Cooper: “Says who?”
Sheriff Troy: “The Govermint!”
After a shamefully long hiatus, 2024 is finally over and I return to Doux Reviews to finish writing some long-overdue reviews. I figure I had better before Amazon wraps up filming the second season.
‘The Trap’ is where a lot of the as-yet disconnected dots in Fallout begin to link up. We get more ominous hints about the Vaults and the agenda behind them. We learn some things about the enigmatic villainess, Moldaver. And we see some new conflicts emerge within our three wasteland wanderers.
Vault 4
As expected, Vault 4 is not what Lucy imagined. While friendly, many of the residents are mutants or just plain strange; their Overseer is an eccentric but upbeat cyclops played by Chris Parnell. Maximus doesn’t find the mutations strange, but he is suspicious and wary of their cult-like behavior.
Amusingly, they trade perspectives in the middle of the episode. Lucy picks up on the weirdness and tries to figure out what these new Vault-dwellers are hiding, while Max is easily won over by the Vault's luxuries, such as hot showers, fresh clothes and TV with popcorn; his reaction to eating caviar for the first time was especially funny.
What really clues Lucy in on the not-rightness of these Vault-dwellers is when they — or, at least, the ones who were survivors of Shady Sands — turn out to be worshippers of Lee Moldaver, the woman who attacked Vault 33 and took her father. This prompts her to investigate Vault 4’s forbidden level, where she discovers the residents are keeping women in some form of suspended animation. Before we learn what any of this is about, Lucy gets apprehended.
Not sure what this weird, horny, fire-worshipping cult is about either, but the real questions it raises all have to do with Moldaver, whom they refer to as "The Flame Mother." And the answers appear to lie in the Ghoul’s storyline.
The Govermint
We find the Ghoul where we last left him, or rather some enforcers for a local tyrant do. While he contends with this makeshift “govermint” in the present timeline, the past shows Cooper Howard just beginning to feel the old world slip away.
After starring in an ad for the newly made Vault 4, a few of Cooper’s friends in the entertainment industry make him see the growing divisions in America, as well as a homegrown threat that goes beyond the Cold War. That threat being Vault-Tec.
Cooper is reluctant to buy into this. One, because it’s a message supported by blacklisted communists. Two, because his wife Barb works for Vault-Tec. He believes in her, but even she can’t hide the company’s sketchiness. Especially not after he's introduced to one of Barb's colleagues, Bud Askins, a smarmy and cheerfully amoral execuutive who used to work for the futuristic defense contractor West-Tek. And it’s this mounting evidence of sketchiness that gets Cooper to finally humor the communist movement railing against the company that claims to have America's best interests at heart.
A communist movement that turns out to be led by none other than Lee Moldaver, over 200 years in the past.
This was a surprise. Not that there are people from the old world who found a way to make it to the present, but that she’s one of them. Though, clearly she found a cleaner way of doing it than Cooper and the ghouls did. This reveal adds context to her attack on Vault 33 in the first episode. Her beef with the Vaults goes way back.
So it seems Lucy and the Ghoul might both have a score to settle with Moldaver. But who will reach her first?
Caps and rads:
* No Vault 33 in this episode.
* I found it kind of amusing how Walton Goggins seems to project Rod Serling a little bit in the Vault 4 ad. I imagine Serling would be appalled by something like Vault-Tec.
* Very gnarly detail when the “bullet” pulled from Maximus’s gunshot wound turns out to be a rotten tooth.
* The phone number included in the ad for Vault 4 is apparently one viewers can actually call. All you get on the other line is the sound of a person screaming in terror.
* The flashbacks to Cooper’s pre-war past are interesting, because it’s not something you really see in the games; besides Fallout 4, that is. I like the contrast between the opulent retrofuturistic 2070s and the blasted wasteland of 2096. This is a franchise that really puts into perspective how far off the rails mankind can go.
* One of the movies Cooper Howard starred in was called ‘A Man and His Dog.’ A big inspiration for the Fallout series was the Harlan Ellison story, A Boy and His Dog.
* Glenn Fleshler plays Booker Sorrel, the President of the local "govermint" and another old acquaintance of Cooper's. He spends his little bit of screentime sitting at a table, eating irradiated meat and spitting the cysts it contains into a metal bucket.
* Matt Berry as the voice of the Mr. Handy robots is some serendipitous casting.
* I loved hearing the Fallout: New Vegas theme when Lucy sees the two-headed bear flag of the New California Republic. That music takes me back.
* Lucy awkwardly but politely unzipping her jumpsuit a few inches in solidarity with the stripped down Vault cultists was another funny detail.
Quotes:
Cooper Howard: “And now you can be a hero, too. By purchasing a residence in a Vault-Tec vault today. Because if the worst should happen tomorrow, the world is gonna need Americans just like you to build a better day after.”
Bud Askins: "The future of all humanity comes down to one word... Management."
Sebastian Leslie: “Listen to me, Hollywood is the past. Forget Hollywood. The future, my friend, is products. You’re a product. I’m a product. The end of the world is a product. And for those of us who can successfully embrace that, I’d say the future is golden.”
Maximus: “… You smell good.”
Lucy: “What? Oh… You wanna have sex?”
Maximus: “… You mean use my cock?”
Lucy: “… Yeah.”
Hilarious conversation. Also, not really a surprise that the Brotherhood of Steel gets an F in sex-ed.
Overseer Benjamin: “Uh, oh, and if you’re unfamiliar with how the bathrooms work, just ask. Asking is less embarrassing than getting it wrong. Trust me. We’ve had incident after incident with newcomers.”
Barb Howard: “I need this job, Coop. It guarantees a spot in the vaults.”
Cooper: “We got money. We can buy a spot in the vaults.”
Barb: “One of the good vaults.”
Cooper: “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Oh-ho-ho, do not open that can of worms.
Charlie Whiteknife: “Vault-Tec is a trillion dollar company that owns half of everything. And after ten years of war, the U.S. government is broker than a joke. The cattle ranchers are in charge, Coop.”
Birdie: “How about you sleep in a room of your own tonight? Have a hot shower. Nothing wrong with a little bit of comfort.”
Maximus: “Um, when you say ‘hot shower,’ what does— what does that mean, exactly?”
Cooper/The Ghoul: “Oh… you a president now?”
Sorrel Booker: “Don’t see why not.”
He's got a point, considering the standards America sets for itself.
Cooper/The Ghoul: “Now, if you need any more evidence, I can tell you about this town I just shot up, Filly. Oh, I must have killed nine or ten people.”
Troy: “My daddy lives in Filly.”
Cooper/The Ghoul: “Well, not no more he don’t, unless he’s a coward.”
Maximus: “They gave me a robe. And slippers.”
The delivery here. Chef's kiss!
Three and a half out of five post-apocalyptic sex cults.
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