The Ringer-Verse - ‘Fallout’ Season 2 Finale Reactions (and Interviews!) | Button Mash

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Welcome to the Wasteland—and farewell, for now! Ben Lindbergh and Van Lathan reunite, hug, and hold hands as they discuss the eighth and last episode of 'Fallout' Season 2, "The Strip." First, they share their thoughts on what a season finale should accomplish and whether they found "The Strip" satisfying. Then they catch up with the core characters one more time, break down the hardest-hitting emotional moments, and discuss several loose ends before speculating on the direction of the series in Season 3. After that, Ben chats with 'Fallout' cocreator and co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet about the finale and the future of the show. Finally, Ben brings on the lead creative designer of 'Fallout: New Vegas,' Obsidian Entertainment creative director John Gonzalez, to talk about how the show handled its source material, the potential and peril of game adaptations, and the finer points of storytelling in open-world games. Email us at [e-mail]! Intro (0:00)Review of the finale (2:14)The Ghoul and House (15:20)Coop and Barb (23:27)Maximus (26:58)Lucy and Hank (35:20)The Vaulties (56:13)Post-credits scene (1:02:37)Interview with Geneva Robertson-Dworet (1:11:19)Interview with John Gonzalez (1:21:20)Outro (1:54:11) Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Van Lathan, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and John GonzalezProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone, it's Amy Polar, and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang. In preparation for that, I asked some of my friends to send in some videos and give me some advice. Just be yourself, and the guests will come. Don't be the celebrity that this is their, like, sixth thing they're doing. I love true crime and cooking podcasts. Is there any way you could combine the two? Well, everyone has an opinion and a podcast. So, join me for Good Hang. It's rough out there. We're just trying to lighten it up a little. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.

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doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trimfaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Trimfairadio.com. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business. Fast, reliable internet means everything for your business. And even this podcast, that's why I trust Spectrum Business to keep companies of all sizes connected with internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, mobile services, plus 24-7 US-based support. Millions of business owners already trust Spectrum Business. So visit Spectrum.com slash business to learn more. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. and welcome into the ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor at the Ringer and Kaiser of Buttonmash. Lindberg, the Unifier, is dead. Lindberg, the destroyer, is born. And back to talk you through the finale of Fallout season two,

just like House talks the ghoul through the management vault. And like the ghoul, I bet on hope. And I won, even bigger than he did, because I've been searching all this time, And I found who I was looking for. Stepping out of the cryopod, feeling frosty, it's Van Lathen. Hello, Van. I am so happy to be back.

I have been on the 200-year journey to find truth, to find my tribe, and it led me here to you, Ben. So happy to have you. Don't even have to go all the road of Colorado to track you down. We are here to talk about Fallout Season 2, Episode 8, The Strip, directed by Fred Toy and written by Carrie Dornetto. And after I talk to you, I got two more people to talk to because Fallout co-creator and co-showrunner, Geneva Robertson, Dwarret, will be stopping by for a brief chat. And then I'll be talking to video game legend John Gonzalez, the creative design lead and lead writer of Fallout New Vegas and the man who made up Robert House and Caesar's Legion about how he thinks this season handled everything from the game. Some ups, some down, some highs, some lows. So a packed podcast about a packed episode of Fallout.

And as always, let's start with our review. Van, what did you think? What's your verdict on the finale? Very, very strong finale. Okay. All right. Had a lot of work to do. Yeah.

Leaving us with two big cliffhangers, really three, that were going to sing the song of our characters in a very direct way. You know, you had to get that song right, right pitch, right tone. I was left pretty satisfied where Coupe where Maximus But they're back together Maximus Luzzi back together Yeah that's the important thing

I felt pretty satisfied Where all the characters ended up Now if there was A criticism is that I wonder, and I want to ask you this How you're feeling right now With the Moore Story finale It used to be

television of old that what these shows would do was they would wrap up a pretty significant storyline in one season and then start another one in the first episode

of the next season. Take the Sopranos for a second, right? Yeah, yeah. If you looked at the Sopranos, there'd be a new character that would come into the show and that character would be in some relation to Tony, a character dies or, you know, is incarcerated or something, then at the start of the next season, there's sort of a new thing for Tony to do.

Now, those stories are constructed a little bit different than Fallout. Fallout can't do that because you can't save this world, really. You can't, there's nothing you can do but continue to search for answers inside of it. That sometimes does leave you in a finale going, okay, Coop didn't get his wife and his daughter. He got another clue about where they are. So ending, same as the beginning. Yeah, I kind of missed the semi-self-contained finale followed by the reset.

I think I'd say about this finale, what I'd say about the season as a whole, which is that most of the stuff centered on the three leads, Lucy, Maximus, the ghoul, is great. Good emotional moments, heartbreaking, partings, heartwarming reunions, solid action. I was a little let down by the Death Claw Showdown last week, but this week more than made up for that. Some excellent lines, laugh lines, and dramatic ones. As for everything else, a little messy, little messy. Now, the leads, they're the emotional foundation of the show. They're occupying most of the screen time.

So that's the important thing. That's what you need to get right. And that's what Fallout does get right and what I think the finale mostly got right. that's sufficient for me to enjoy the series, to enjoy talking about it, to want to come back for more. That said, yeah, I've got some gripes because I do think people sometimes expect too much closure in season finale that aren't series finale. You know, this is not really landing the plane. This is just a mid-air refueling, or maybe it's a connecting flight you're grabbing. You know, it's not the end. It's not the destination. So I think it's fine for there to be loose ends and some

unresolved storylines. You don't have to tell me what Hank's grand plan is. The ghoul doesn't have to find his family. Thaddeus doesn't have to discover what he's turning into. We don't even have to find out if house is still alive in physical form. You can absolutely string us along on some stuff. That's part of why we keep watching. But there is a fine line, I think, where a finale doesn't feel final enough or it doesn't feel fulfilling. It feels like a stopping point. It feels like a stopping point. but not a natural ending point exactly. And that hurts more, I think, when you have eight episodes, and then you have to wait a year and a half or whatever it is.

And Fallout isn't even one of the worst offenders when it comes to the breaks between seasons. But we are getting a little less material than we used to when seasons were longer. And the breaks are longer too. And so I do want just sort of a slight fulfillment, just something that rewards the investment in the show that we've made this season alone. And I think there's some areas where the finale fell a little flat there. Were you satisfied with the final ending point of the journeys of the three characters? Do you feel like you got growth and evolution?

I mean, certainly from Lucy, right? She's almost like a different person. From Maximus, from the ghoul. Was there enough stuff that happened in the pre-wasteland era that was tied? up for you in the finale as well? Yes, I would say I'm pretty satisfied with the arcs of those characters. And yeah, the ghoul, you know, he sets off on a new journey at the end of this season instead of the start of next season.

That's okay. I think it's all the other subplots that the show has just been trying to find time for all season. And some of them come back into play here. You know, we haven't seen the Legion since episode three. The Legion comes back in a big way here. We haven't seen the Brotherhood since episode four. We haven't seen the NCR such as it was since episode four.

And they're back to, they're stronger again. Stronger than ever. Yeah. And I know that there were some teases, some hints that maybe there was actually some remnant of the NCR out there. But I imagine that took some people by surprise when they just suddenly show up in force in the nick of time. And, you know, this final episode is building up this NCR Legion battle.

but then we don't actually get the battle. We're just sort of setting the scene for that battle. All the stuff that's happening in the vault, the products of inbreeding support group where we're wondering all season, why are we spending so much time with these people? This finale did not offer an answer. They punted on that whole thing to me.

Yes, very much so. Or either they felt like they ended it with the wedding last episode, but the whole, I guess it's the C plot of the season. Yeah, D, E, F, I don't know. E, F, they punted on the whole thing. Yeah, yeah.

And the wedding, that's a different vault entirely. Totally, yeah, right, totally different vault. A quick check-in on that one. But Reg and his crew, I assume that will come back into play at some point. But given that we were questioning and wondering all season long, why are we spending so much time with these people? And now we're still waiting and wondering to find out. House didn't have a whole lot to do here in this finale. You know, we don't see.

Moldaver, aka Kate, anymore. Maybe we're not seeing anymore. Remember the super mutant who just came in for some exposition and to tell us about the enclave a couple episodes ago, you know, that'll have to wait for whenever Norm, not much happens with norm in this episode. So there's a lot there that is just kind of left lying. And I assume that those threads will be picked up and probably knitted together at some point in season three or beyond.

But it's a little frustrating, I guess, to. have spent all that time with some of those storylines and still be waiting to find out why. Also, no big twist, no big surprise in the finale. Not that I think of this as that twisty a show, but even something on the order of, say,

finding out the depths of Hank's depravity in the season one finale. Nothing that happened here particularly surprised me, I guess. But, yeah, all the stuff surrounding that core trio really hit home. And that's enough to make it work for me.

It's just, I guess my note for next season is either pare it back a bit, all the other stuff, or just go in on it more because somehow it just felt a little like too much or not enough. I don't know which, but it felt kind of caught in the middle when it came to all that ancillary stuff and all the world building that surrounded our heroes or anti-heroes here. Hank ended up feeling for me like a kind of strangely... he's a very important character. Obviously, he's one of the most important characters. But this finale, he kind of didn't treat him like one.

Kind of like a broken down, mute, like useless Obi-Wan in a way. Luke's kicking your ass now. You've been completely depowered. But you strike him down. He becomes more powerful than you could possibly imagine. You could possibly imagine. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Only a master of evil, Darth, calls him by his ceremonial. because that definitely wasn't meant to be his first name. Anyway, so it calls by his title, which I guess can make sense. So, you know, I think I expected this to be a heavier Hank and House episode. The communication between House and Coop

and the Wasteland version, Kube, the Gould, I think I expected that to give me more information about what was supposed to happen. I know that that gets him, two, his wife and his daughter, or at least the cryogenic sleep pot where they were being held, by the time we got there, I knew they weren't going to be in there. I did not think that they would be in there. Yes.

Because I was thinking, what would them be being in there mean? I was feeling, like, sort of nervous for him. Because if his wife pops out of that thing, she looks at him, it's going to be tough. Yeah. So, so, so, so, so I was. was feeling slightly nervous for him. Yeah, because we talked back on our pot about the first episode, I think,

about what happens if he finds them? Is he the dog who catches the car? If he finds his family, what will he do then? Where do you go from there? So yeah, by that point, with a few minutes left in the episode, you kind of figured it's going to be a Mario moment. It's going to be his princesses are in another castle

and we're going to be off on another phase of the quest. Don't get me started on that shit. You know, there are times in my life where I question my own intelligence. One of them is my first time spinning through Mario before I knew about the warps and stuff. So, you know, I'm going through the fucking game. I'm beating every fucking level trying to get to the end.

I want to get to the end of the shit. A lot of people just, like, running around. Like, my cousins didn't even like to play the game that much. They would, this is a tangent guy. Just spare with me. My cousin didn't even like playing the game. Vintage tangent. They like to, like, jack the turtle.

Do you know what that is? Yes. You jump on the turtle over and over and over again, and you fucking get like a million lives and it ended up stops counting the life. It's like a gold coin and like a life or something like that. I never even to this day,

I think that button mash, just, I'm almost glaring this plane. I think that button mash should have a series called How You Do That. Where y'all talk about like how you do some of the most impossible things in video game history. Like how you actually beat Mike Tyson.

I could never do it. Punch out. How you jack the turtle. How you do that. Like, Coy and them would just be on the fucking thing, jacking the turtle. Anyway. But I would try to, like, actually beat the game. And every time I got to the end, it'd be like, your princess is in the other castle.

I remember when I was first playing the game trying to get to the game, I'm like, yo, what the fuck's going on here? Like, what's going to happen? Yeah. Like, at what point in my mama would be watching me getting freaked out and be like, van, you got to keep playing. Be like, how long? How long do I have to keep playing? it's getting harder,

the world's getting different, and every time I beat somebody, it's not over. And one time my cousin come over, he's like, you don't even need to play these boys. I'm like, what? You don't even play these levels. You don't play these levels. Nobody plays these levels.

Beat Mario three minutes. Like, you know what I'm saying? He's just speed running it. Yeah. Speed running it. Like, you don't even need to play these levels. You get this, go here, boom, you get to the end, you beat them, it's open.

So, like, it is what it is. You'd be playing Mario and Luigi, you beat the game with Mario before Luigi even got his turn. So, but, so when I, when you say that now, it's triggering. You should have said it because now it's making me look at the finale totally different. Yeah, you do. You get some sense of accomplishment, though. You beat that boss.

You finish off that stage. Then you go to another world. And yeah, you have to start over. But there's a feeling of, okay, I did it. I made it through that. That was something. And then we start another adventure. So that's what you want.

I guess, in a season, but not series finale. But you do want to feel like a triumphant moment or like it's a natural point to cut things off until it comes back. And in some respects, I think this was and in others, not as much. Let's just go through it. We'll talk about the three leads,

and then we'll just wrap up some of the stray subplots here. So the ghoul and Kup, we'll talk about them, and then we'll talk about Maximus. We'll talk about Lucy. So the ghoul's at the Lucky 38. He and House are having a tete-a-tete. And House says my body became something of a target for wondering travelers with something to prove I've been poisoned shot bludgeoned with a crowbar. That's a reference to New Vegas and your playable character, the courier.

The ghoul agrees to leave the diode that's powering computerized house. If House will get him into the management vault, House agrees we have a deal, though the ghoul has to take the portable pit boy house with him. or not, Mr. Howard, House says, everyone works for me eventually. House really has an incredible capacity to praise himself for his foresight while also getting outmaneuvered constantly. Because he says, I was always one step ahead of Voltaic, whose impenetrable vault he has a back entrance into. But then a minute later, he says, I never fathomed. There could be someone one step ahead of me. So he's not the house after all. The enclave is, or as he calls them, Valtex investors. And Hank, he says, is one of their acolytes. The ghoul was their unwitting servant.

So really, everyone works for the enclave eventually. And that's a theme here that we are just continuing to build up the enclave as the big bad of the wasteland. How are you feeling about that? All these kind of sub bosses, mini bosses, you know, they're all just working for the enclave. You think house is bad. You think Hank is bad. They're just peons. They're just minions. They're just having their own strings pulled by the true baddie, the enclave. Yeah, a lot of a show like this is going to be about evolving alliances, which alliances dissolve and new ones that are made, but then also alliances that are new inside of themselves.

I guess that's the evolution portion of it. I wasn't sure what I wanted from House. like in this episode. I think I wanted to be some large secret to be uncovered. Something that would fundamentally change the way I look at the show or look at the goal.

That's kind of what didn't happen. Yeah. For me at least. There were cool things. You know, it's interesting to know that like shooting the diode would destroy the universe. Yeah.

Yeah. Now it's Chekhov's diode. We'll find out whether anyone blows up the whole planet. Yeah, cool little things to probably extend to other planets. I'm like, wow, it's very interesting right there. But, you know, I guess part of this show is Coop being in search of his humanity. He is in this place with sort of never-ending misery, never-ending despair and peril.

And it feels like a world of his own making to a degree. And so in tracking his past life, we track the failure that help lead to where he's in, where he's at right now. What I'm starting to wonder is what I want for the character. If finding his family is not that thing, does Coop literally have to save the world in order to undo his role in destroying it?

Or does he just have to save himself? Ideally, both, probably. He has a lot to make up for here. It's true. And I think probably on some level, he's driven to undo what he did and write that wrong, even if his primary goal is to find his family. But I think he still has a conscience in there.

And Lucy's conscience has rubbed off on him to some extent. So I assume he will have a larger mission and not just purely self-serving. or maybe in order to save his family, he has to not just find them, but also provide a place for them to live that is also safe, which means that he will have to take down the enclave or whoever is shadowy behind the scenes here, because otherwise they'd be hunting him and them down. So he says, quoting God and Gloria Gaynor and Popeye, I am what I am, house answers, is that what you'll tell your family if you find them? of course he doesn't find them yet they are not in the pods but a postcard from Colorado is Colorado was a good idea which is written in Barb's hand presumably a reference to Coop's line to her about how they should go not to Bakersfield but all the way to Colorado she woke up and went to Colorado and left him a clue that she's there yeah or she was never

in there but just left the fuck what that worked so she's never so she's never in there So if she never goes in there, she leaves the postcard, but then for her to be alive, she'd have to get into another cryo chamber, would she not? Yes, she would have to be frozen elsewhere, presumably. So if she's frozen elsewhere, she knew that she was going to Colorado to get frozen, or doesn't it make more sense that I was really thinking about this last night, Kalika got pissed off because I was asking her this question over and over again. She's like, man, I don't watch that show.

And I was like, would it make more sense that she woke up and left that postcard and went to Colorado, knowing that he would find it? Or does it make more sense that she put it in there before she took the big sleep in some other place? Yeah, either way, I guess it's putting a lot of faith in him to find her, to think that he's going to get into the management fault, which is supposed to be impervious. So I assumed that this postcard has just been sitting there for her. a couple centuries and that this was just kind of a decoy cryopods all along. It's not clear to me whether Hank knows that Barb and Janie aren't there.

You know, was that just an empty threat that he made to him earlier in the season about how he'd thaw them out and kill them or whatever? Or did he think they were there? You know, maybe Barb is trying to fool the enclave too, right? And so maybe she wanted Hank and the enclave to think that she's in one place, but actually she's in another place. Maybe there is some sort of safer secret vault. That was my presumption rather than she just got thawed recently and trekked out there.

And why would she even think that that Coop slash the ghoul was even still around at that point, right? Unless she had somehow heard about the ghoul and said that sounds like. I know it was cool. Yeah. I don't know. But, you know, I assume that she's peacefully sleeping somewhere too. Or who knows, maybe they're all ghouls. Maybe they'll just be one big, cool, happy family.

That'd be good because then he wouldn't have to have any awkwardness about the nose missing. But, you know, hopefully she likes him for him and can see below the surface. So House thinks that Kooke, Gould is going to be demoralized by this, going to be broken by this. He's been on this quest for centuries. He comes up to empty, but not quite. House says you're still living in a world of fiction, a world that isn't real. And the ghoul says you're wrong about that for the first time in 200 long-ass years. I know my family is alive.

Then he and dogmeat stride off into the sunset, or at least toward the Rockies. Although, as we know, the ghoul's golden rule of the wasteland is that thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time. So I'm guessing he's not going to arrive at the Rockies in the season three premiere. Stuff will happen. But before we leave him, let's just talk quickly about Kup in the past. So we see that de-aged Hank and Steph have gotten. engaged, a Vegas wedding, a Vegas engagement. They have fallen for each other quite quickly. We've seen how persuasive Steph can be. And Barb, as she and Cooper walking out of there, says,

am I crazy? Or did we just come out of Vegas a couple of winners? Not so fast, Barb, because they are not winners in this case. I still feel, by the way, like Coop and Barb patch things up too quickly. They just seem all good now. I mean, to me, I get that we understand why she was forced maybe to do the thing she did or that Kup could maybe understand why she did the thing she did for Janie's sake. But initially at least he seems appalled by that. You're just willing to massacre millions, billions for our daughter? I mean, I like her too, but that's a lot.

And now he seems to have very quickly come around as soon as she helped him out a little bit. So this felt a little too quick and neat for me personally. I kept waiting for another turn. Yeah, yeah. I was waiting for another turn that would maybe position this episode in a different way. Maybe they weren't on as good a turns as we thought they were. Maybe it's a double cross. Maybe it's a double cross and he learned something.

Maybe his goal is not going to be to find her. Maybe the daughter will be the only thing left. I kept waiting on something dynamic to make their relationship and the trajectory of it makes sense. But no, living, breathing, McGuffin that has a backstory. Kind of way it works. Yeah, even just a little lingering, okay, I think we can patch things up, but it's going to take me some time. You know, I got to get used to this idea. I just called you like the worst monster in history.

And then you come around and suddenly we're cool. Yeah. She has to pretend like she's still with the enclave. She has to do something. She has to put space between him and her in order to keep him safe and keep the daughter safe. There's a choice that she has to make. Either give him to us or we'll kill you both or kill all three of you. Like something that was a little bit that injected, like I said,

some type of dynamism into that whole situation never came now. Yeah, a bit abrupt, a bit too neat, unless there's another wrinkle coming. So suddenly the phones start ringing. The agents are closing in. Is this a hard line where Kup can jack out of the Matrix? Sadly, no, he is taken into custody by order of the House on American Activities Committee. Not Robert House, the congressional one. And presumably blacklisted. So we sort of anticipated this last week. This must be why he's working kids' birthday parties and not in a vault. and why he has to spirit Janie to safety on horseback. And actually back in the series premiere in that first scene before the bombs dropped, someone says one of the other parents, I think, at that party say that Coop is doing this instead of being a movie star because he's paying alimony. And I don't know whether that was true, but maybe, maybe they got a divorce to sell the innocence of Barb because he tells her what's been it all on me. you got to do this. We got to do what we're doing for Barb and sacrifices must be made.

So maybe they actually kind of play act parting. But, you know, House who's on the phone says, not my fault, don't play me. And he says they're far worse people than I, Mr. Howard, which is basically what Barb said to Coop as well. You know, and he didn't buy it at first because who could possibly be worse than Barb? But it's the enclave. It's always the enclave. They're the worst. They're worse than everyone.

So that takes us up to the present for poop and the ghoul. Meanwhile, Maxness, our man Max, he's squaring off with the death claw den while the freesiders hide inside and start betting on his survival and by extension, they're owned. That was a good bit, I think, them betting on whether he will be killed. And if he is, then they assume that they will also be killed, but it doesn't stop them from betting. Thaddeus, who just has bottle caps on bottle caps, says, I used to make my. money for a living, good line also. And this battle, this worked for me. It was, you know,

kind of inconsistent, I guess, in that in one scene, he's one-shadding these death clause with missiles and then the power armor, you can't depend on the power armor. It malfunctions and he's back to melee attacks and he's getting beat up. But we got Gore. We got, you know, I guess the death clause in traditional video game fashion are all approaching him one by one, just taking their turns very considerably instead of sort of swarming him. But this was more of a pull all the stops out and no holds barred battles. So I'm glad that last week was just a prelude because they've been building up the death claw confrontation all season. For sure. Here's a problem that I have with the death claw battle, the one by one thing. Okay. I have a big problem with this.

I always have. If you go back and watch the original Blade movie. Okay. There's some great martial arts in Remember back in the day when this came out, remember reading something that said, the Blade movie comes out just before the Matrix. They're existing in the same space, maybe a year before, something like that. And they're talking about the movie and all that stuff.

You're talking about like, you know, I remember somebody said, if you go back and watch this movie, you'll see fight scenes that are like just below the Matrix level. I always go back and watch that stuff. I'll watch the way the vampires would fight Blade. There's one specific scenes.

in the hall where the vampires are, Blades fighting two vampires. He's really fighting one vampire while the other vampire like flips their weapon around.

Like goes like this and stuff like that. And I'm like, they always take turns. Why don't you, why don't I just like go run up on blade? One of y'all hit them in the face and one of them,

yeah, hit him in the leg. Let's just see if that works. And it just bothers me whenever I see it. I always like for there to be a story reason that they can't rush him. If he would have shot a missile and it would have like destroyed their entrance and only one of them could get through at a time. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's like the Spartans. There's just a

little pass. Yeah. Right. Showrunners think of stuff like that. Because if not, Maximus is fucked if they all run at him at the same time. He's done. Yep. Right. I did like this battle though for a lot of reasons. Number one, they're scared. They are scared. Number two, watching him like he's in this powerful armor, but the endurance, his mental and physical endurance of enduring wave after wave after wave is literally a test of his heroism. This entire battle is a test of how long he can do this. And it's also, so that ends up becoming a test of the reason that he's doing it, right? You beat up one dude, you move on, you beat up two, you move on. But if you have to stand there and fight eight death claws, then jump out of your armor and take. And, you take it. And,

take up a shield and a spear and really commit to it, it just told you a lot about Maximus's character. And it was just a lot of fun. The man from the bear was in there talking his shit. Good to see the bear alumni get more work. Always. The appearance of the new NCR at the end was actually unexpected for me. Me too.

I didn't I expect that to happen? Yeah, there were a couple very timely saves in this episode. Obviously, the ghoul bails out Lucy just at the last second. And then we get the Deus X NCR here. And I was a little disappointed by it because I think my favorite moment of this scene was when Max leaves the armor. And he knows he's beaten. He knows he's doomed. But he's going to make that last stand anyway.

And he doesn't even really pick up a spear and a shield. He picks up a pool cue and a roulette table. So it's fitting for free size. and New Vegas, but also these aren't even really weapons. He's just making do with what he can. It's a pretty badass moment. And also, it inspires some of these self-interested freesiders to go help him. And it's very much, it's the Spider-Man 2 subway car scene, right?

That's what it is because it's all these bystanders and they're thinking this hero is just going to help them. And then know the common people have to help him out because they realize this is just a kid. He can't do it itself. and there's strength in numbers and we have to help him. And then that gets cut off because the NCR arrives right at that moment. Now that first shot, literally, when the NCR sniper takes out the death clause and you get that sort of slow motion view, that's taken directly from the opening cutscene of Fallout New Vegas. So that's a little bit of fan service for you. But Captain Rodriguez marches in with just this company of her compatriots who were out there somewhere after.

all and says, we got it from here. And, you know, I know that she had said that there were users out there. We don't know where they were. We don't know how they got separated for decades, why they couldn't contact each other. I assume that will be explained at some point. It's all a little convenient. And it did disappoint me just a bit because I was kind of caught up in the moment and Maximus being the hero and inspiring everyone else to kind of band together in the spirit of shady sands, and then the actual NCR comes along. So I don't know. That just felt a little too conveniently times for me.

I also was not expecting it. I guess there were some hints it was sort of set up, but we hadn't even seen these people or really had reason to think of them for most of the season, you know, or at least half the season. So that's another case where it's like things were just kind of disappearing from view and coming back into vision. And we just haven't seen them because there just was not enough screen time. to really lavish on all of these factions and subplots.

Was there enough screen time for the audience or yourself to be, do we have even enough of a sense of their identity to be elated that they're there? To say, oh, the New California public's here. That's meaningful. Or is it only meaningful in the service of saving Maximus from certain death? Well, we saw that when he rode in with his power armor and everyone took him to be the NCR, they were celebrating the return of celebration, right, civilization is back embodied by Maximus. So between that and his happy memories of Shady Sands, which was part of the NCR, I guess there's

enough there for us to understand that this is good. They're bringing order back. The nasty Legion is coming. There's going to be a big battle. But it was pretty brief, just the amount of time that we spent with those factions in this season compared to, say, the game. And how it just, sort of simplistic the depictions of them were because it's just kind of good versus evil, I guess, you know, Legion bad, NCR good, not really a lot of gray to it, not that there was any time to show that. So yeah, that fell a little flat for me. Again, maybe they'll build it up. But if a big storyline in season three is now like still being in New Vegas and NCR versus Legion, I don't know that they set that up adequately for me to really be excited about seeing it here on screen.

But it comes back in a big way, that's for sure. But I like that Maximus, you know, he's like, he's been trying on all these different armors, right? Whether it's actual armor or just figurative armor, you know, kind of putting on the persona of the badass soldier or actually wearing the power armor. And I like that he just fully embraced himself as who he is as the hero. when he stepped out of that armor. And he seems to be okay with delegating, leaving it up to the NCR from here. So let's talk about Lucy,

which will lead us back to Maximus. So Lucy picks up where we left off. She's heading into the brain frame. She sees poor Congresswoman Welch, who pleads for death and for her to stop Hank, despite Lucy's half-hearted hope that we can patch you up, which is classic Lucy, just waiting into a clearly unsalible situation.

and saying, yeah, well, we can take care of this. I enjoyed that. The head was actually sort of genuinely disturbing to me. That was creepy. I hate. Yeah. Like the eyes, the dead eyes. Yeah.

You have this tendency to do things when you see somebody in that situation as a character to put yourself in that position and just like, or even if you're looking at that, it sucks. Yeah. And Lucy's presented with another dilemma here. She says, why does everybody always? want me to kill them all the time. And again, she takes a life, not for the first time in this season, if you can call what the Congresswoman is doing, living at this stage. This is more of a

mercy killing. But she does go ahead with it when maybe at the start of the season, maybe she wouldn't have. Maybe she actually would have kept her alive out of some misguided sense of wanting to help and actually doing more damage that way. She does it. And then Hank is not pleased. by that. Hank explains that he was using Welch to add a little personality to House's product, the automated man, so we sort of get some insight into how this was working. He goes into a spiel about personality test, very middle management, says that Diane was ISTP on the old Myers-Briggs scale, introverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving, although the thinking doesn't seem to be all that helpful here. He says, ideal personality to scale with the kind of attributes we could stand to see more of

there in the world if you ask me well-meaning sweet non-threatening and so she says well why would you do that to her and he says well daddy's job is complicated sweetie which i say to my daughter sometimes though not when she walks in on a living disembodied head in my room so i don't know we still don't know i guess exactly what the deal with the congresswoman is we were speculating about this last week is she some sort of double agent herself trying to entrap do-gooders and she's actually working for the enclave and they just decided she was more useful this way? Or did they actually hate her because she was trying to do good and stop them? And this is the way that they're making her pay.

I guess either way, it works. You know, like they'll just use you whether you're ostensibly on their side or not. But it seems like there was some reason to keep her alive, though, because you could torture and kill her if you're making her pay. But if there's something, you know, special about her or, some knowledge base that she has or even something that's useful. The energy, the, I guess, like, you know, there's resources involved in keeping her alive. There's a bunch of stuff. Like, why do you do it? Yeah, she's got her. That was the question.

Her beverages, her refreshments. Right. That was the question I was looking to, I was looking for an answer to, should I say. Yeah. It's like, what's the purpose of keeping her alive this entire time? I'm like, what is the enclave getting out of that? What's, what's Hank's reason for being into that? Like, why? And you kind of didn't get that. At least I don't feel like we did. No.

Yeah, I guess, you know, he thinks that it makes the machines, the drones more docile or peaceful or whatever. And so it's good to kind of pattern their brainwaves after her or something along those lines. Yeah, but I don't know if she was actually good all along. And this is sort of the ultimate torture and punishment for her to, make her against her will serve the interests of the enclave, or whether they just betrayed her because that's what the enclave does. Either way, pretty gruesome and glad that Lucy took care of business there.

So we know that this was the plan. Lucy asks, though, what's your end game with all of this? As if Hank will reveal that in season two. But we do know that he has miniaturized the automated man device. And then one of the creepiest, just most haunting line deliveries here, he says, other than the little scar on the neck, Hank very creepily says, you'll be my little girl again. And we understand that he means to implant the chip in Lucy. She comes to that realization too. She says, you're insane.

And then maybe my favorite line in this episode, you don't mean that. And if you do very soon, you won't. It's just tort of force for Kyle McLaughlin here. because he still just, he plays so well just the, like, caring dads. He does love Lucy on some level. And yet he is just so twisted and so sadistic and so amoral. But he sells it, you know? You can kind of almost see why she still wants to believe that there's good in him,

even if he's pretty, pretty terrible to the core. Yeah, it's interesting how the show deals with mutation. This world is a mutated version of itself. The goodness of the vault dwellers is a mutated version of that. Right. They're pleasant, like hyper pleasant, or at least they weren't when we met them. They're hyper pleasant, but they're not, their core isn't, it's not rooted in anything that we orient our society around now.

So it's this artificial sort of, uh, weird version of that. And then him as a father, right, like his fatherhood, he is essentially doing the thing that, or staying connected to the thing that parents are connected to at the beginning of the life of the kid. Which is that, like, you know, I'll speak for my upbringing because I feel like in the quiet languages,

this might be different. But, like, early on, you don't get to, you might. get to have a personality, but you don't really get to robustly in any way question your parents or have conversations about them in the world. The chip is in your neck, but it's in your neck emotionally and psychologically. Yeah. Right. Lucy is essentially growing up because she's doing what all kids do, except she's doing it at like 30. She's questioning her parents, I think we've talked about this before, questioning her parents' ethics, and breaking free of them. Her breaking

free of what her parents or in this case parent want her to do is decidedly high leverage. It's a lot more high leverage than staying out past your curfew or, you know, all of that stuff. So even when he says that, he's trying to infantilize her in a way to bring her back to the age where he basically says something. She believes it's right and good because he's her father. but the reason why he's doing that is not to create this artificial bond of parent and kid, it's to legitimately hold on to control of this entire world. It's an interesting examination into parenthood. Yeah, he has kind of turned all of the wastelanders into his children in a way.

You know, just brainwash them. And now he wants to turn Lucy into one of them too. And yeah, I guess it's not, well, it's a little unlike how everyone you grow up and your parent, your guardian, you realize that they're fallible. They're just people trying to do their best or hopefully trying to do their best and they're flawed and they make mistakes. And sometimes you actually do know better, but then sometimes they can't accept that. And then sometimes there's a battle over that before you kind of get through the adolescent years and maybe you can just interact as adults, hopefully on sort of the same level. So, yeah, I guess that's sort of exposing who these people actually are. It's kind of like with House we were talking about, it's a little letdown for House that he is built up into this just omniscient superpower.

And then, you know, a lot of his flaws and the holes in his knowledge are exposed. But maybe that's kind of a commentary, too, on some of the tech titans of today who maybe have an inflated sense of their own capabilities and are quite lacking in some respects. Kind of the show is saying that all you have to really do is try these guys And you'll find out the holes and the flaws in their philosophies. It's not even that they're impenetrable is that they've created such an insulation Such a how can I say this? They're not impenetrable they've just done such a good job in making us believe that they are Yeah

Like making someone believe that you are genius is much more important than actually being one, you know what I mean? Right. Yeah. So that's kind of the house thing. Yeah. It's kind of, yeah, talking a big game. It's like, you know, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

It's kind of a Wizard of Oz situation, maybe, at least in the show, if not in the game. So the ghoul gets there, impeccable timing, and he takes out the brainwashed guy who's manhandling Lucy. and gives poor Hank here just a bullet in the ass. And he says if it was up to me, it wouldn't be your ass bleeding out all over the floor. But it ain't up to me. Yeah. So this is very much the influence of Lucy, of course.

You know, before she started killing people at the start of the season, we were wondering, okay, Lucy's going to come to resemble the ghoul. The ghoul's going to come to resemble Lucy. Here we have Lucy doing the difficult thing, putting the congresswoman out of her misery. whereas the ghoul is going for the non-lethal, well, at least with Hank, if not for his henchmen, and leaving his fate up to Lucy and then piecing out, which, you know, I would have liked a little more time with those two just after everything they've been through. But, hey, they both have family stuff to sort out. I guess the bad thing is who knows when we'll see Lucy and the ghoul together again, right?

For all we know, just the pattern of this show, they might not get back together until the end of season three or something, right? and I enjoy their dynamics. So it would have been nice for them to catch up just a bit, but they're both on their way. They have business to take care of. So we get this kind of touching, I think, seen with Lucy and Hank. Hank who has this unactivated chip in his neck and he's trying to justify and rationalize. He says, I just wanted to make all this worthy of you. And he realizes that Lucy has hardened her heart.

We're not going back, are we? her season-long goal of bringing him back to the vault to face justice, not happening. Guess the surface changes a person, she says. And it took a while for her to change. Maybe it was overdue. But it has finally happened. She is a different person. She is a wastelander here, not a vault dweller anymore or some blend of both.

And Hank still trying to talk Lucy into stopping the Legion before they massacre everyone, just further his plan. She again says, I need you to tell me what you are really doing here. And then she says, then I'm going to turn you into the father I thought you were. And we get this shot of Hank's face. He looks almost proud to me. Because this is what he was going to do to her, right? Like he was going to turn her into the daughter that he thinks she used to be or that he wishes she was.

That's sort of what she's contemplating to here. She's just going to turn him into the nice guy that she thought he was. So, you know, maybe you have to become the bad guy to take out the bad guy. there's a little bit of that happening here, right? Yeah, I mean, I think he's, like, a lot of parents, not all parents, a lot of parents become really proud of their kids. It's kind of grotesque a little bit. When they see themselves in the kid, you know, like, you're me.

And so he probably appreciates the fact that she basically echoed exactly what he said, but she's going to do it in her way. Look, she's a savage just like her puppy. just like Daddy Do you know what I wanted to ask you about? Yeah. Wouldn't have been interesting if Lucy and Maximus

added one to their party and they added Hank to it? Ooh. Wouldn't it be? I, as the episode was winding down, I was trying to figure out how it was going to go. I was like, if they're looking for the enclave, if they're looking for the real people who run this,

what if it's now dog me, Maximus, Lucy, the ghoul, and Hank. And they're on their way to Colorado or whatever like that. That's halfway what I thought was going to happen because there's something that happens later on in the episode that I don't think I fully get. And I was going to ask you about it

from the standpoint of the game where what's her name gives the order? And then it goes or, I don't know what's happening there. No, neither do I. I think we can speculate. but no, that's still kind of cryptic. I don't want to jump the gun because I know you go chronologically, but I think we're going there next. Yeah, yeah, we will.

Yeah, this show just doesn't work that way. Aren't you all going in the same direction? Can't you all just travel together? Even in season one, they're all going after the head, but they're all doing it separately most of the time. You know, they kind of contrive ways for them to be split apart so that they can bring them back together again and have the heartfelt reunion. But sometimes you just feel like, when I go together, It's just more efficient that way. But yeah, just kind of frogmarch Hank in his handcuffs all the way because clearly he knows a lot of things that he is not divulging here.

You could maybe continue to try to get that out of him. Maybe he's just more dangerous alive and with his faculties. And that's one thing that I was semi disappointed by. So, you know, we said like Lucy, she'll do what needs to be done. Thanks to Hank, she said, I'm not a fudging idiot. Right. And so what we don't get to see, though, is what decision she ultimately would have made. And that gets taken out of her hands.

Maybe that's a kindness by Hank, but maybe it's just advancing his own goals here because he says this, again, very cryptic tease for the next season. You think this is the real world. The surface is the experiment, not the vaults. I've already sent my R&D out in the wasteland. Their boxes are the latest models, too. You can't even see them. to everyone their following orders written for them centuries ago. And then with one last, I love you, Sugarbond, he's gone.

He's just the empty husk of Hank with a bullet in his butt. And I like that there's just this moment where the newly just memory wiped Hank says good as new as he brushes aside a stray hair of hers. Maybe he's good as new too. But, you know, we don't get to see Lucy make the decision with Hank that she makes with Welch. She doesn't get to dispense justice. We don't get to find out whether she's going to kill him. She's going to wipe his own memory.

She's going to have second thoughts. He just does it. So we'll never know which option she would have elected here. So are you dissatisfied with where his character is right now? Well, his character's nowhere now, I guess. I mean, depending. It's funny. I know if Jomey was watching this, he was thinking about agents of shields.

because when isn't he thinking about agents of shield? But also there's a character in that show played by Kyle McLaughlin, who has one last tender exchange with his daughter before his memories were wiped. So this has all happened before. I guess Hank could be faking. I don't think he's faking. I don't think he's faking either. I almost hope he's faking because I'm sorry to lose him and lose the villain of Hank here.

If he's just kind of got to square one blank slate, that would be a big loss for the show. show, I think, if he's even on the show anymore. So there's a part of me that that hopes this is all a ruse, but I don't really believe it. And so then, yeah, the question is just, okay, what is his scheme here? What does it mean? The surface is the experiment, not the vaults. Do you have any ideas? I don't. This is the part of the show where I start coasting because a lot of the things I expected to happen, either happened or didn't happen. And then, you know, you got some stuff in the background like fucking those big one of those big fucking moths killer moths

killing everybody yeah so you you have that type of thing but I'm like I'm wondering to go back to what we're talking about with the with the I'm like what is he talking about like this is the part where I start to wonder if I'm missing stuff because I didn't play the game because when he says I have R&D when he says all of that stuff like I don't know what the fuck he's talking about right I have no clue like what like what he's talking about I'm thinking I started Googling on the boxes in fallout. I started looking up different shit and trying to figure out what it is,

but they're setting stuff up for next season, and I guess we're going to find all of that out. Yes, presumably, at some point. So that's another example of this finale being just sort of stay tuned for season three because we'll actually find something out then maybe. But yeah, I assume he's talking about He's put the brain chips.

He's put the automated man in others that they were just sort of sleeper agents. You know, they're implanted whether they know it or not. And now by pressing the button to automate himself, he has maybe also automated others. Yeah. Yeah, who are spread out and what they're doing and where and why. We don't know exactly. And also, we don't have a litany of characters to. So it would be one thing if there were so many characters in the show,

or if there are a bunch of characters in the show, a bunch of different characters in the show, that them somehow being taken over by these chips or having these chips activate them would be meaningful to us because it would change their personalities or change what they're doing. We don't really have that.

Yeah. But there's nobody left right now that we've already gotten to know that I could imagine, unless it was like fucking Maximus or something like that, that I can imagine this having like this huge effect. So I guess now,

every character we meet, who will be one to be one whether or not they were mind-controlled in some way. Right. Yeah, fortunately, we have that handy-dandy little chime that plays every time we see one of the little mind-control devices. Ding! Right, right.

So Lucy loses her dad, but gets back her boyfriend. She has a sweet reunion with Maximus, at least. It's sweet until they go to House's Penthouse, and they see the Legion marching into town. And Lucy says, I could have prevented this. There's going to be a war, and it's all my fault. Maximus says, yeah, well, welcome to the wasteland, because he's been dealing with this all season.

And can he make this a good world? And what would it cost? And they've both made the decision to turn away from that instead of kind of becoming corrupted to impose order. Because it's so many times the bad guy is, you know, they don't think they're the bad guy. They think it's, it's palpatine. It's, you know, we're trying to just impose order here, right? And what's the cost to that order? They've both decided that it's too high and they won't do it.

And so they're holding hands sweetly. looking out the window. Glad to see these two together again. I'll take care of this whole family when he was like 16. Yeah. Killed his dad. You guys, go back and read some of the Lord. He's evil incarnate.

Like, like he's real. Yeah. Right. Oh, she be sheave. Not a good guy. Hugo Damascus. Like they, they, they, they, they, they, yeah, he killed. Yeah, you kill a lot of back in the day.

We call him Darth around these parts, short for Sidious. Okay, so just to wrap up a few of the loose ends here, not that the show really wraps him up. So we touched on the Legion. We get the Macaulay Culkin comeback. Turns out the old Caesar didn't actually name a successor. He wanted the Legion to end with him. But Macaulay kills a Legionary, declares himself the new Caesar regardless. So one Civil War is seemingly resolved.

and he's off to build a palace in Vegas, which will be called Kaiser's Palace. Good line. Okay. And then move it on to the Valties. So in Vault 32, Steph is holed up in the overseer's office. The Valties are chanting.

They're banging on the door, death to management. And Steph, who we now know, I guess, is Hank's bride and Chet's bride not to be. I don't know how this works with Lucy's mom. Was Lucy's mom? aware of Steph, was Steph not thawed at this point?

Yeah, what the fuck? I thought there was going to be some kind of revelation that maybe in a real way she was Lucy's mom. Like that's not, you know, yeah, but like that's not what happened. Like what the fuck? How did that go on? Was she in cryo sleep and Hank was sleeping around while she was sleeping? Maybe that was, we don't know exactly when she was thought, but she's still young, so she can't have been around for as long as Hank and Betty.

So presumably she was just slumper. burn away and Hank had himself a second family in the vault. I guess that's what happened here. But, I mean, I kind of don't blame him for wanting to let Steph sleep because, you know, she seems like she might be fun for a little while. But there's, there's some underlying issues there, you know, Canadians, as we covered last week, can't trust him. Especially Canadians that don't believe Americans are human.

Yeah, exactly. So, and obviously she was using Hank. whether he knew it or not to get herself a spot and buds buds and a spot in the vault. So she opens Hank's briefcase. We were wondering, is this going to be F.E.V. The forced evolutionary virus. Is she going to set it loose somehow? It's a pit boy, which she uses to call the enclave and request that they initiate phase two.

And we do see this enclave headquarters, this secret base maybe in Colorado. And they're monitoring all the radios. So they're hearing Hank's transmission. We now know he was not talking to Mr. House. He was talking to someone, something with the enclave, when he was talking to some unspecified sir at the start of the season. And they received Norm's radio transmission to. Someone heard him and they hear Steph.

So we don't know what phase two is. I assume this has something to do with F.E.V and a plan to turn people into mutants and maybe also Hank's plan with brainwashing everyone, you know, whatever the next phase. They're just initiating Order 66 here, just whatever it is. We will find out sometime soon. But still a mystery to me.

We've, you know, had some threads and some crumbs and some suggestions here that it must be related to all this FEV business. But that will also have to wait for season three. I swore you were going to know about this. I didn't even Google it. Like, I was like, you know what? this is going to be Ben's video game corner where he goes, well, phase two comes from blah blah,

and then people became unicorns, and they were running around the wasteland, and you got to get the fucking unicorn virus outside. There's going to be something. Yeah. Because it was so consequential in the way that it was shot. They give you a pretty detailed look at this compound, and also the fact that the compound looks incredibly functional.

Like is it not scraps or like a husk or something like... Yeah, it's where Wiltsig came from in season one, I think, in dog meat, right? It's where dog meat was being raised and trained. Right. So like, you know, this entire deal and wow, I've seen this stuff's going into my ear, in my head and out of my fucking life. But like, so like, you know, seeing all that and they're like, oh, okay, well, what's going on here? What the hell is you talking about? What's face two?

What's face two? What is all of this stuff? I guess these are the things. that you're supposed to be able to hang on to to pique your interest and like keep the momentum going into a third into a third season. Yep.

Even though I'm more motivated by just the character development. I don't even care. Like literally I was like it I care. No, I don't care. No, I don't care. I don't even care really what it means. But I care more about the fact

one of the most meaningful scenes was Maximus and Lucy looking down there knowing that the Legion is coming up. Okay, what are they going to do? do. Like what's going to happen. Yeah. Right. You know, so like that whole thing, McCauley Colkin is leader of the Legion. I guess he got a, he got a fucking promotion. He's going to be back. So like all of that stuff is more interesting. I didn't even know what's going on. I was like really looking to you to explain that. Sorry. I'm sorry. But I'm saying it's like

more stuff on the show that just becomes kind of like stuff that happened in the finale. Yeah. We'll see if I can get any answers out of the showrunner. But I wouldn't count on it. There's just a lot of examples in Fallout lore of nefarious organizations. trying to improve slash enslave the populace. Sometimes it's the enclave, it's F-E-V, sometimes it's Fallout 4. There's the Institute and Synths. And the idea is, well, we're trying to advance humanity, which entails turning people into giddy pigs and removing their free will. So we also see Norm, of course, all of Bud's Buds, who have been tormenting him here, seemingly get taken out by these New York City-sized rad roaches, which are much more menacing than they

generally are in the games. They got a big buff here because they're pretty easy to dispatch. Except conveniently for Claudia and Norm himself. So I don't know how Claudia survived. I don't know where all the rad roaches went in that room that the door seemed to be closed, but

I guess that all... Like she got out of it. I thought that was actually a fun scene of them not letting him in and then all a sudden, aha, dummy. Now you're trapped in there with them. Right. And so, but But she lives.

He lives just by holding up a chair. Yeah. I guess there was a backdoor some other way out of that room. But those two are together. So that's nice for them. And, you know, it just felt like Norm's storyline. I guess we kind of found out about FEV through that. So it was useful in that sense.

But that wasn't paid off in this season. And the actual storyline itself just didn't amount to much. Norm's just kind of been wandering around, you know, occasionally being knocked unconscious. So hopefully he has a little more to work with next season. He's got CTE now. Yeah, you would think. I mean, everyone really taking a lot of blows to the head like Armand Maximus. He's got his bell rung inside that suit too. He's clearly a little loosey. And that brings us to the final. So there's a post credit scene, which I missed in my first watch fortunately caught it. Guess what, Ben? Cut it on my second watch because I'm prepared.

I prepare for podcasts. But yeah. I'm hearing about it from the first time. I'm not shocked by that. I swear. There is a post-credit scene, but it doesn't clear up any of the things that you're wanting to be cleared up. So they don't reveal what phase two is in the post-credit scene. It's about a minute long, and we see the brotherhood again. So we have not seen the brotherhood for about half the season. And I was, you know, when I watched the first time, didn't see this post-credit scene. And I'm thinking, so the brotherhood, we're just, we're not going to see them again. That's that. After all, the brotherhood lore, we see them for one. minute here. And Dane, who is still in camp for some reason, still serving Quintus, brings a

blueprint to Quintus. And Quintus declares that he's not the unifier anymore. He's the destroyer. He's mad. Basically, he's butt hurt. I guess Hank is really the one who's but hurt. But he's also upset because they didn't accept his rule. He wasn't able to unify the Brotherhood factions. And now it's no more Mr. Nice guy. No more Mr. Nye's. Quintas. So Dane brings him this blueprint for a massive mech, which is Liberty Prime, which game players will remember from Fallout 3 and 4. Giant robot. This is the Liberty Prime Alpha. It was teased earlier in the season. We saw it in a photo in the background, but here we see that they're planning to build this thing. And in the games, it's been used by the Brotherhood against the

enclave. So yet another super weapon coming into play, it needs a massive power source. So maybe everyone will after the diode for that or maybe all of the other fusion cores that they've found will be enough to turn this thing on. But yeah, Quintus and the Brotherhood back in play. So I don't know if that changes your perception of this finale in any way now that I've dropped that little Brotherhood bomb on you. No, I'll go back and watch. I was wondering where they were. Yeah. At the same time, they were kind of like out of my mind a little bit. Yeah. I think I'm becoming a Legion head. Really? Okay. Yeah, I'm into the Legion. You like the outfits? Like the fashion? They are they're a bunch of dumb psychos.

That always works for me. Okay. And so now we're headed for Colorado, or at least the ghoul is. And, you know, in the games, there's usually each game has a new location. And so maybe new season, new location, you know, we moved to New Vegas and season two. Maybe we'll still be in that area with all the stuff that they've sort of seated with the Legion and the NCR and everything. but also maybe a new location, assuming they don't get sidetracked along the way

and end up somewhere else. And Colorado, there's a little bit in the lore about Colorado. It was a planned location in the original Fallout 3, which never came out and is known as Van Buren. Now it was being developed by Black Isle and never saw the light of day. It was canceled, but it was supposed to be partially set in Colorado. And also there's a game called Fallout Tactics,

which is sort of semi-canonical, maybe. And there is also a Vault Zero in Fallout Tactics in Colorado in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which is basically like a big underground U.S. military bunker, kind of like the real one, basically. That's what Vault Zero is, more or less. And also, I saw that the people at PC Gamer pointed out that in the lead-up to Fallout Season 1, Amazon posted this hour-long video about the opening of Vault 33. You can watch it on YouTube, I think. And it's called a special live report from Galaxy News.

And there's sort of a fake sales pitch for Vault Tech. And the announcer says, Voltaic, Valt, Living is Living the Dream. And it's the only way to safety unless you're the president of the United States or something like that. And you have a mountain in Colorado to go under and direct the events of the world. So, Paradise, Season 2, coming back soon. We should do pods about that. Love that show. I love that show.

Now, that's a show that doesn't really make you wait for the next season. Like, they're just, they're burning clot. I said, fucking. Putting it all out there. Fogelman and Sterling were like, nah, man. People, people, people, people was fucking with the show. We don't have a lot of time. Like, they were like, no, we get right back to it.

Yeah. Good show. Good show. Great, great physique for Sterling. That naked shower scene, which is a great showcase for his physique. Anyway, looking forward to that return. But, yeah, this suggests, you know, and maybe the introduction of President Clancy Brown,

okay, maybe he's still hold up. Maybe he's still in this enclave base. Maybe he's frozen too. Maybe he's a president sickle. Maybe he has been thawed. Who knows? But maybe it's, you don't bring Clancy Brown just to have him sit in the car for one second

and never see him again. So maybe he'll be back. And Ron Perlman will be back and we'll find out what the mutant was for. But it seems that the enclave and maybe the remnants of the government and the president all out there. And maybe when Hank is on the radio at the start of the season, saying reporting for duty, sir, who knows, maybe he's talking to the president. But we'll find out. We'll see whether this all comes to fruition at some point. But for now, we must be patient. Yeah, 2028, see you guys.

You think I'm taking the under, you know? I think they'll make back next season. It's supposed to start filming this spring, I think. And there was a little more than a year and a half between season one and season two. So I think, Maybe we might be looking at late next year, I believe. That could be awesome. Just try to give it to us before Secret Wars, man. Oh, that'd be nice. Yeah. It'd be dope, yeah.

Yeah, well, all sorts of Secret Wars in Fallout as well. And maybe we'll find out, and they won't be so secret anymore. But for now, they still are. Still many mysteries to be unraveled. And wherever we head next, I hope that you and I can continue this journey, because I'm always happy to party up with you in the wasteland of content. This has been fun. I'm glad you could join me for some of these pods.

I enjoyed it. Like a great deal. I love the show. I'm actually going to do something, Ben. What's that? I'm going to play the games before the next season of the show. I can't leave the show. I'm going to play the games.

Where should I start? Give me the prescription. What should I do? I'm going to start playing Fallout. Wow. I'm getting to the games before the next season comes out. Now, this is sincere. You mean to follow through on this?

This is not going to be a Sean Fennacy. I'm becoming a gamer now so that I can understand the game adaptations never falling through. Get the fuck out of here. So it was so funny. Me and Bal were like,

do you know? Like no way. No, I'm going to play. Okay. All right. Well, we welcome you on board. I guess, you know, New Vegas,

I think maybe in retrospect, you'll understand some of the stuff that we've been watching and talking about and that's a great game and also a fairly short one by fallout standards.

And then I check out Fallout 3. You could go, you know, Fallout 3 and then New Vegas, maybe because Fallout 3 came out just a bit before New Vegas. And New Vegas sort of started as an expansion to Fallout 3. So I'd say 3 and New Vegas. And then we'll see how you feel, whether you want to go to 4 or beyond. But you have some time. So I'll hold you to this. I'm going to check back in. I'm going to start Fallout 3 this weekend. I'm going to start it this weekend, maybe even Friday. Maybe Friday I'll get to Fallout 3 and then into Fallout New Vegas I'll come back and check in with you before the season even comes out and let you know what I think about it

but this is all this is on PS5 right You can you can find it Yeah it wasn't originally But yeah you can You can get these games in some form They've been re-released I'm not doing a computer for this You're already to just abandon

The vow that you just made If you can't play out of a console If I can't get the fucking game if I can't get the fucking game. The game is on Xbox, one PS5 situation. Yeah, it came out originally for PS3 and 360, but backwards compatibility will be your friend here. So, yeah.

Okay, okay. I'm ready. I wish you well on your Fallout journey, and thanks. The podcast journey has been fun, and now we will take the shortest of breaks, and we'll be back with one of the showrunners of Fallout, Geneva Robertson, Dwar it,

followed by John Gonzalez, one of the masterminds of Fallout. Vegas. This episode is brought to by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and making a mess. You don't need WeatherTech floor liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner or road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those weather tech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today.

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We are joined now by Geneva Robertson-Dwarat co-creator and co-show runner of Fallout. Thanks for joining us, Geneva. Oh, thank you for having me. So going into the finale, how did you try to balance the sometimes competing concerns of wanting to provide a satisfying climax to the single season we just watched and wanting to extend and set up the ongoing overarching series. How'd you decide what you could pay off now and what you would need more time to tie up?

I think it's such a giant and thrilling mythology to work in the Fallout universe that we knew we weren't going to answer every last question that the viewers have. However, we did want to get to the really important emotional moments in our character's journeys that we feel was their next step in their character progression. So for Lucy, that was facing off against her father. How far was she willing to go to stop him?

How far was he willing to go to stop her? And give what we felt was a final answer to that question. And similarly, for the ghoul to reach the next step in his search for his wife and daughter. Well, we marveled all season at how much you had to juggle. So many characters and timelines and settings and stories to serve. If there was one aspect of this season, that you would have liked to flesh out even more or that you just would have had an easier time incorporating

if you'd had, say, a ninth episode or just some extra screen time, what would it be? I'm always so excited to get back to our vault storyline. I think it's so pivotal to the story that we're telling. And I think it's a place where we play a lot of our sort of most fun, life-hearted characters, but it's ultimately incredibly important to the story we're telling.

and I'm excited to get back there for season three. So episode nine would have been Reg and the inbreeding support group, just nothing but reg. I think it would have hopefully been the events that follow what Steph does when she opens up Hank's Memento box and takes out what's inside. So season three is in pre-production.

It's been reported that you'll be shooting this spring. So I assume the scripts are written or well underway. Can you tell us anything about how season three will compare to one and two structurally, just in terms of the complexity of the story and how many characters and subplots are in play? What's really interesting about structuring a giant story, like the one that we're trying to tell in this show,

is that your characters end up starting at the same place in many ways. Hank, the ghoul, Lucy, Max, they were all in Los Angeles, season one. And then season two, they all diverge. And what we're excited to do next is to start weaving them together again in new ways. So I'm really excited for what I hope are unexpected overlaps between our characters that feel unexpected.

And yet, once you see them, totally inevitable. And also, I'm very excited to go somewhere. The games have explored very little. Which may or may not be Colorado. You are not going to unveil that at this time. Well, we know the ghoul is heading to Colorado. But what about Lucian Max? And will he arrive?

Will he get sidetracked on the way? you never know. By bullshit, every goddamn time. Exactly. I don't know whether you learned that this season would drop weekly instead of all at once, but I wonder how you felt that affected the storytelling approach or the audience reception. For instance, if you go an episode or two without seeing a character, that maybe lands a little differently when you can't just play the next episode as soon as

the last one ends, right? You actually have to wait a week or two. It is really interesting. It's still something that we're, I think, adjusting to as a show. show and learning about how to account for because even in sort of late stages of post-production, there were still conversations about, are we going to drop the first few at a time, are we going to see Maximus on opening night at the beginning of the season? So, you know, these are things that we're adjusting to as a show and that we're excited to

work on more for the next season. I assume you can't divulge what the format and episode count and really schedule will be for season three, but do you have more clarity on that during the writing process, than you did when you were writing season two? You know, those are a bit above my pay grade, but I just try to focus on the story and those with more power than me figure out such things. There's always a shadowy enclave pulling the strings

behind the scenes, even for a showrunner, I excess. So you talked before season two about how you wanted to avoid canonizing any one ending of Fallout New Vegas. And now that we've seen the whole thing, what was the most challenging aspect of telling the story you wanted to tell without limitations, but also without contradicting people's play-throughs. Yeah, we tried our best to avoid committing to a canonical ending

so that we were not negating anyone's gameplay experience, as you're saying. I hope we succeeded. I know that some fans are pointing out, hey, I did this in the game. That didn't make sense with what I saw in the show. We truly just tried our best with the story we wanted to tell to make sense for as many players' experiences as we possibly could. Okay, I'll stipulate here that your answer to this question will not be binding.

Plans can change. But Aaron Moten mentioned last spring that he was initially pitched on a five to six season arc for Maximus. You've laid a lot of groundwork in season two. This world got a lot larger. How far ahead do you have the series mapped out? And what are you aiming for, if anything, in terms of total length? It's funny you asked Todd and Jonah and I have talked a lot about the final season and where we all want it to go. however exactly how many seasons will be lucky enough to get before we tell that final story.

We are still obviously finding out from, like I said, people who are above my pay grade. But, you know, we're hopeful that we get to do this for a long time because there are so many more parts of the wasteland and aspects of the lore that I love that I'm just sad that we haven't been able to get to yet with our characters, but would love to. But you do have in your head, at least if it's, everything goes the way you wanted and you get your, if you have your druthers, you know when and where it ends approximately? Yes, we know our final season story that we're all excited about.

So I know you can't reveal the specifics about what's coming, but I wonder if philosophically you can say whether you do intend to tie things up neatly in that end, because some showrunners will say, hey, bear with us, all will be explained. And others like to leave things ambiguous. And the fallout franchise has always been a bit ambiguous in terms of the underlying lore, like, who dropped the bombs and why? So are you ultimately interested in answering those questions definitively, or would you prefer, even in the end, to maintain some mystery? I think there are so many answers that we would like to give that are important to our story in our part of the wasteland that I think the show has clearly raised that we are dying to answer because we're excited about the answers we have. and we feel like what we've been doing is laying questions in the audience's mind.

We hope that they're excited to get the answers to as we are excited to share them. But of course, sure, there are a few things, I think, in the Fallout universe that are fun precisely because no one can quite agree on them and that they are mysterious and that they are debatable between the fan base. But I think there's many, many, many answers we do owe and that we are excited to give. So I hope we, I'm just excited to do more seasons and get to those. And after Maximus and Lucy connected in season one, you cruelly separated them this season before finally bringing them back together.

They were happy to see each other. Will you let these lovebirds spend some quality time together in season three? I mean, I don't want to give any spoilers away to season three, but I'm certainly interested in their relationship. I'll say that. If you separate them again, we'll be up in arms. I want them to just have some happy time together for the poor people. They've been through so much.

So, and you've brought in a bunch of just high-profile guest stars in some delightful roles, some of which you have dispensed with quite quickly and unceremoniously. So when you actually land one of these people, when you land a Kumail, Njani, or whoever it is, right, do you have some desire to say, can't we keep them around or do we need to let them go this quickly? Yeah, so when you have an extraordinary performance, like the one Kumail game, of course, you're very sad when you get to the end of the episode and they have a sledge in their helmets and you're like, fuck, maybe we cut that off too soon. But the good news is we have many new characters who are coming this season that bring in new

factions into our show, new aspects of the wasteland. So we're really excited for the audience to meet those. And some of those are going to be characters who may stick around for longer. We'll have to see. Yeah, I wanted to ask that lastly, I guess, if you have a fantasy pairing, you know, because all your characters are separated so often. And it's such a treat when they do come back together in the finale, only to be wrenched apart again.

I'm really excited for viewers to see 301. We have a new pairing that I hope they don't see coming, that I think is really juicy and that is one of the things that's most delighting me as we work in the writer's room on season three. Well, Geneva, thanks. Congratulations for wrapping up season three. I know there's no rest for the weary because I'm sure you're as busy as ever working on season three, but...

I'm here in the office. Yeah, we're working on it right now. Well, thanks so much for chatting with us. Thank you so much, Ben. And this podcast goes to phase three. I'll be back in just a moment with John Gonzalez, one of the brains behind Fallout New Vegas. Not a disembodied brain, still attached to his head, crucially,

much more conducive to podcasting. And he has some thoughts about the aspects of New Vegas that Fallout season two did or perhaps didn't do justice to. Well, if the game was rigged from the start, We're about to talk to the guy who rigged it. John Gonzalez was the creative design lead, effectively the lead writer for Fallout New Vegas. He wrote the main plot, crafted the casinos and concepts for the strip, created and wrote Robert

House and wrote many other characters, including Kaiser slash Caesar. After working on New Vegas, he served as narrative designer of Middle Earth Shadow of Mortar and helped craft a famous nemesis system. Then he became the narrative director of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West and led the development of Aloi and her robot-filled world. Last year, he returned to Obsidian, where he's working as a creative director on an undisclosed project that he has disclosed is not Fallout New Vegas too. Sorry, Fallout fans. He also has a video game-themed novel coming out this year called Godmode single player. John, welcome to Buttonmash. Well, thank you so much, Ben. It's really a pleasure.

Well, you may not be working on New Vegas, too, but we did get a sequel of sorts in Fallout season two. So tell us how it felt to watch these characters and concepts come back and to see other people play in this sandbox you help design. Well, I think that, I mean, it's been a delight, really, from the first season onwards to see how the iconic designs and locations of the IP have been realized for the screen. I think that that's work's been basically flawless. You know, this also extends to the costuming as well.

I think that the cinematography, the visual effects, I think all of that has been really top-notch. And I love the core cast. I mean, I think there's just a lot of really strong performances, but I think in particular, Ella Prunel and Aaron Motton and Walton Goggins are all fantastic. So I love getting a chance to see them doing what they do. I thought that the first season was actually a kind of a surprise delight for me. I mean, I just thought that it was really strong that it fired. on all cylinders. I thought I had a great pacing, some really nice surprises, some different,

but I thought very smart takes on the IP. And also a wonderful kind of cadence of going back and forth in time, you know, between Walt and Goggins sort of flashbacks in history and then the unfolding events in the wasteland of the present and having those sorts of, I mean, I think it's kind of cool that they were able to orchestrate in the first season, this revelation for all three characters about the cause of the Great War and really, you know, land that. That's, that's, that's kind of tricky to do in terms of narrative design and I admired it. Yeah. Are you able to just watch this show as I might, as our listeners might, just as a fan, as an appreciator of the show, or do you find yourself getting extra invested, especially this season, as many of your creations

come back to life? Well, I mean, I think it's, it's probably impossible for me to watch it. just as a regular vanilla viewer. Absolutely. But I think that I went in to the season being really deeply curious about how they were going to use characters and other elements from New Vegas. But I think actually what they ended up doing

with those elements were so different or sort of so in a way detached from the game that perhaps I ended up having the experience of watching more as a regular viewer rather than someone who was feeling as though my direct work was being adapted. I thought that the use of New Vegas was largely cosmetic. It was sort of like a decorative backdrop, these elements about the location or the idea.

It really didn't have to do much with the substance or the actual narrative of New Vegas. So I would say that actually New Vegas felt less to me like I wouldn't, I don't know that I would say that, like I wouldn't analyze. how did they use New Vegas as source material? I think they kind of didn't. I think it was sort of aesthetic inspiration for the season. It wasn't really what they were driving at or what their primary concern was.

Right. As new to you, as it was to anyone else watching week to week, you had no sneak peek, you weren't consulted, you had no inkling of where this was going. That's right. I had no forewarning and no prior preparation. You talked to PC Gamer last year and you made some comments about how,

It's kind of like maybe being a comics writer in the 60s and 70s. You don't really get residuals. You don't exactly get ownership over the IP. I didn't take that as a complaint so much as an observation about the way things work and have always worked maybe in this medium going back to the Atari days when developers had to hide their initials or their names because no one knew who made them. That's the gig, I guess. Is there any part of you that thinks or hopes could things be?

different at some point if you're the person who breathes life into concepts or characters that you could maintain some role, some ownership, some stake in that, or is it just inevitable that each person plays their part and you hand it off to the next person? Well, one thing, Ben, I really appreciate is that your interpretation of the comments they made a PC gamer, I think, is dead accurate. I actually wasn't... Not everyone on the internet interpreted. No, no, they didn't. I think that they must have saw it as a kind of complaint or resentment or bitterness. And that's actually not the case. It was more of a statement of fact, as you're saying it. And I really don't have complaints about my career in the video game industry. My rights to creations in video games are different than if I were doing that

for like a union-based type of work like you have in television. But you know that going in. And so I've still been, I still feel as I've been incredibly fortunate to have been able to do the work that I've done in the video game industry and it's been a great career. So, yeah, I know that anything that I'm creating is going to be owned by my employer in terms of the hopes of being able to have greater influence or ownership. To me, that's limited to any kind of IP that I create on my own. I think that that's, it's not the main, you know, the main inspiration behind doing the novel that I've been working on. But one of the things I'm aware of when I'm working on this novel is, okay, this is my IP. This is a time in my life where I'm actually creating something where I have sole ownership over this. And that's cool.

It's a, you know, there's a certain, there's a certain kind of charge that comes from that. I'm not really expecting that I'm working with a multi-billion dollar IP, you know, like Horizon became or whatever. But it's still nice to be able to have ownership stakes in something. So even though this was not a direct adaptation, it was picking up 15 years. after the events of Fall Out New Vegas, and obviously a lot has changed. What was something or some things that the show did with that lore that you liked,

that you thought, oh, maybe this is what I would have done, this is the way I would have taken things, or this is not at all the way I would have taken things, but I like it. I think really the things that I most enjoyed were the ones that I was talking about how they were realized on the screen visually. I think all of that was really strong.

I think that the use of the New Vegas material within the, you know, the storylines themselves, to me, again, felt kind of like cosmetic backdrop and the takes on them. Actually, a lot of things throughout this season, I think in comparison to the first season, I found myself kind of wondering at the logic of some of the situations and also the way that the material was used. So, you know, to be clear, I don't think that New Vegas or any other Fallout game is inviolable scripture. I think that the creative team should go ahead and have freedom to play with that material however they wish. But I think that the goal is to do something that is more interesting. It's either deeper and more nuanced or it is more keenly honed for the dramatic purposes of the story that is being told.

And a lot of that for me was a little bit. bit of a head scratcher this season. Actually, I think a really good representative sample is the use of the Kings, right? So you have the Kings in New Vegas. Here, Lucy is going through withdrawals on Buffout, and she comes, she's very twitchy when she gets to New Vegas, and we have a bunch of ghouls that are dressed up as the Kings. And all they are is just Elvis impersonator ghouls, and she kills them. And it's kind of an amusing little nod, I think, to people who know about the kings, but the kings in the game are really quite interesting, right? Now, I think that's fine. I don't think that that's a problem. I don't think that it's, again, it's not as though

the kings are some sacrosanic element of lore and you have to have this full exploration of them. But I would say that that approach actually felt fairly representative to me of how New Vegas was showing up in the game throughout. And like I said, also, the logic of some of the situations were ones where I was sort of, you know, a little perplexed. You know, so for example, The NCR, we don't really understand what happened 15 years ago at the NCR, but the NCR, when we meet them, is two people who've been sitting out in the open in the desert at a camp with a big armory for 10 years without receiving reinforcements. Like, okay, like, so I was like, I was finding myself going like, okay, is the idea that we're, it's a satire of the NCR? Like the, the stupidity of the NCR? Is that the point? Because this doesn't make any sense to me from a kind of world.

construction or world logic business, right? I mean, the world logic approach. And that was also the same thing with Caesar's Legion. You have them in two camps. They've been a war for years, unable to resolve the civil war when there's a body with a note in the center, like on a bulwark between these two camps. And, you know, I've done a lot of imagining designs, I mean, locations in games where I have to think about the logic of those locations and how, you know, people move to and from them. And so I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, well, okay, they have a bulwark between them. That's a wall. But don't they leave their camps on all the other sides? Like, couldn't they circulate around and do a flanking attack? And like, is anybody actually

like motivated to try to resolve this conflict that's, you know, dividing their strength into? And I mean, it just seemed like they were ridiculous, which then again made me wonder like, well, is that the point? I mean, is the point that they're just taking kind of a piss at the Caesar's Legion as being kind of idiotic cosplayers, which I think is an okay thing to make fun of, Caesar's Legion about, but like not as interesting for me as what I think of as being the rather terrifying threat that they are in that game. Yeah. And so it kind of goes on through that.

I felt very much the same way about Brotherhood of Steel, you know, when they show up and these just seem to be kind of barbarian kings rather than the heads of these fanatical monastic orders. and then, but I think that the primary one, as you probably anticipate, is that is the portrayal of Mr. House. Like, I just don't, I don't see the original Mr. House in this Mr. House. I just see them as being two very different things. I mean, when we first meet him, this is a guy who has gone to some kind of dive bar to antagonize some thuggish laborers into following him into an alley where he's put $32 million in a car to tempt them to let him put a device on the back of one of their necks so that you can have that guy. beat his friends together. This is like, I was like, what? Like Mr. Howse in the original, you know,

version is this kind of reclusive mastermind, right? So he's somebody who does all of these, you know, incredibly fine calculations of probabilities, which they reference in the television show, but really almost more in the television show, what you get is how he got things wrong, or how are there all these things he doesn't know. He doesn't know who the other player is at the table. He's being outflanked and outmaneuvered. He's also someone in the original game who has no need for slaves or interest in a technology for slaves because he's a roboticist. He has a robot army that he's created. He needs people because he likes customers. He doesn't feel as though he needs to directly dominate people

because he believes that he knows how to manipulate them. He believes that he understands human greed and other motivations so finely that he can get whatever it is that he wants by just rigging the game with the proper incentives. I mean, that's how he brings about the New Vegas Strip, is he just selects which of these tribes around here are the ones who are most likely to be useful to me. They're the most capable. He sends out his circuitrons, and he makes deals with them.

He has some signed contracts, his employees. He's not interested in getting slaves. That whole sort of concept that was really at the core of the story in this season, perfectly legitimate thing to have is the core of A story, but not something that I recognized as being the kind of technology that interested Mr. Huss. And not so not connected to the kind of like grand, like technological horizon that he was aiming for, you know, like where he's not trying to get people back into orbit by developing that kind of tech. Yeah, you did a Reddit AMA in December and someone asked you about

Caesar and you said, I can say that my intention while writing Caesar was to give the guy some intellectual heft and a substantive argument for that model of dictatorship, which leaned heavily on the idea that the post-apocalyptic context required it. I didn't want to write the guy as a straw man villain, which isn't to say that the Legion isn't awful. They are. The NCR are pretty bad too. And Mr. House is pretty bad too. There are no straight-up good guys. But you wanted a little nuance, at least to explain their reasoning, their motivations. And the time that this season afforded, I think, with the eight episodes and the number of elements here just did not allow. for that sort of exploration of those characters. And so the Legion, they are essentially

strong-man villains. I say, you know, we walk into the camp. The camp is kind of ludicrous, as you said, and then there's immediately a crucifixion. We get the idea that these are bad guys. We don't really know why they're dressing up this way and what their whole deal is. And we just get the sense that they're bad, right? They're maybe maniacs or something, which, you know, I guess if I hadn't played the games, maybe I wouldn't. feel the absence of those additional shades and layers to that faction. Then again, if I hadn't played the game, maybe I would be a bit lost about who these people are and what they want and what I'm supposed to think about them. So maybe that just had to be jettisoned. You know, the sacrifice must be

made for screen time and to serve the main characters. But yes, you do feel that absence at points. I think that that's a good observation. I think you do have to make those sorts of choices about what is that you're going to cut. I think that the thing that's less interesting for me about the choice here is, is the way that they are made to be ludicrous. And I mean, they are kind of ludicrous, so it's not as though I don't understand it. And actually, I love the moment in the show when Lucy says,

when someone complains about the NCR, oh, so the NCR is sort of vaguely, like, imperfect, but they're, you know, the other ones are these terrifying people who are, you know, crucifying others, but we somehow can't decide between the two of them. I actually did like that as a little, uh, a little dig at that, the moral nuance, so to speak, of the game. But to me, making the ludicrous is less interesting than making them, you know, you could also do Caesar's Legion where they're just very straightforward and basic, but they're just utterly terrifying. That's something that, to me, is at least has them feel like a more, you know, a stronger adversarial force in the

story that's being told here. Yeah, I just didn't really take them all that seriously. And also, you know, we didn't even get to see any kind of, I don't know if they're saving the battle between the NCR company that somehow magically showed up at on the strip to save Maximus. Yes. I don't know if they're planning on waiting for the battle for the next season, but if you remember that interview that you did with me about open world design, one of the points I was having is you don't leave that stuff, you know, on the table. You go ahead if you're going to promise it, you deliver it.

And so at the end, I was kind of like, wait a minute, we're not even going to get a chance to see the Legion and the NCR go at it, that would have been fun. Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you have these observations, these nitpicks, maybe more than nitpicks, and yet you're able to enjoy and appreciate the show for what it is, because there are plenty of people who have less of a personal investment in the lore of Fallout New Vegas than you do as the person who designed a lot of it, who can be very precious about adaptations or different depictions of game lore in movies on TV.

And if anything changes, it's an affront to the original. It's wrong. It's bad. And you seem to be capable of drawing a distinction between, okay, maybe some things were underserved here or this isn't the way I would have done it. And yet, I really like a lot of aspects of the show. So that's, I think, kind of admirable that you're able to look on the bright side.

Well, I mean, I've done enough creative work over the course of my career to know how hard it is to make something that's even mediocre, frankly. And this is way better than mediocre. There's just a tremendous amount of great work that's been done on the show. And so long as there's a fallout television show, I'm going to be watching every single episode. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that there are things here that I think could have been used to greater effect. However, I'm not one of the people who's in the writer's room who's trying to make the decisions about where it is that they're steering this. And like I said, it's not inviolable scripture.

You know, there's nothing sacrosanct about it. It's up to them to craft a really compelling great narrative. And then for us to go ahead and receive it, and I guess have all sorts of opinions about it. Now, you made this game more than 15 years ago. I don't know how fresh these specifics are in your mind. But one of the things the showwriters said they set out to do was to not anoint any one ending of the game

as the official ending. And so I wonder how well you think they accomplished that or, you know, whether you think they've navigated the difficulties of not wanting to sort of invalidate anyone's play through while telling the story that they set out to tell. Well, I mean, I think that they did a take on New Vegas where it is not possible to map that onto any of the endings. I just can't actually map it on to any of the events in the game. Like clearly in the game, there's no way that there's a play-through of that game where you don't end up having this final battle for Hoover Dam. And things would get decided one way or another. The fact that House is still alive in some respect means that there's a lot of stuff in the game that didn't happen. I can't look at the television show and map that on to anything for the game.

To me, it felt a little bit more, I guess, like the game had never really happened. Yeah, I guess we don't know to what degree he is actually. physically alive. There's a way that you can finish New Vegas and he can survive in some form. So I guess they tried to just make the most of that. And adding the body double aspect to it to kind of confuse everything more, just, was that the real house? Was that the body double all along?

So does it kind of reframe your understanding of what you were actually seeing or which house you were actually interacting with in New Vegas all along? So in that sense, I guess it could maybe even open up new interpretations of the story you told, potentially, but I don't know whether you see it that way. Yeah, I don't know how to exactly fit that into what we developed for New Vegas, but I think it's certainly something that fans of the show could speculate about. Yeah. And I guess it's hard to answer this without patting yourself on the back, but pat away. Why has the game endured? Why has it become so beloved to the point? that people are pretty precious about, hey, don't tamper with my precious New Vegas

because this game means a lot to it. And I love it. And even if you're not working on a sequel, would you want to someday? Or would you want to play one or at least see a remaster of some sort? I think that the game has ended up standing the test of time because it's perhaps, of the last 15 years,

the kind of larger budget game. I don't know if you can call it true AAA. But let's say it's, we'll call it AAA. I think that of the AAA games in the last 15 years is probably the one that is most maniacically focused on player agency. And it also unleashes the player to make choices in an environment of actual consequence and one where there is a lot of moral gray. And so it allows people to, it invites people to project themselves into this world and to be making all sorts of moral and narrative choices that have weight and that feel meaningful. And it is something

that obviously people can play in many different ways to many different sort of conclusions and results and then have that reflected in, you know, this crazily complex slideshow at the end that summarizes everything that they did. And I think that the quality of the writing throughout and definitely beyond just my own work, I think it's very high quality. I think there was a tremendous amount of passion that went into it. So I think that that's sort of why it has stuck around for people. It feels like a believable and reactive world for many people to a greater extent than other games have delivered, although there are many, many games that have been great in different ways. And then as for working on a sequel or something like that's, I kind of feel like,

I feel like, you know, my involvement in, in Fallout was 15 years ago. It was a formative moment of my life, since then I've moved on to doing some other work. I think I would actually be more interested rather than seeing a direct sequel at seeing people try to recreate in a AAA context, narrative experiences that really welcome player agency with that kind of intricacy. That's actually the way that I would love to see New Vegas live on in further expressions or further explorations. You know, let's see it in a variety of different kind of environments or even genres and see how that would play out. I think other than that, that kind of narrative choice has mostly been explored in more indie games in the meantime, which is great, but I'd like to see

that in also some of the premium entertainment as well. Yeah, and I don't know whether you're still working in the open world space we will learn someday, but when I talked to you for the website a few years ago, we did touch on that, both the storytelling potential and storytelling challenge of open world games versus more scripted, linear types of stories. Like, for example, Fallout New Vegas, the game versus Fallout Season 2, where we are just sort of passively consuming a story that is told to us as opposed to choosing our own adventure. And I assume now with a novel under your belt, you have had it the other way, too, where you just get to lay out the story the way that you want it. So how are you feeling these days about the potential for open world video game storytelling,

especially compared to other media and adaptations that sometimes have to take one of those stories and those worlds and pick a lane? Well, I still love them both. Absolutely. And I think that the thing that's so exciting about open world narrative design in particular is this opportunity to provide players with this wide range of choices that they can make throughout the game that have consequence in the way that we were talking about earlier. And the challenge there is to imagine an environment that's rich enough in drama that those choices can branch to really distinctive but really satisfying outcomes. When you're working on a long-form linear story like the novel, and this would also, of course, be the case with a film or a television show,

You're on the hook for creating the absolute best single story, not a bunch of stories that are all good, but become great because they are the unique experience of that player. You just have to create the single best version of it. And then the thing about a novel that I have found to be so remarkable in comparison to my game work is you have to do it all alone. It's like you're, it's like you have to paint every single pixel of the image just by yourself. Usually I'm working in collaborative environments where I can rely on the skills and vision of my collaborators. I can describe a location in terms of how it's going to function within

the narrative and key features. I hand that off to a concept artist and what comes back is usually just way better than anything that I could have come up with on my own. I don't have any of those advantages when I'm working on a novel. But I think that it's still been really satisfying to work in another medium. I found it to be really challenging. But this is also kind of part of the fun of this is it's a video game themed kind of big action extravaganza. The title you mentioned it earlier was God meant single player. The tagline that I have for at release that I'm experimenting with is what if the world were a video game, but you weren't the one playing it. It's sort of a crazy situation that explores a different take on simulation theory, the idea that, okay, we're living in

the simulation, but something has gone wrong. And now someone basically is playing, is abusing our simulation like Grand Theft Auto. They're doing like a Grand Theft Auto rampage. So how is it that ordinary mortals or the NPCs can somehow figure out a way of thwarting this godlike presence that is tormenting this kind of world? And if people are interested in finding out a little bit more about it, I put together a kind of initial teaser site, which is who is p1.com. They can go ahead and check that out. I'm going to be making updates. I'm sort of finishing up right now, and then I'm expecting you to have it out in Spring.

of this year. One more question inspired by New Vegas. Our former guest friend of the show, Jason Schreier, published a feature on Obsidian at Bloomberg just this week, for which he spoke to some of your colleagues. It was basically about how Obsidian released three games last year, which was impressive, but also not exactly planned or ideal. It was partly a product of how long some of those games took to make. New Vegas was invoked in the story because it did not take very long to make. it took less than two years to make in stark contrast to some bigger budget games of today. Now, I assume there's some sort of happy medium between how rushed the New Vegas process was, even though it paid off and how protracted some of the development processes are these days.

So what, if anything, would you take from that experience and say, yeah, we should get back to making games like that versus, oh, we should never make games like that again? Yeah, DeVegis was a really unique situation in part because, in large part, because Bethesda had made Fallout 3 and had developed all of the tools necessary to make that game with the Garden of Eden Creation Kit. So we were, I think it is fair to say, maybe some people don't like admitting this, but we were like a massive, incredibly ambitious mod. We were really using that.

Now, there were additions, systemic additions, that Josh Sawyer designed for the game. I think we're great and a whole bunch of other refinements, but we were really working with a very solid kind of foundation for making that game. So none of that development work about, you know, an engine or the development or the kind of creation kit, I mean creation tools. Those were largely solved when we started. We did have a brutally compressed schedule, and I wouldn't recommend anybody having to do that before. We made that worse for ourselves, I suppose, by being incredibly ambitious. We, you know, I think that the game, had some multiple of content compared to fallout three.

During those 18 months, that's the only time that I've worked seven days a week in long hours. I mean, that was the most brutal crunch I ever went through. Obsidian at that time was an independent developer. It had to sing for its supper. It was dependent on getting, you know, living contract to contract. Success or failure was, you know, always an issue for every single project. It's very different from Obsidian as a studio that is under the Microsoft umbrella. The situation here is much more chill, much more reasonable for people to do the work.

So, yeah, I've never been through any kind of strain or had my marriage under so much strings when I was working on Fallout, New Vegas. We did fine. We're still together and very happy, but it was a rough period of time. And lastly, this is not the last time that some work of yours, some creations of yours, will find their way to at least a different sort of screen or a different medium, because, of course, Sony is working on a Horizon movie. It was initially a TV show.

Now it's a movie. I wonder what you have gleaned from Fallout Season 2 in terms of the best way to port things from video games to the screen. And maybe it's different moving to TV versus movies. But, you know, as you were saying, maybe some of these elements from New Vegas hindered more than they helped fallout season two. Maybe you feel like it seems like maybe it would have been better off without them if they weren't going to be explored in greater depth.

Let me know if I'm putting words in your mouth there. But I wonder whether you take anything away from that just about adaptations of games in general and how faithful they should be and how you balance that desire for Easter eggs and callbacks and thrilling the existing fans versus trying to tell a standalone story that's not sort of hamstrung by its connections to the original. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I do not have any kind of visibility onto the Horizon film, and so I don't even know for certain that it is a direct adaptation.

I would say that it would be really smart to make a direct adaptation of Horizon Zero Dawn because I think the story there really holds up very well. Yeah, I agree. And would work in a linear, I mean, it is a linear story, and I think it's one that's got actual power and surprise. And so I think that that is something, much like I think the first season of The Last of Us was able to take the story from that game and realize that in a linear form and it worked. And I think that that could be the case also with Horizon Zero Dawn. I would say, however, television shows sound a lot better to me for that having to do that adaptation in a film.

There's so much story there. And it's not really that there's a whole lot of inconsequential extra story. If I were doing an adaptation of Horizon Zero Dawn, I definitely would have wanted the canvas space to be able to go back and forth in time, for example. In Horizon Zero Dawn, all of the revelations that are made about the past and the robot apocalypse that leads to the world of the game was really through data points or holograms. You discover glimpses of the past. It seems to me that the natural thing to do in an adaptation would have been to actually go back in time and to be. and to be developing a parallel story, much as I think the first season...

Yeah, season two style for season one. Yeah, as season one did, I thought really well. And I thought that that would have been the way to do it. But I really don't know, even if you're doing a two and a half or three-hour movie, how you land that and then still get... And you still get the same kind of power about just like the sorrow of how the world ended previously and how that plays into Alois story as well. Well, you didn't work on fall at season two, but for better or worse, it would have looked a lot different without you. And I've certainly spent many happy hours wandering around in the worlds you have created, as have many of my listeners, I'm sure. So we will eagerly await the announcement of your new project at Obsidian as well as your novel, which, as you noted, people can keep tabs on at who is p1.com. And if we don't have you back before that Horizon movie, then we'll have to have you back to talk about that adaptation too. So thanks very much.

John, appreciate it. Thank you so much, Ben. It's really a pleasure to talk to you again. And that concludes our coverage of Fallout Season 2. Hope you've had as much fun with it as I have. Thanks to Van and Daniel, Vaniel, and all our other guests. Thanks to Devin Ronaldo for producing today's episode,

and thanks to our Juneer Ramgo-Pal for giving us the green light to go weekly with these pods. If you'd care to share your thoughts on the finale or Fallout at large, you can contact us via email at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com. A Night of the Seven Kingdom's coverage will continue at the Ringaverse and House of Our and Buttonmash will be back later this month to talk about the 40th anniversary of the legend of Zelda,

some other more recent releases, Nintendo designed and otherwise. And of course, the hotly anticipated Resident Evil Requiem. As Mr. House says, What are you doing? The enclave is still out there. We're not done, Mr. Howard. We have business. Not with me, you don't, the ghoul answers.

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