Genre – Drama Series
Movie Total Runtime – 7 Hours 31 Minutes
Spoilers – Yes

I have to give credit to the continuity folks. It’s the little things, and they typically add up. Things like the amount of jerky hanging from the Ghoul’s pack as they travel going down. Things like gear condition deteriorating. Though I have to dock the production staff points for the Super Duper Mart not looking like a grocery store. And then the corpse left in the open supposedly for two years not being decomposed enough. Okay, I get that the people making these props were probably asked for an old corpse, and not specifically for a corpse that had been out in the open at room temperature for two years. Some of the corpses better fit the time frame, but others look like they ran out of custom corpses and picked whatever the special effects house had in stock. But I’m in a nitpicky mood.

Why? Because the series is committing the cardinal sin of being mediocre. If it were good, I could go “I was wrong they did a good job,” while enjoying the content. If it was bad, I could go on a cathartic rant at all the ways it sucked. But it is being just medicore.

Needing chems, the Ghoul sells Lucy to an organ farm where she gets in a fight with a medical robot and eventually shocks it with a defibrillator. This scene is a godsend for my nitpickiness. While they did name drop the General Atomics company as the makers of this model robot, they avoided the brand name of Mr Handy – I wonder why. Then we get two examples of “That does not work that way” in a single shock. The paddles for correcting arrhythmia give a single sharp pulse to jolt the heart back into proper cycle. The one in the show is depicted as giving off a sustained electrical discharge of protracted duration. The second problem is that Lucy placed the paddles on either side of a metal housing around a circular saw at the end of a long appendage that stuck out from the body of the robot. A body that is floating by means of a small rocket or jet on its underside. So not only was the robot not grounded, the electricity would cross from paddle to casing to paddle without reaching any vital components. Indeed, since the robot has an all-metal casing, there was nowhere on the exterior that these paddles would have done anything to the internals.

I feel better having gotten to nitpick something.

Lucy does understand enough to repurpose the robot to threaten the organ harvesters and release their captives. She unfortunately insists that they release their captive feral ghouls too. This makes sense from a character perspective. Lucy knows nothing of the wasteland, even though the organ harvesters try to warn her, she won’t hear of it. What is a feral ghoul? If you recall in an earlier installment I mentioned that ghoul minds deteriorate over time. Well, when they’re gone, the ghoul goes feral – a mindless creature which will attack and feed on any living thing other than other ghouls it comes upon.

Oops.

The organ harvesters end up dead and Lucy is forced to kill a feral to not be eaten herself. Since she still doesn’t grasp the reality that once feral a ghoul can’t be regarded as human anymore, she is more than a little traumatized at this.

While Lucy is learning the harsh realities of the wastes, the vault dwellers back in Vault 33 have to figure out what to do with their prisoners. Not sure how they ended up with prisoners, but they need to deliver plot dialog to Lucy’s brother about Vault 32 not being what they think it is. So Lucy’s lover-cousin and her brother (two people, have to be clear on that with the levels of consanguinity in Vault 33) dig out enough of the collapsed tunnel to Vault 32 that Raider Queen left by to investigate. there they find two-year dead corpses and signs that the residents lost it killing each other and/or themseves while writing in blood on the walls. The gasp, shock, info found on the overseer’s terminal is that the Raiders got in using Lucy’s mother’s Pip Boy (a personal arm-mounted computer worn by vault residents).

At the end of the episode, Lucy finds the Ghoul collapsed from lack of the drugs. She drops some by his hand before walking away. It is revealed that these particular drugs are anti-feral medication, something previously nonexistent in the series. Though on balance, I am not opposed to the idea that someone managed to develop an anti-feral drug for ghouls.

Episode 4 ends with Lucy following the tracker she’d planted in the severed head of Enclave Scientists and the Ghoul watching an old movie of his on the organ harvesters’ couch. Credit where credit is due, the actual composition of Episode 4 was an improvement as they let the scenes run the necessary duration to tell the story, and the Vault 32 environment was well constructed. Demerit where demerit is due – all of the scenes with the pregnant cyclops woman were cringe. (Okay, the character lost her eye during the raider attack, she isn’t an actual cyclops).

I don’t think Maximus showed up in Episode 4, so they start Episode 5 with him and Squire Dude in a sequence which had me cringing, and I can’t fully pin down why. They do redeem the scene when, after Maximus reveals to Squire Dude that Titus is actually dead and it’s been him, Squire Dude does not want to help him lie to the Brotherhood. In the fight that follows, Squire Dude outwits Maximus, removes the power core from his armor and limps away with the head. (Maximus had managed to stomp on Squire Dude’s ankle during the fight.) If I am uncharitable to the writers, I suppose we’re meant to feel sympathy for Maximus because after the scenes of bonding with Squire Dude, he’s betrayed by this new friend. In context, however, I’m entirely with Squire Dude in going “The Brotherhood is going to kill you, and I’m not going to get myself killed lying to them.” So, Maximus might be feeling betrayed, but he is a dumbass who needs to think more.

Being immobilized by the loss of the power core, Maximus is swarmed by Radroaches, but Lucy shoots them off. I am questioning why Lucy is at Maximus’ location instead of following the tracker in Enclave Scientist’s Head. They do eventually say that she was simply following that but the shiny power armor caught her attention. I had to delete my uncharitable rant at a perceived contrivance, and now I’m disappointed that I lost a rant. I do like to rant. I do wish it was either good enough to praise or bad enough to rant about.

Anyway, Maximus lies to Lucy and they team up to track down Squire Dude. Lucy tries to get caught up on events between the bombs falling and current day. But, Maximus is a dumbass and says the bombs fell when he was a kid. Clearly this is not the case, we saw the bombs fell, saw the 219 years later message, and Maximus is not a ghoul (the Brotherhood kills ghouls and doesn’t recruit them anyway). Hopefully this isn’t foreshadowing something stupid (or if it is I get to rant about it).

For some reason we’re still following events in Vault 33 as they hold an election for Overseer and continue to find ominous but inconclusive environmental storytelling in Vault 32. Lucy’s Brother does poke around in the computer and find out that all of the Vault 33 Overseers had come from Vault 31. I wonder if they have electoral integrity issues in Vault 33. I do have to nipick a problem with the computer graphics. They cut horizontal scan lines into the font used to make it look like a low resolution greenscreen CRT, but the edges and corners of the lettering is exceedingly sharp, making it clearly not the product of those scan lines, but a chopped up higher resolution font. I wouldn’t notice it if not for the fact that the show zoomed in really close to the text and filled the screen with the error.

Maximus and Lucy come upon Shady Sands in a scene purpose written to infuriate the fanbase as we find that the capital of the New California Republic is now a nuclear crater. This was the ‘bombs fell’ Maximus was talking about. For those unfamiliar, the NCR was founded between the first and second games by people saved by the player in the first game, and remained a major faction through to New Vegas, with no sign of imminent nuclear collapse. Well, in any game on the west coast, its borders never extended further east than the Colorado River, so the east coast games didn’t have the NCR as a faction. Probably why Todd “It Just Works” Howard let them trash the place. It wasn’t a Bethesda creation, so he had no attachment to it, but the fans did.

From their game design, Todd and Bethesda can’t get past this “Five minutes after the apocalypse” mindset despite centuries in canon. The NCR was “We have begun rebuilding and clearing the rubble for a new future.” Far too optimistic, clearly.

Back with the Vaulties, someone has done a bang up job of cleaning the corpses out of Vault 32, making it look as though nothing happened. Since the only option is Vault 31, we know who dunnit.

Back in the ruins of Shady Sands, our twin dumbasses literally fall into a Vault. I’ve played enough of Fallout 1 to know there was no Vault under Shady Sands, which had been settled by people leaving the somewhat distant Vault 15.

… Outside, in the real world, somehow it seems my tax dollars went to fund this nonsense. A lot of times I skip the closing credits but for some reason I let them run and found that this show was supported by the New York Governer’s Office of Motion Picture and Television Development. It’s one thing when Amazon gets my money because I buy something from them. But it’s quite another when some useless *bleep* shovels it their way as an incentive. Moving on, lets try to get Episode Six into this article.

Episode 6 starts with an advert by the Cowboy showing off Vault 4. I had to pause and laugh when he knocked on a wall, we clearly heard the sound of sheet metal being tapped, and he claimed it was three foot thick lead casing. I can’t tell if this was meant to be a lie in the ad or a goof by the show proper. Well, after more flashbacks to pre war times, the Ghoul finally wakes up in the Organ harvesters base. He gets picked up by some people cosplaying as Sheriffs.

Over in Vault 4, the local vaulties patch up our pair of dumbasses and we are introduced to the actual cyclops, who is for some reason the overseer. We find out that more and more of the vaulties are mutants of some form or another.

In more flashbacks we find that the person I’d dubbed Craft Services Woman actually works for Vault-Tek and knows about the experiments. One of the Cowboy’s former coworkers begins spouting commie conspiracy theories, and invites the Cowboy to a meeting about how evil Vault-Tek is. In a later conversation between the Cowboy and the Craft Services Woman, they had a rather short discussion about personal freedom versus the options for survival in case of nuclear war. On one hand I want to give credit that neither side was explicitly presented as explcitly correct in the minds of the show. On the other hand, I find it sad that what used to be the norm in writing is now a mark of cudos. The result was that they came off as simply human.

In the next scene they promptly burn all of that goodwill in the dialog between Lucy and the cylopean overseer. The Overseer is written like a caricature and Lucy is, well, a dumbass. Maximus goes looking for a new power core for his armor. The writers are trying to give Vault 4 ‘Stepford’ vibes, but they’re overdoing it and it’s not getting the effect they want. I’m wondering if they did indeed divvy up the writing between different teams with different skill levels. During this time with Lucy and Maximus in Vault 4, we hit one of the major continuity problems for fans. In the classroom there is a timeline which shows key points of the timeline of Shady Sands, ending with “The Fall of Shady Sands” in 2277 with an arrow pointed at a musroom cloud. Now, we know they nuked the town for this series, but New Vegas takes place in 2281, and the NCR was a major faction in that game. There was no indication that anything was wrong in Shady Sands, much less a fresh nuclear crater. Some online folks have argued that the “fall” was not the nuking. Looking at the timeline, I can’t agree with these internet apologists. The timeline is definately implying that Shady Sands got nuked in 2277. From a timeline perspective, you could argue that would make Maximus too old to still be just barely a squire with his age at time of nuking plus nineteen years. But Maximus is kinda slow on the uptake, and the actor looks old enough for that timeline to fit.

The next few sequences are quickly intercut, long story short, the Sherif Cosplayers don’t fare so well, the Ghoul finds a wanted poster for the Raider Queen in their station, and indicates some past connection with her. The surface dweller contingent of Vault 4 has a rather disturbed ceremony worshipping an icon of the Raider Queen. And in the past, the Cowboy arrives at the conspiracy meeting to run into someone who from juxtaposition I infer we are supposed to take to the the same Raider Queen.

Freaked out by the ceremony, Lucy goes to Maximus and insists they have to leave. She does the infuriating thing where a fictional character doesn’t just tell the other what they witnessed. Instead she goes to the forbidden level of the Vault to find ‘proof’ that they are hiding something. Like weird blood rituals and mutants aren’t reason enough to move along. On the forbidden level Lucy finds evidence of weird biological experimentation along with cryotubes full of pregnant women. Of my guesses as to what was going on… that was not one of them.

Just under 2,500 words, time for a “to be continued.”