]: That seems to be his dilemma, the scene with him drinking a bunch and then flashing back to Mr. House and drinking a bunch. [SPEAKER_01]: There are parallels here. [SPEAKER_01]: He's realizing that he might have to do something terrible in order to get what he wants and he's struggling with that.

37:45 [SPEAKER_01]: And as I mentioned before, he has more influence over the events that have happened than he seems to have expected. [SPEAKER_01]: It's as if he's reacting to things and then things play out in ways that are way bigger and way worse than he ever would have expected. [SPEAKER_01]: And there's visual symbolism here with him drunk on the back of not a bull, but...

38:04 [SPEAKER_01]: a bomb, writing it at the casino, as if he is trying to somehow control or stay on the back of this deadly thing that is about to change the world forever. [SPEAKER_01]: It feels kind of like he's back on that bomb, or maybe has never left it symbolically. [SPEAKER_01]: Now Lucy drops to the floor and we think that she's about to pass out.

38:26 [SPEAKER_01]: He tells her to go to sleep and then she'll wake up where she came from. [SPEAKER_01]: But then she gets back up. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, tranquilizers can take a little while before they fully work on somebody, but I also think that this might have something to do with the fact that she has a dictal in her system, which could be fighting the tranquilizer.

38:42 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it's just some speculation on my side. [SPEAKER_01]: Then she punches him out of window with the power fist, and we see him get impaled on a pole. [SPEAKER_01]: So Norm's story ends with him getting choked out by Ronnie, who discovers that he's not actually in charge. [SPEAKER_01]: Lucy passes out, and the Google ends up impaled on a poll.

39:01 [SPEAKER_01]: So we have the biggest cliffhanger yet, because three of our favorite characters are now in trouble. [SPEAKER_01]: Now you don't have to worry too much. [SPEAKER_01]: We've seen scenes in the trailers that show that the goal is still alive throughout the rest of this season. [SPEAKER_01]: So being impaled on a poll is not enough to kill him, how he will heal from that.

39:19 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not 100% sure, but I think it might have something to do with the power core that the chicken lover still has from negotiating with Thaddeus, when he gave Thaddeus was probably FV, that's turning him into a super mutant. [SPEAKER_01]: Remember, we saw a scene previously where he used a power core and the radiation from the power core to heal himself.

39:39 [SPEAKER_01]: That could happen again. [SPEAKER_01]: So don't worry, he's not dead, but we're not really sure what's going to happen with Norm. [SPEAKER_01]: Will he be turned into a super mutant? [SPEAKER_01]: What else could possibly happen? [SPEAKER_01]: Being a prisoner of these vault tech people who have no idea what the world is like yet.

39:55 [SPEAKER_01]: and what's going to happen with Lucy? [SPEAKER_01]: I think what they're setting up here is the fact that the school will be incapable of taking her back to the vault, so Hank will have no choice other than to bring her to him. [SPEAKER_01]: And the scene that we haven't seen yet with the school and Maximus and Thadius approaching the gates in order to go into the strip again or deal with the death clause [SPEAKER_01]: It is them coming together in order to fight the death clause to get back to wherever Lucy is being held to try to rescue her.

40:30 [SPEAKER_01]: I have a feeling that that is the big climactic scene of the season. [SPEAKER_01]: So there you go, those are my thoughts so far. [SPEAKER_01]: All the things I remember to bring up, I'm sure I will have other thoughts today and other things that come up that I'll want to clarify in the next episode.

40:44 [SPEAKER_01]: So make sure you stay tuned for that. [SPEAKER_01]: And as always, if you have any thoughts about any of the stuff we've seen so far or you have a counterpoint to one of my points with some really interesting evidence, absolutely let me know, comment on the episode or better yet. [SPEAKER_01]: Join us on the robots radio discord.

40:59 [SPEAKER_01]: There's a link in the description and in the main description of the show as a whole or just search robots radio discord. [SPEAKER_01]: You'll find a link on Google. [SPEAKER_01]: That's the best place because the spoiler section on our discord has been so busy lately. [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody with their theories and their different thoughts and their perspectives and on top of it.

41:16 [SPEAKER_01]: It is such a wonderful community. [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody is so polite. [SPEAKER_01]: And even when we disagree with things, we do it in kind of an academic way, where there's no personal attack. [SPEAKER_01]: It's more of a, well, that's interesting, but what do you think about this sort of way?

41:27 [SPEAKER_01]: It's the best discord on the internet as far as I've concerned. [SPEAKER_01]: But I'll be back in a second. [SPEAKER_01]: We gotta go think our patrons don't go anywhere. [SPEAKER_01]: This show wouldn't be possible without our patrons. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for your continued support.

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42:15 [SPEAKER_01]: I think it'll be 7 by that week plus where we think the seasons going to end and maybe we'll do some fun predictions and we'll see if any of our patrons can nail the ending. [SPEAKER_01]: That'll be super fun. [SPEAKER_01]: Also, if you'd like [SPEAKER_01]: like to help out in other ways, leave a five star review or a comment, a positive comments and reviews are extremely helpful.

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