The Ringer-Verse - ‘Fallout’ Season 2 Premiere Reactions (Plus Justin Theroux!) | Button Mash

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Van Lathan return to the Wasteland for the first weekly Button Mash breakdown of ‘Fallout’ Season 2. First, they recap the premiere and discuss how it sets up the season. Then, Ben talks to Justin Theroux about joining the show in the role of Robert House. Finally, Ben brings on Polygon senior editor Chris Hayner for a primer on the game that inspired much of this season, ‘Fallout: New Vegas.’ Intro (0:00)'Fallout' Season 2 premiere recap (11:56)Interview with Justin Theroux (52:13)Inside 'Fallout: New Vegas'—the game behind the season (1:00:33) Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Van Lathan, Justin Theroux, and Chris HaynerProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, Danny Hyfe, it's here from The Ringer Fantasy Football Show. We're coming to you multiple times per week to tell you who to draft, who not to draft. Honestly, that's kind of most of it. The Ringer Fantasy Football Show, YouTube, Spotify, wherever get your podcast, the Ringer Fantasy Football Show. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tramphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tramphia is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks. followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks.

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This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and make it a mess. You don't need weather tech floor liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those weather tech 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. Welcome into the ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Belmondberg, senior editor at the ringer and vault overseer of Buttmash. I've requested a co-host through the inter-podcast communications computer and joining me for this episode is one of of Ben's buds, a man who never passes up a pot of flea soup. Let me say that again. A man who never

passes up a pot of flea soup. Van Lathen. Bebue, what's up, Ben? Hey, Van. Nice to have you back. Always good when you drop by butt mesh. I'm honored. It's nice to be back, especially to talk about something like this, man. I'm actually got a show to chain for these. Yeah, exactly. We're both big fans of Fallout and we're here today to discuss the season two premiere, which picks up right after the finale of season one. In real life, though, more than a year and a half has passed, which actually isn't that bad by big budget blockbuster TV timeframes these days. I'm just happy when it's a sub-severance break. And Van, we and Amazon probably have higher expectations for this show than we did the first time around when its quality and its success sort of took us by surprise. I don't think

Amazon knew what it had on its hands or that this would be one of the biggest. debut shows of 2024. Which is interesting because it's clear that they spent a lot of money. But it wasn't clear if they knew the depth of story that they had. From the first scene, you got something that was both visually intoxicating but also thematically devastating. Your show starts with this mushroom cloud, gold, Timothy Olofant, a character, Timothy Olofant, I always do that, Walton Geyer's character, looking out over

and incinerated and nuked L.A. It happens. And then you're like, oh, my God, I'm in this world. And then after that, you just never know what to expect from the show. Mm-hmm. You're recasting the ghoul here. You want Timothy in the show? You want Walt Nout? Timothy Olafant and Walton Guggins is like Bill Paxon, rest in peace.

And Bill Pullman. Not Bill Pullman. The other guy from Remember the Titans that plays the secondary coach that's also in Armageddon. What's his name? You know what I'm talking about? This guy is in so much. He's not an Armageddon. He's in The Rock. No, it's an Armageddon. He's in Armageddon.

He's, he's a, but he also plays the number one assistant coach and remember the Titans. I used to get him and Bill Paxson confused all the time. We're talking about Will Patton? Will Patton? Yeah. It was Will Patton. Yeah. It was Will Patton and Bill Paxton.

Patton. Patton. Palman. Paxton. Polman. Paxton. But now it's like, you're two older,

sexy, character-driven white guys are Oliphant and Gagins. And sometimes I get Oliphant and Gagins out. They really should do a movie where one of them is the crook and one of them is the... Oh, yeah.

That would be great. De Niro Picino of Oliphant and Gagans. But down a level, because they're down a level. A little bit. Take it down a level and then do something for them. Get them in the movie together. Well, you can't go wrong with either. Will Patton appears in Silo, which has some things in common with fallout.

We got some vaults and post-apocalypse. But this is a different one. This is a prime video show. And yeah, we like this series a lot. It doesn't take itself too seriously. It's funny. It's got a great cast, not featuring Timothy Aliphant, but still very strong. And yeah, you can tell how much money Amazon spent on this thing.

It looks great, good practical effects, good special effects, good needle drops, just top to bottom quality show. It does justice to the games if you care about the games, but it doesn't hit you over the heads with Easter eggs, tells its own story, so you don't need to have played anything to enjoy this show. And I was sort of surprised by how much I enjoyed the first season two. So we go from binge drop to weekly release. And that's when you know that Prime Video realizes, okay, we spent a zillion dollars on the show. Now we're going to get our money's worth because we want people to be talking about this thing and buzz to build over the course of the season.

It's sort of what they did with the boys and other shows. You do the binge drop maybe early on. And then once it's super popular, you just drip it out, parcel it out week to week. And they've already renewed this thing for season three. so we know we're going to get much more fallout. And that's reflected in our coverage here because I think we were kind of taken aback by how good it was and how many people were watching it.

And the binge drop is always tough to navigate as a podcast TV recapper. So we did one episode on the entire first season of Fallout. You were here on Buttonmesh. And that was it. That was the entirety of our coverage. But this year, we're going all in. We're going to do weekly episodes.

It's going to be great. To quote Norm McLean, plans are hard. Chaos, though. Chaos is easy. But we do have some plans for this pod. So I'll lay out what we're doing. If you're a regular buttmash listener, don't worry. We'll still be doing non-fallout pods throughout this run, including our annual Games of the Year draft next week.

If you're not a gamer, not normally a listener, come on in. The cryopod is comfy. We'll be either airing our reactions immediately after each episode appears on Prime video or a day later. depending on whether there's a Wednesday episode of the Midnight Boys. Because the Midnight Boys, you know, take precedence. They bumps the button mesh fallout recap. That's okay.

Is that true? I don't have to be that way. You want to cede your Wednesday spot? Why don't we just do Midnight Boys? Just combine it all. You come over there, we do it. We do fallout and then we release them. And it's all the same feed.

We're all the same pod. You think Charles will be a big Fallout fan? Hell no. What is he a fan of? He's a fan of nothing. I don't know if he's tried it. But, you know, it's the type of show that he would like, though,

it's daring and it's a vision, and you can't really, like, pigeonhole it. It's full of surprise, it's twists and turns. So it's the type of show that he likes. He doesn't like straight paint-by-numbers type stuff. You know, we talked about the fact that this show is not just daring from the visual standpoint, and it is,

you know, kind of the, when they're giving you your flashbacks, they're giving you this steampunk. Is I called steampunk retro-futuristic? Yeah, retrofuturistic. I'd say. Retro-futurist kind of vibe, which I love that. Mm-hmm.

Me too. I love when they're doing retrofuturism, and it's the 50s, but they, you know, everything's nuclear power or they got time travel with some damn shit like that. You know, when you get back to, I guess, the present day or the future, it's obviously in a post-apocalyptic situation, but that still is using the retrofuturist technology of that imaginary 50s time or whatever it was. Yeah. I don't know if it's actually, is it actually the 50s or is it?

It's not. No, there's an alternate timeline in the fallout lore. So it's 2096 when the bombs dropped. But it's 50s-esque visually. But they dress like that, right? Yes. Which is crazy. Yeah.

But I enjoy that. So because of those two dueling settings, you just can't put your finger on what's going to happen with the show. The show exists in flashback, much like the game, which always kept you on your toes. The show exists in flashback. It also exists in a current narrative, you know, split between our main protagonist and the ghoul. And you just don't know. And the third protagonist who haven't seen yet, Maximus, whatever.

So, and him and what's going on with him, the show just was you were in constant tension and traction. Yeah. That's kind of what this season has to live up to. It's interesting with the first season binge mode drop, second season weekly drop deal, because that makes essentially the first season of your show, a pilot. It makes it a season-long pilot to see if audiences actually react to it. Then you go to the weekly, and that's when you really want the cultural energy of the show to, like, maintain a conversation across eight to ten weeks.

Yes, they really reacted to it. It was a huge, huge hit. And yeah, tonally, too, there's a lot of variation. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's dark and super serious. There's some heartfelt emotional character moments. There's over-the-top violence. Yes.

Yeah, it's got it all. So if you heard Daniel Chin and I did pods on The Last of Us season two on But Mesh, these will be a bit different. Daniel and I covered that season strictly as a game adaptation because there were, what, four other shows on our network covering the Last of Us season two. If you were employed by the Ringer, you were probably podcasting about the Last of Us. So we sort of stayed in our lane here. This time, we pretty much have the series to ourselves. Yeah, what a mistake we made? What a miscalculation that was.

Yeah, well, we sort of slept on Fallout season one. This time we sort of have the series to ourselves, so ButtMesh will be your one-stop shop for Fallout coverage. Maybe it'll pop up here and there somewhere else, but we'll be your main destination. The ringer going all in on the last of us like that. That was like the Paul George trade of the ringer. Yeah, we bought in on season one.

Nobody wanted to give ground. You guys don't understand the inner workings behind the scene shit. of like, who's going to cover what show and all that stuff. The fiefdoms. Yes. The little, you guys don't understand how people throw their way to around. What's nerd culture? What's not?

What's prestige? What's nerd culture? What's not? What's prestige? What they want to go on the prestige show? Yeah. You know, it's all done very like, you know, kind of politely. And we never, like, get in the room and duke it out.

But nobody budged on the last of us. So we all ended up covering the second season of a show, a season that just wasn't that It was okay. Yeah, we bought high on The Last of Us. Right. We rode the decline a little bit, but yeah, there's the disembodied brain of Bill behind the scenes, just handing out the assignments and deciding who's going to cover what, and everyone ended up covering that.

We kind of did it as a game adaptation here, but this time for Fallout, we'll focus on discussing the series as a standalone story as a TV show, but we'll also dig into the video game origins. We'll talk to the cast and creators of the show, and the games. And we're actually doing all of those things today. I don't know if you know this fan, but you and I are breaking down the premiere. And then Justin Thoreau will join me to talk about joining the cast in the role of Robert House. And then Chris Hainer from Polygon will hop on for a primer on Fallout New Vegas, the game that influenced a lot of this season. So whatever you want to

know about Fallout, let this podcast be your pit boy. Also, Amazon sent six episodes in advance, but I don't want to spoil anything or have a heads up on what's coming. So I'm not watching ahead. I am staying in the weekly TV trenches with you all. And you've only seen the premiere too. I've only seen the premiere. We're all on the same page here.

No screener gate. A screener. When I saw Justin Thoreau, I was like, yeah, this is about to be a quality scene. We might as well jump into it because it was a quality scene. It was fucking nice.

Yeah. So the man who knew is the season two premiere written by creators and showrunners Geneva Robertson Dwarrett and Graham Wagner directed by Fred Toy. And yeah, we do jump into new character, new setting. We're introduced to Robert Howes played by Justin Thoreau

and his brutal mind control technology. So what did you make of this extremely cold open? So, you know, you come into it, you see Justin Thoreau. So when you see him, you know, that something quirky is going to happen. I like that name, Graham Wagner. Like Wagner.

Wagner. Yeah. Wagner. Okay. So, you know, and these guys come over. Obviously, the pre-nuclear Holocaust version of the world that we live in is one that was in serious cultural traction. You know, there's, it's funny.

After I watched this, it inspired me to go back and watch the watchman, the animated watchman that is on HBO because the worlds feel the same. You know, their alternate timelines. But they're worlds that kind of put you in. to the feeling and the emotional feeling of what it would be like when a nuclear holocaust was inevitable. Like what's that going to feel like when we know that the, not that it's, you know, something on the horizon, it's cataclysm that could come, but we know that it's imminent. It's going to happen.

And there are always a lot of different factors that would come together to make the end of the world imminent. So when you watch the characters and their decisions, the decisions that they have to make in ordinary days, ordinary lives in their ordinary days of lives knowing something like that is happening, it's always interesting. So that's the backdrop of that. Then there's also this other, the sort of techno-futalism that exists in that world that's not that much different than what we're dealing with right now. There's a tremendous amount of technology that is available in the world, and it kind of wants to take over the world. And those guys that walk over represent a sort of proletariat that thinks that they're at cross purposes with that.

And then you have the really polished guy in the suit. So polished, it looks like Justin Thoreau is wearing a human being's mask. Like every single hair on his head is perfect. His face is, it looks like he looks like the untrustworthy guy in a room full of construction workers. They want to harm him. He wants to some way enslave him. and that tension takes you throughout the entire scene. Yes, he has the mustache.

He's not actually twirling it, but he looks like he might at any moment. And if you've played Fallout New Vegas, you will recognize this character, Robert House, Mr. House. I will get into that a little later on the episode with Chris and a little bit of the lore surrounding that character.

Although there's a little bit of a wrinkle here because this character, Robert House, appeared on screen in season one, played by another actor, Raffy Silver. And in this introductory scene in the premiere, we actually see that version of Mr. House on the TV in the bar. And then the blue collar working class assault of the earth guys basically ask Thoreau when he chimes in, are you this guy's biggest fan? And he says, yeah, you could say that. And so it's not entirely clear yet what the relationship between the Robert House on that screen is and the Robert House that Thoreau is playing is.

He, the real, the man behind the curtain, is there some other relationship there? Presumably that will be spelled out. But yeah, this is a legendary villain from Fallout New Vegas. And his tool of villainy here, this mind control device that he demonstrates brutally. There is something in Fallout 3 called a mesmatron, which is kind of a similar mind control device that leads to heads popping potentially if overused. It's a weapon. It's not like an implant that you stick in someone's neck, but same sort of idea.

We've seen a lot of skulls exploding in nerd culture lately between the boys and Black Bolt in Dr. Strange in the multiverse of madness. I'm getting used to just heads popping like pimples these days. It's a brutal way to kill someone. You know, you get the visceral, somebody else, all over you and stuff like that. And it's like, you know, I think there is,

there are starting to be diminishing returns in some of the oh my God this is totally fucking fucking crazy with the violence and all that stuff like that and it's gory and all of that we're starting to get to a point to where it's all right man

like you know all the jangle unchained over the top violence is kind of like not exactly a culture fit with some of this stuff so let's like turn it down a little bit but it works in this world. Yeah you can't shock us anymore

we've seen it all so we get this introduction and, you know, it's to have Thoreau in the cast, that's going to be a new element to the season throughout. He's a good actor. This is an intriguing character, and these devices that he's testing here clearly still some kinks to work out,

and they will come back later in the episode because Hank is experimenting with them as well. So after this flashback intro, we pretty much pick up where the finale left off. And season one ended with some pretty major revelations. We found out that Hank not a good guy, in fact, very bad guy, one of the baddies of Vault Tech exec who was thawed out in this secret collection of cryopods in Vault 33. We learned that he blew up the town of Shady Sands after his partner, Lucy's mother, brought Lucy to the town. This was his

vengeance. And Lucy, like Maximus, is a survivor of that massacre. We learned that Voltaic is involved in a conspiracy to engineer the end of the world. And then the McGuffin that everyone's chasing through season one, this chip in the scientist's head turns out to have been the secret to cold fusion, which Faltek bought and buried. And so we pick up not long after that, but season two is sort of a reset because at the end of season one, everyone came together.

And now, except for Lucy and the ghoul, they're all sort of separate again, which I guess is, you know, time-honored TV tactic. Like we have to go back to one basically at the start of the season so that everyone has something to quest after again. Yeah, I always hate it when they do that, but it never not works. Sort of like, yeah, Peacemaker's season two, you know? Like the whole gang gets together and their best buds, and then suddenly they're all splintered apart and they have to come back together again. And there's always sort of some plate spinning and throat clearing to get back to that point.

and in Peacemaker, lots of music videos and performances for some reason. But in season one, the unifying thing was that they were all chasing the same goal, the head, for different reasons. And then it brings them together. And I guess it's also sort of similar in the sense that season one was about Lucy, who's kind of the main protagonist. I guess there are three really. But we meet her first. She's our window into this world because she's new to the wasteland. And in season one, she's trying to track down her dad to rescue him.

Now she's trying to track down her dad again, but this time to hunt him down to bring it to justice. And then I guess the question, though, is like, what does it even mean to bring someone to justice in this world? And that's what the ghoul asks her. It's who administers justice. Okay, you find him. Then what? Does the ghoul put a bullet in his head? You know, there's no law exactly or everyone has their own sense of frontier.

justice in this world. Yeah, I think in a world with so many questions, the justice is probably in answers. Justice, it's a, this is always like the deal in these post-apocalyptic worlds. It seems like in all of these worlds, the most powerful people are the people who know the most. Like how this happened. Think about the book of Eli. The guy wants the Bible. And he wants the Bible because he has enough knowledge from the world prior to know that it can use religion, something that's pretty much been incinerated, that he can basically indoctrinate the people there and become the most powerful person. But it's what he knows about human nature that makes him the most powerful person. So in this particular world, I think whereas this is a quest for justice, whereas this is a quest you're finding your family, it's really a really. a quest to know and make sense of the entire world.

That's what's driving Lucy more than anything. I don't think she has any justice for her father, but I think she has questions for him. And she keeps getting answers about the nature of her reality that she doesn't really like. Yeah. Yeah. And there's this tension between these two.

I like them as a duo, Gagins and Pernell and The Gould and Lucy. And obviously, Lucy, despite everything she went through in season one, She's still trying to cling to her vault upbringing. And, you know, the ghoul talks to her and says, that wasn't real the way that you were raised. And she says, I know, but she wants to lead by example. And that this is the way that people have hope, essentially, to know that what you do matters.

And that's the open question, I guess, whether it actually does, whether she can retain this sense of optimism and order in this really disrupted post-a- apocalyptic wasteland world, whether she'll rub off on the ghoul, whether he'll rub off on her, make her harder, make him softer. Presumably that will play out as the season progresses here. But, you know, we get kind of a classic vintage action scene to reintroduce these characters in a setting straight out of the game, Fall Out New Vegas. And, you know, this is something this show does well, just gunslinging, right? And Lucy's still trying to go with the non-lethal. if possible, and the ghoul is not at all doing that. But he shoots her down, or she shoots him down, and then he goes to town on everyone. And they clean up and move on. Let me ask you this.

The bombs drop in 277. This season is set, I think, 219 years later. It's 2296. And we know that the ghoul is just single-mindedly driven by finding his family. That's all he wants. after 200 plus years, do you think you would still care about your kids? Do you think you would still care about finding your family? Because to me, it would just seem like it happened to a completely different person. That was just a completely different pre-apocalyptic life. And at this stage, I would have lived so long. I don't know if I would even really remember them. They'd just be an idea, a concept. There's no way you could possibly picture your kid after 200 plus years, right? I just, I wonder if I could cling to that motivation for that long. Well, you're right. And then I think maybe you're not connecting the reason why you being right is what drives the character. So the thing that propels people that are on a quest more than anything, most that have a credo that are on, it's always normally an idea. It's not an actual thing.

It's your idea of a thing, right? And so his children and his family at this point are probably more powerful to him as an idea, as a symbol of what was taken from him. And not as actually the people that they actually are. Like it's almost like when my dog chases a squirrel is actually, what are you going to do with the squirrel when you catch it? The joker said that. But the idea is that that's what you must do. You are a dog. You chase squirrel.

Yes. So that dynamic is what pushes you forward. And for him, we're getting the backstory about what put him in this position, so many decisions that he had to make. So he's really contending as is the audience with those decisions that led to all of this stuff and the regret and things he could have did and things that he should have did. His family are more representative of that of that trauma, of that longing than they are of the actual people that they are. So he's really chasing his former self. Yes, it's abstract. Yeah.

It's what was taken from him. The idea of his family, it's vengeance in a way and sort of self-punishment, I suppose, and this is driving him. And then the question is, yeah, if he actually does find them at some point, then is he the dog that caught the car or the squirrel? Yeah. Will they even recognize him for one thing, looking the way he does? And not just the physical difference, but just how he has evolved as a person, obviously, to survive for two centuries in this.

world where there's no law, would he even be capable of the kind of love that we see in the flashback when he tries to escape, he takes his daughter, he takes his dog, he tries to drive away to Bakersfield. And then it's too late. Everyone's freaking out. There's an alarm. It's just a test, but everyone is panicking. And then he sees the sign, the big billboard with him advertising Voltaic. And he just realizes how responsible he is again. For the whole thing. You know, this show is not a show where you can see the seams. I'm not saying that it's a show where you can see the seams,

but I am saying it's a show that does a great job making use of things that are very obvious. Like something that you said earlier struck me, when he says that, when he tells Lucy that her world wasn't the real world

being the vault, right? That's a matrix sort of situation, you know, where you're on the Nebuchadnezzar and you're eating the tasty wheat protein. That's the real world, the actual world, but the world that the viewer is used to is actually the world of the matrix. That's our real world. Our real world is the matrix. The one we can touch and access is the matrix. And then the tasty wheat version, the real world is a world

that we don't ever want to be in and can't really think about or conjuring our minds at all. This is kind of the same. The Valtek world is actually the world inside the VALTIC world inside the vulture, I say it's actually a little realer to us, right? Because they got water, they got all kinds of stuff. You know, they have sex with their cousins. That's something that we do. And so when he's telling her she's not ready for the real world and the two worlds are being contrasted, that's a direct contrast made by one of the characters through something intellectual. Then there are little things that they do. Like when the new overseer is talking to the guy and he's like, she's telling them to give the baby a name and, you know,

you know what I'm talking about the same way we're talking? Yep. Notice what she's doing. She's ripping apart an orange. This is little stuff that the show does. She's ripping apart an orange. And when she's ripping apart the orange, she cuts, she's brutally cutting the orange, right?

She's not meticulously peeling it, taking it layer by layer. She's showing no care for it. But when the orange is so orange, there's so much bounty and abundance in the orange. And then when she rips it apart, it rips apart all weird and jagged like, but you can see the hunks in it. Like they look like they're healthy.

They have stuff to eat. And when you compare and contrast that to a woman taking vermin out of her head and using it as protein in a soup, you have to ask yourself which world you would want to live in. You have to ask yourself that. Just that one thing, like, and even in that scene where she's talking about the guy, like, you don't want to be that guy, right? You don't want to be someone that's being made to watch a baby that's not yours and total, you don't want to be any of that. But the show is constantly putting you into

conflict and asking very direct and fundamental questions about the nature of personhood. So I was watching that, I watched that scene back a couple of times, I'm like, wouldn't you want to be in the place where there are bright, orange hunks of citrus?

Or would you want to be in a place where it's your wits and it's your knife? and there answers to questions, and there's truth. So truth or safety, kind of an underlying theme in the entire show. Right, because the vault seems safer than the surface, but on the surface, everything is literally and figuratively on the surface. It's all out there.

You can see the threats, and they're lethal, but you can at least navigate what's out there and find your way through it. Whereas in the vault, everything is seemingly protected from the elements. you're behind the barred doors, you're keeping the undesirable elements out. But then it turns out that, of course, the rot is on the inside. The call's coming from inside the vault.

And Voltaic is controlling this whole thing, right? And, you know, poor Chet is going to have to name this kid, Chet Jr., and raise him. And there's the constant implied threat. After she finishes dissecting the fruit, she then just stabs that knife into the desk. and basically cows him to do what she wants him to do. And that's their whole life.

They've been living here, taking orders without knowing that they're really taking orders from this nefarious force. And, you know, I like that the show is kind of leaning into the megalomania of Valtek and House and others this season. Because one thing that kind of confused us, I think we talked about this at the end of season one, when we see Coop's wife and that big conference, that sort of Dr. Strangelove-style conference room they have, and they're talking about their plans for the end of the world, and there's this idea, there's a lot of earning potential with the end of the world.

And we were kind of puzzling about that because it seems like if anything, it would be just the opposite, that if you actually drop the bombs, there goes your market. How are you going to sell vaults? How are you going to keep making money? If that's the only goal,

then it doesn't seem like, actually engineering the nuclear apocalypse would further your ends. But if you're just a bunch of monsters and fascists, then it makes some sense. And that seems to be what they actually are here. When you sort of strip away the business implications and wanting to stockpile all this money, ultimately they just want to wipe the surface clean and recreate it in their image. They want to order the world as they see fit. And there's the line about, you know, we want kind of no factions, right? Like the reclamation day will happen when they basically just scour the surface and they've done away with everyone who disagrees with us. That's what the disembodied brain of

Bud says when there's no one left on the surface to disagree with us. And you know, you play that out and you figure, okay, if they're the only faction, then eventually there are going to be factions within that faction. And you'll just end up with the same world we have now where you have competing forces and they disagree, and that's how we got to this place. But that's what's really animating them here. These are people who want some sort of final solution for the world, essentially. It's not purely about profit. That's part of it.

But it makes more sense to me that way when you read Valtek and House and all these people as just, you know, not just technocrats, not just people who want to be billionaires and trillionaires, but people who actually want to re-engineer the world in their image and are willing. willing to stop at nothing to do that. Yeah, I mean, well said, from a capitalist perspective, it makes more sense to keep everybody on the brink, right? Yes, right. Like, everybody needs a gun, everybody needs a vault,

everybody needs a juggle water. So keep them there and resist any type of peace or resolution so that everyone consumes the stuff that you're buying, right? It's like, if there's a gold rush, you sell the shovels. If there's a tech rush, you sell the chips. Shout out to Nvidia, you know them. You've been fucking with them for a long time, right? But if there's dogma to what you're talking about,

then you don't give a fuck about none of that. If you believe that there's a virus in people or in society, then you just kill the virus and whoever goes with it goes with it. Then on the other side of whatever the cure to the virus is, people then become the virus. Yeah. Because then Lucy's the virus, the ghoul is the virus. These are the people that survived the cleansing of the disease.

Yeah. They're the fleas. you're trying to shake out of your hair. Exactly. And then we watch them essentially spread. And that's kind of what the show is. It's about them spreading and the way that they look at things spreading, which idea will spread and then threaten whatever the new operating system of society is.

And once again, that is why in this particular show, it's so important to have competing narratives and competing points of view. Like when you're watching like The Walk and Dead, something that the the zombies do in the show is very important. They just don't let people get comfortable. Because like if you woke up

on Wednesday morning and the walking dead was there were no zombies the show would be kind of the same. Yeah. Right? But the only thing that would change in the show is that when somebody was walking through the woods to the next town, a group of people to fight,

is that they wouldn't have to look over their shoulder. The zombies keep the tension, like, of the show. And it also, it ratches up every decision that you make because you can't make peace without thinking there's something trying to kill us. You can't get, that's the whole deal. This one is different, though. There's not like one ordering thing that keeps people on edge. It's different in every single setting with every single motivation

that all of the characters have, and that's difficult to do. Yeah, and everyone's a guinea pig in this world. We know that the vaults are actually experimenting on some people, and it's just if you blow up someone's head, that's just the cost of doing business. That just means you have to perfect your device, but it doesn't give you pause aside from that. In the trailer, there's a shot of McLean experimenting on mice.

There's no difference for him between a mouse and the guy in Vault 24 that he basically reprograms in this episode to deliver a message to Lucy. They're just entirely immaterial to him. He'll wipe shady sands off the map at the drop of the hat. And when Mr. House at the beginning, he's talking to the workers and he says, I try and see it from your perspective, but it's hard to imagine being so dim as to be caught off guard by the inevitable. The world may end, but progress marches on. So, you know, he's the one who's trying to foresee all the eventualities and come up with contingency plans. But for these people, the end of the world is not something.

to be avoided. It is progress. It is the goal. It's how you get your fresh start and your blank slate. Yeah, it's not the end of anything. It's the beginning of something else. Yeah, you can design the world the way that you want it to be. And of course, all of this is airing on Amazon, which, you know, adds just another layer as a meta layer as you're watching all of this, hundreds of millions of dollars going into this, but the real world Robco equivalent. It's so funny to me. Like stuff like that is so funny, man. It's, you know, there was a time, and I, you know, shout out to everybody at Amazon for the screeners, but I got to be honest. There was a time when all of our tech guys legitimately represented something different.

They would come out and you put a microphone in one of the tech guys's face and they would go, you know, tech should never be used to make weapons. Yeah. It should never be used. Yeah. It should never be used. It should be used to make people's lives better and to entertain people and the deep in people's understanding. in relationship to their world. That's out.

That's gone. Bye. I don't know if y'all been paying attention, but the Pallantier, like, different, that's finished. So all of those guys have made, a lot of, some of these tech guys have been given officer ranks in the Army.

So all of that's out. So we now have a direct relationship politically with the tech lords of our society and the people who have, visions of world domination and spreading whatever their version of Americanism all over the place and we're

we fund that by watching the shows and like using the stuff and there's no way around it it's no way around it because it's kind of like a part of the thing so when you're watching it

you're looking at it and you're going shit the nuts on these people to put this on the thing. Like, we're looking at it. The nuts of these people to kind of put this to make us answer these questions

on their streaming service. Right. Yes. I don't know if it's self-aware or if it's entirely oblivious and they don't even care if people make these connections or don't make them themselves.

I don't know whether it's sort of a subtle commentary by the creators. Also, I guess these days we're inclined to see just echoes of AI in everything. You watch Fluribus, you watch Fallout. And that seems to be here, too, in this opening scene of the premiere. I guess it's more industrialization.

It's sort of, you know, like a Luddite uprising, kind of like a Dune sort of scenario. But it's, you know, robots taking people's jobs. And that's what we're dealing with now, not physical robots in all cases, but software chatbots. And we're constantly told, oh, this is progress. This is inevitable. And it's not really. There are people pulling the strings. There are people who are making massive amounts of money on this and fueling it.

And it's inevitable for us. We're just sort of subjected to it, whether we want it or not, whether it actually improves our lives or not. But these are the same people who sort of see themselves as visionaries, maybe, and think that they're improving the world or at least improving the bottom line. But that's what we're dealing with here. It's just a little more explicit in fiction than it is in reality. But honestly, the line is pretty thin these days. So. Yeah.

But also, you know, all of this is true. It's funny to watch Squid Game and then watch like, Love Island. Or to watch Squid Game and then like watch the floor. Yeah. Like when it's like, if you're like, oh, we're one step away. So watching Running Man, I would see Running Man.

There's a game show at the beginning of Running Man where this guy is running on a hamster wheel and he's asking questions and their monitor his heart rate. I don't know if you saw the movie. And I'm like, they would do that show right now. Like maybe the Running Man show, maybe we're a generation away from that. But the show where the guy is running on the hamster wheel

and he's asking questions and their monitor in his heart rate, somebody somewhere went, watch, that's coming out. They'll do that show right now. So all of this stuff is we're getting towards a marriage of the dystopian version of society that we imagined and the reality of that at least kind of starting, which makes this show to me more interesting.

It makes shows like, this more interesting when you're actually negotiating the effects of some of this stuff on your life, the centralization of corporate power. What that means for a society that's based in capitalism, how people's view, like for example, let's go back to the first season and view those guys and, you know, what they're doing from a capitalist framework. Obviously, after a while, when they've run out of people to sell to, then they have to double down on their control of the people that they do have.

And that is essentially an AI question. Like some of the stuff that we're looking at with the way the technology is spreading and the tech people are spreading is they're simply running out of customers. Like how many more users does Facebook have? Like how many more people can you get to use Amazon? How many more people can you get to get all of this stuff?

Then you have to change the way that you harvest your user base. So you make a different world for them. Or go into AI, you make a different type of situation where that's needed and you have to convince them of something else to buy until you eventually said, you know what, reset the whole thing.

The whole thing needs to be reset. It's not out of the question. I'm going to get a ten-fold hat right now. Deb, do we have any here in the office? I'm going to get a ten-fold. It's not out of the question. So the question is, what can you watch that gives you a look at what's on the other side of excess?

And it shows like this. Yeah, no, we're not far from that. Squid Game becomes a big hit. And so Netflix says, what if we make Squid Game the Challenge, which is a game show version. They know y'all like that. Or speaking of Amazon, what about Mr. Beast makes Beast games? You know, it's like, what if Squid Game were real, essentially? Now, no one's dying.

Yeah, not killing nobody yet. No, not yet. But the same sort of, you know, humbling people performing stunts for money, that's supposed to be the thing that you away from Squid Game. Oh, this is actually cruel. This is bad. This is for other people's entertainment, making people suffer. And then it's repurposed into what if this was just a fun game show. It's like there's a famous tweet from a few years ago, very viral. It says, sci-fi author, in my book, I invented the torment nexus as a cautionary tale. And then tech company, at long last, we have created the torment nexus from classic sci-fi novel, don't create the

torment nexus. Yeah, that's where we are, essentially. And Fallout is a pretty good look at that. So it's fun, no. I'm still having fun. It is still fun. Yeah. We can enjoy it and appreciate it on all of these layers, I guess, as long as we're aware of all the layers it's working on. One concern, slight concern I have about this season. So it's always been a show from the start about just separated people trying to find their way back to each other and the world conspiring against them and everything. And as we said, okay, now they're kind of artificially separated yet again. do we end up in a scenario where all the characters are so spread out and they don't have the same goal the way that they did in season one that was sort of drawing them together? As you said, in this first episode, we don't even see our man Maximus.

You know, the new knight Titus of the brotherhood doesn't even make an appearance here. Now, presumably he will show up soon and we'll get plenty of brotherhood this season. But if he is completely separated from Lucy, you know, does it start to feel a little distrower? jointed and you're spending time with all these different factions and characters in different places and they're working on different things and Hank has his own goal that he's working on. You know, can it sort of spiral? That's something that I will be paying attention to. Haven't watched ahead.

So I don't know. Maybe they kind of all keep it under control. But that's one risk, I think, when a show is sort of feeling itself and is a huge success and has no constraints and you can kind of, you know, get a little big for your bridges maybe. So we'll see. I hope that it's all kind of knitted together neatly. Well, I think with a show like this, the advantage that it has, and this is more of a question for you,

is that shows like this that are based in video games are different. They're video games right now, more than almost anything, more than even comic books, have such a deep lore, because to play with television television

the story that they give you on television the evolution of a television story is it doesn't compare to a video game it doesn't because you spend so many hours with a video game so when there's a story on television

they want you to watch eight new hours of something. They want you to watch 10 new hours or something. Even back in the day when it was 22 episodes at, you know, a half hour, they want you to watch

that many hours or something. You take it, you put it in your mind and you go. The video game, they want you to play hours and hours and hours and hours and hours or something.

So the lore that they give you in a video game, the new features that they give you in a video game, the new technology that they give you in a video game,

it has to be so deep. It has to be so much that there's a lot more to pull from when you are making a lot of these shows. There's a lot to pull from. Now, some of the shows are more story-based like The Last of Us, right? Yeah. But then, like, Fallout, there's a lot of tech in these games. There's heavy plot in these games. There's new places to go, new things, things to uncover.

But that stuff is done specifically to get an audience who spent dozens and dozens and dozens of hours. with the video game to do it again. And so what you would think is that with a show that there is so much to pull from that the show would be able to take the video game lore and build story around it and continuously give you something new to look forward to. It's not that it's like foolproof,

but they're able to do that in these long-running video game series. So there's a lot of source material there for the show to continue. continually come back and reinvent itself and give you something new. Yeah, that was one of my concerns with season two, because the Fallout game lore doesn't map that neatly onto a single self-contained narrative that you can easily translate to TV, the way that The Last of Us did for better and then maybe for worse.

It's, you know, much more sprawling and amorphous and different games in different places and different time periods and disagreement on the official narrative. And that's kind of one of the things that intrigues fallout fans about the show is that it's considered canon. And it's sort of a sequel. And it takes place later in the timeline than the games do. And it actually kind of clears up some of the stuff about how the apocalypse happened and who had what motivations were sort of learning things. Even if you have spent a million hours playing the games, you can actually learn some things about the world from the show. But it doesn't have just, okay, we're adapting this particular plot line and just porting it over to TV in a pretty

predictable fashion. But the concepts of all of the stuff are there. Yes. Yes. It's true. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing is, so we spend a little time in the original vaults here with our original characters, Chet and Reg and Betty and all the rest.

And, you know, it feels a little bit divorced from where we are with our leads. And that's another thing that I'll be kind of monitoring throughout the season. And when we go back to the vaults and we're in Reg's inbreeding products of inbreeding support group with some disappointed people who hope that they can hook up with their cousins and not have anyone be upset at them. Yeah, that and the snack budget and all of this stuff, you know, will that seem sort of low stakes? Will that hold our interests? Will it seem too far removed from everything else? We're also running out of water. Running out of water, it's true.

There's some stakes there. You know, and we're thawing out all of the buds, buds, frozen executives. Norm comes up with the irrational third solution, which is just to, you know, go for the chaos and thaw out all the cryopods. So we'll see what ramifications that will have. You know, it's good comic relief, I guess. It feels like a good break. I love my man Davy and his feasibility studies on the signage.

But it does feel little bit far flung from where we are. with Lucy and the ghoul and the main quest line of this season. So again, I hope that they can keep that all together. But we'll find out when we keep watching and we'll see how it all just weaves together and hopefully all comes to a head again at the end of the season and leaves us an exciting place leading into season three. And, you know, before the end of this episode, we get the visit to Vault 24, where it seems like Vault Tech was brainwashing people, kind of clockwork orange style to see if they could turn

Americans into communists using these mesmatron-type mind-control devices. We see that Hank programmed someone to send a message to Lucy, go home. He calls her Sugar Bomb, which is her dad's nickname for her and in-game snack. And he takes a hard drive with records of the testing that they've done on this device. He takes it back to a Vault Tech headquarters where everyone's gone. And it seems like they've ended up, they've met the same. fate with the testing. But he leaves a message for Mr. House. And we know that Mr. House is going to show up in the flashbacks. Still kind of an open question about whether he's still alive in the present timeline, but Hank says he doesn't doubt it. And given that he's the guy who seemingly foresees everything

that's coming, you've got to figure that he will show up in some way, shape, or form in modern day, New Vegas. And Hank wants to work with him. He says, I'm going to complete the work you started. And when this is all over, you will be begging me to help you. And that's where we leave. these characters in this episode. So this brain computer interface miniaturized, making it work so that it doesn't explode the people you're trying to enslave, that seems like it'll be Hank's big goal throughout the season, and we'll see how that ties into the world domination narrative. We know Moldaver wants Koop to kill Robert House, whom she says will be the one who presses

the button. We don't know whether he wants to drop bombs on other cities or whether he just wants to protect Vegas from the bombs being dropped on it. So we see Coop and his wife putting up facades, pretending with each other. This happy husband domestic role could be his toughest acting assignment yet. There's a lot, a lot kind of up in the air. And we'll see how it all kind of comes together or whether it does. I hope it does because I like this show. I do too. I'm happy to be back. It's a fun world, man. It's a fun sandbox. I'm happy to be back. It is. It's a really good show. And there's a lot of character gross

I think that can still happen here. I hope we just don't skimp on time that it takes. We need some screen time for these characters to actually develop them the way that they were when we met them in season one. So I hope that you will be back at some point throughout this season, throughout this run for another recap on Futtonash,

but I'm glad you could join me for this first one so we could come back with a bang and with Van. Always a pleasure and an honor. Thanks so much for coming on. Anytime. Hey, pay attention to all of this tech stuff, all right? Fine.

It's actually not fine, but pay attention to it, all right? Enjoy fallout. I'll be back. I'll be back. Whatever you guys want me back, I'll be back. Keep your head on a swivel or it might explode. We may all be patsies, just like coop. Just unwilling stooges for the people who are pulling our strings, the puppet masters.

And now we hear from the ghoul nowhere near Robert. House is safe, but hopefully it's safe to talk to the man who plays Robert House, Justin Thoreau. I'll be back with him in just a moment, followed by Chris Hainer of Polygon, to school everyone just a bit about Fallout New Vegas. 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. It keep companies of all sizes connected with internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, mobile services, plus 24-7 U.S.-based support,

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As Beth and Rip build a future together, peace will have to wait is they face corruption, danger, and a ruthless rival ranch, willing to protect its secrets at all costs. Legacy is a beautiful thing, but only if it survives. Dutton Ranch starring Colehauser Kelly Riley, Annette Benning and Ed Harris, now streaming on Paramount Plus. Well, when you first meet Mr. House in Fallout, New Vegas, under certain circumstances, he says,

quite an honor, you spurned my invite. But we wouldn't spurn an invite to talk to the man who is playing Mr. House in Fallout, to Justin Thoreau. Who joins me now? Welcome, Justin. An intro. Thank you so much. It feels very accurate to the canon for me to speak to you on a screen while your body is elsewhere. So your mouth is moving at least. So that's an improvement. Speaking of the canon, you're inheriting a character who has been portrayed previously, most prominently, by René O'Bershonois. So when Walton Goggins calls you and asks you to play this part, what research did you do? What aspects of those previous portrayals did you try to adopt and what new elements did you try to incorporate?

Well, the first thing I did was clap my hands with joy because I was so excited to go work with Walton. We had never worked together. And then quickly got into the work of it, which was several phone calls with Geneva and Jonah and just trying to sort of get, bring me up to speed on where he fits into the story from, you know, as it relates to season one and where he fits of the story in season two. And then comes just the normal work of what any actor does, which is just trying to figure out the entry point to the character. I watched a lot of gameplay of particularly, obviously,

the house sections of New Vegas to sort of see what I could glean from that. Renee did such a beautiful job voicing that character that I quickly realized I didn't really want to try and obviously match that or do an impersonation of a character that he had already sort of created that felt pretty. full and having played video games myself for a long time, I know how those voices really get burned into your head and it can seem like there can be no other person that can do that. So knowing that, I sort of decided to, I guess, make a departure and try and find sort of what I thought would be an effective voice for Mr. House. And what I sort of struck on was that sort of

very, frankly, dated 50s, mid-Atlantic, Connecticut kind of accent that immediately places, when you hear it, it sort of places you beneath them, you know, when a person like that starts speaking in a room, you realize they're up here and you're down here. And so that's sort of what I leaned into. And that was sort of my first little toehold into playing him, which was trying to create someone that could plateau himself quickly in any room or any situation and make someone feel less than. Even though gamers are quite attached to that character and can be precious about those portrayals, I saw a lot of reactions. Oh, he's perfect for the part. So what were you told, if anything about why they thought of you for this role? I wasn't told anything. I guess the powers

it be, which I guess is Jonah, Geneva, Graham, and Walton thought it would be a good idea and trusted me enough to come up with something that fit. Now, I know you grew a mustache for White House plumbers and you were relieved to shave it off at the end of that show. So when you look up Mr. House and see the stash again, do you go, oh no? It was actually, no, that's a mustache that I actually would like to rock. The G. Gordon Liddy was not a fun mustache. But as luck would not have it, I was concurrently shooting something else at the same time. And I really did want to grow a mustache, but they gave me a fake mustache for this one. Got it. So I had to go through just the 10 minutes of prosthetics applied everything.

I think like we'll not go through. Yes, not quite. You get to keep your nose, so that's nice. You're a stylish guy. I think of you as a fashionable fellow, and I think the first reveal of you as Mr. House came in, GQ, appropriately. So tell me about the fashion sense of Mr. House

and how it does or doesn't mirror your own. It doesn't mirror my own. He has a very sort of loose-legged silken or linen pants. He's got, but it's very helpful as far as just being an actor you're playing and got the sort of cut shoulder and, you know, his silk shirts and those sort of, just those great sort of 50s type outfits and looks and those weird sort of bowling shirts. And I'm not even sure what they're called. But I loved his wardrobe. It wasn't the kind of wardrobe that I wanted to bring on with me, but it really put me in time and place when I were I put it on.

To the extent that you can say at this stage, where would you situate him on the moral spectrum from hero to villain? If you're asking me, I think he's pretty low, morally speaking. If you're asking him, I think he would conversely place himself very high. I guess a lot of villains, which. Yeah. You know, most villains think that what they're doing, including real life villains, think that they're doing something to better the country, better to the humanity.

It's so funny when you see, you know, occasionally they sort of drag these people before Congress. and they're very virtuous about what they're deploying on the population. And so, yeah, I think House himself would say, my work is important. You know, look, we've got to break a few eggs in order to get things done. But at the end of the day, you know, it's important work. And, of course, we have, as an audience, fallout, have the benefit of seeing how great that work was. Were there parallels to our world and our reality that drew you to playing a character like this?

Absolutely. Yeah. Delicious parallels. I won't name names, but in a weird way, I think it's more fun for the audience to name them. But look, when you have these billionaires that get to this incredibly rarefied air where they meet no resistance in their lives, they're free to pursue whatever technology they want to pursue and invest billions, if not trillions of dollars into it, that's a scary thing. Watching this season two premiere reminded me of another season two premiere when when Kevin Garvey moves to Jarden, Texas, the miracle town on the leftovers that's free of departeds. Is it a stretch to say that New Vegas is the Jarden of the Fallout University?

Do you see any similarities here? I don't know. I mean, it's less miraculous than Jarden. But yeah, God, I mean, I don't know. I mean, New Vegas feels like a horrible place to try and exist. Garden felt like that's sort of a utopia, even though it was fraught with its own problems. but yeah, there is some faint red line between our two apocalypses in these two shows. Yeah, I mean, compared to the wasteland, I guess it's quasi-utopian in some respects.

It's sort of a post-apocalyptic oasis. Also, maybe that in campus is outside of Jordan. Right. Part of like New Vegas. Yeah. You were friends with Walton, but you had never worked with him before somehow. I get the sense that you made up for Lost Time. when filming this season.

You two will share a lot of scenes, a lot of screen time. Tell me about what he's like as a scene partner. You know, it doesn't get much better than Walton Goggins doing a scene with him, you know, because he,

like myself, wants to, at least when you have, we had a couple of these big sort of operatic scenes, you know, real toe-to-to-to-type scenes. And we both wanted to really ring those out, you know,

as forcefully as possible. and make sure that we touched every corner of the room and sang the high notes and the low notes. And he's just one of those actors that'll, there's nothing, you can't do anything wrong with him and he can do nothing wrong to you. You just, we had such a good time. Hopefully no one can see how much fun we're having.

We really did. I mean, that would be my takeaway from this job was just how much fun those days at work were. Yeah, and a fellow fashionable fellow. So if you didn't envy Mr. House's, wardrobe than maybe Walton's you wanted to take home potentially. I have to kind of admire the ghoul's wardrobe. Yeah, you need some spurs.

Yeah. Can go clinking around. Well, I look forward to watching you unravel the enigma of Mr. House throughout the season. Justin Thoreau. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Ben. Well, we heard from Mr. House himself, or at least the person who's playing him. But who is Mr. House?

Where does he come from? What game character might he be based on? We're going to explore those questions and answers to them in this segment, which will be sort of a Spider-Man meme of a segment because we've got multiple senior editors in the house here. I am now joined by Polygon senior editor, Chris Hainer. Hi, Chris. How are you? I'm fantastic, man. It's fallout day. It is. It's exciting. We'll have to fight for seniority among the senior editors. I guess I've been a senior editor longer than you have. So I guess I have senior editor seniority, maybe. At least at my current place of employment.

Oh, definitely your current place. I'm on like my fourth role as a senior editor somewhere. Yeah, yeah. It's not a lot of advancement beyond senior editor. I think I've hit the ceiling here, unfortunately. I don't know when I go to like senior undergraduate school. Yeah. Because like once you finish your senior year, you move on.

I know. I guess we'll just be the boss next, presumably. We'll be the Mr. House of our respective publications. Oh, Lord. I wanted to bring you on because you wrote a good piece for Polygon last month about Fallout New Vegas and about how it's kind of gotten a glow up, how the reputation and perception of the game has improved in the now 15 years since it came out. This game came out in 2010. And it's now among the most beloved Fallout games. And unlike the first season of this series, which was kind of an amalgamation of the Fallout franchise and various influences, season two seems more.

explicitly indebted to Fallout New Vegas. So tell people who haven't played it, who aren't aware of it, who maybe haven't played the Fallout games at all, a little bit about how Fallout New Vegas is perceived and how that has changed over time. All right. So Fallout New Vegas was, okay, Fallout 3 is the game that sort of revitalized the franchise. Fall Out New Vegas was not developed by the same people.

Bethesda handed that off to Obsidian and they put together a game, basically, that's sort of like built on top of Fallout 3. So at first glance, you look at it. It doesn't look like much of an update from the game that came before, but they were asking to pay full price for it. Started as an expansion to it. Yeah, started as expansion. They're like, this is too much.

We got to make it a full game. And then they released it when it was incredibly broken. As a Fallout 3 nerd who was like day one buying Fallout New Vegas, I was so annoyed because it crashed. It introduced a really cool new faction system, which kind of becomes important to the games. but, you know, the first time you try anything, it's probably not going to work the best,

and it certainly didn't. But what followed, like, it was a different time where, like, if something like that happened now, it would be very much cyberpunk 2077, where the world knows. Yeah. But instead, like, they worked on it.

It got fixed. And it's just sort of, like, slowly been building this reputation as the best story in the Fallout series. Yeah. And nothing newer out of the ordinary for a Fallout game to be buggy, at launch. That's pretty part for the course, especially with the Bethesda developed games. This was published by Bethesda, but developed by Obsidian. And there's sort of multiple eras of the Fallout franchise. There's the 2D isometric perspective era, Fallout and Fallout 2 developed by Black Isle

Studios. And then there's the post Black Isle 3D era in which the franchise has mostly been steered by Bethesda. But you had this exception to that rule, this spinoff by Obsidian. which has become beloved. And in this era of Fallout, at least, I think it's probably defensible to say that there's a greater fondness and affection for Fallout New Vegas. There's more of a clamor for a remaster,

a remake, a sequel, Obsidian is constantly getting questions about when will there be some new version of Fallout New Vegas? And the funny thing is that if you read interviews with Todd Howard, who's an executive producer of this series, the TV series and sort of the steward of the Fallout franchise at Bethesda, or just the promotional materials, they're not really plugging Fallout New Vegas. They're steering you to some of the newer games, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Fallout Shelter, and yet, if there's one Fallout game that you need to know about in order to fully appreciate this season, it seems to be, from all indications,

Fallout New Vegas. I can never tell if Bethesda loves or hates New Vegas. Like, they are released in 2026, like a 15th anniversary edition of New Vegas. So like, at the very least, they know they can make money off of it. But yeah, I don't, I think part of it is because right now, there isn't necessarily a stable way to play New Vegas on a PC unless you're going to mod it. Like, there are certain storefronts where you can get versions of it. Like, I think the Game Pass version of it works kind of. but when PCs shifted to Windows 10, that game just stopped working,

flat out stopped working. And modders have gone back and made like the Viva New Vegas add on, which will make it so you can play the game. But part of me wonders if like, I'm sure once the anniversary edition comes out, they'll be pumping it really hard. But yeah, I want them to promote it now,

but I don't know who they'd be like, now go find this game that you can't play. Yes, there's the accessibility problem. And then maybe there's also a little bit of, I don't know if it's bitterness or resentment. Like, hey, Everyone loves this Fallout that we did develop more than the ones we did, seemingly. Hey.

So put a setting like it kind of in Fallout 76. People love it. Put Walt Duggins in there. Exactly. Yes. Have some gul downloadable content for people to enjoy or at least for Bethesda to cash in on. And it is sort of a strange situation because there's been this renewed interest in the Fallout franchise thanks to the show's popularity.

And yet there's no new game to plug. So we've seen the player counts and the sales increase just skyrocket really for the old games, but yeah, you're kind of, you know, their ongoing games in the Fallout universe, but there's not a new product to flog here. And you can sort of see why they would want to base this game on Fall Out New Vegas, because as you said, the story is really strong, the competing factions, the setting of New Vegas itself and the surrounding wasteland, the villain, Mr. House. So, so what stands out to you or what should people know? And, you know, it's tough to spoil anything exactly because it's not as if this is a direct adaptation of the game.

But if someone knows nothing about this game and its setting and its characters, what do you think it would be helpful to know going in? Okay. Well, so, like, for me, like, the star of the game is the, like, the whole of the Mojave Wasteland. For my money, it's the closest fallout. It's the closest the fallout franchise has gotten to sort of a world that feels alive. Everywhere you turn, you're running into some new stranger or a new animal or you're going

to the drive-in. but there's this thing hidden behind the drive-in that somehow digs even further into the story and it's all set against this very recognizable. It's obviously not an exact dude, but it's a very recognizable Las Vegas E backdrop where you look over the horizon and you can see the city.

And anyone who's driven to Los Angeles from, or driven to Las Vegas from Los Angeles, they know that exact site when they come up over the hill going in Nevada. You see that skyline. And it's just, it's a beautiful site to see in the game. And then the best part is you get in the game, you get to like go in and meet all the people who live there and like interact with

them and become part of their group. And I'm not sure how that's going to work on the show. The thing about the show is it's set in the Mojave Wasteland. New Vegas is clearly something that they're headed towards, they're aiming towards. If the season's goal is New Vegas, they're clearly not going to get there in the first episode as they take the time to reintroduce everybody. But there's so many little details and so many just little things pulled from the games. that they got right on.

There's a few things they got a little wrong. But if you've never played the games, you're not going to know that. But it's just the world feels well lived in because it's based on a world that was built to feel well lived in. Yeah. I think we're what, a decade after the events of New Vegas or something like that? 15 years. Yeah.

As long as it's been since the game itself came out. Oh, wow. Yes, matched up perfectly. That's awesome. Right. So things have moved on. And one thing they've been asked about and they have addressed. the showrunners and creators of the series,

they've said that there's no, they're sort of alighting what the canonical ending of Fallout New Vegas is because it's a fallout game. It's nonlinear. You can kind of choose your own way and make your own decisions to some extent. And so sometimes in a game adaptation, they will sort of cement one path

as this was the canonical ending of the game. And this time they're not doing that. They're avoiding sort of anointing one of those as the canon ending, which is nice, I guess, if you played New Vegas because it doesn't sort of invalidate your choice. I appreciate them saying that that's not true. I understand what they're saying,

but anyone who's played New Vegas will see things throughout the season where you're like, okay, well, that certainly eliminates my ending from the game. And I'm not even saying that like, look, you said it yourself, it's not a direct adaptation of any of the endings. They're kind of like, they're kind of forging their own thing because, truth be told, fallout as a timeline, all the games have multiple endings. And they're still all set in a singular timeline. So it's hard to directly nail down anyone ending anywhere. So I guess to that degree, they're not.

But there are definitely choices made. Yes. And one of the things about the game is that it takes a while to get to New Vegas in the game as well. Yeah. It depends. You know, it's, again, it's an open world. you can kind of go at your own pace. But if you're following the main quest line,

you don't just wake up in New Vegas. It takes quite a while. You're on the outskirts. You're in the Mojave. You're in the desert. You're going to all these little towns and gradually working your way up to New Vegas. And you play as this courier,

who's sort of a silent protagonist, and you are left for dead by this character named Benny, played by the late great Matthew Perry. And you are revived. And then you can kind of create the character, name the character essentially. And then eventually you work your way to New Vegas. You meet Mr. House.

You learn about this setting and this villain. So a lot of it is familiar. And just watching the premiere here, there are a lot of things just very viscerably bring me back to New Vegas because there is almost a direct one-to-one. For instance, the shootout, the first scene for Lucy and the Goal in the premiere, is taken directly from the town of Novak

in Fallat New Vegas. You see the dinosaur statue, Dinky the T-Rex, and the Dino Delight Motel. It looks exactly like it does in the game, almost. You know, you can kind of see. They turn the dinosaur around.

They turn the dinosaur around. It makes sense from a blocking perspective. I understand Lucy has to be able to see what's going on. Yes, exactly. But why is there a giant dinosaur facing this hotel and nothing else now? Because in the game, there is also a sniper stationed in the dino's mouth. But if you have a sniper, then you want them sort of facing out to defend the town from invaders. But for this shootouts, no, here you need the dino turned around so that Lucy can fire into the town.

But even the people that she's firing at are the great cons, one of the gangs that's running out and running around in the wasteland in Fallout New Vegas. And if you look at the trailer, again, I haven't watched beyond this first episode, but just in the trailers, we see lots of stuff that seems to be pulled from Falloutout New Vegas. Vegas, you know, the casinos, not just the headquarters for Mr. House, the Lucky 38, but also the Tops and the Atomic Rangler and the Gomorra and Caesar's Legion, one of the factions who were dressing like, you know, Roman centurions and the great cons and the kings and Victor, the Robco Securitron security robots, you know, all these things are pulled pretty directly from the game. And I will say for those who are game fans, understand that this,

this television show isn't about New Vegas. It's about these characters traveling there. So like, yes, you will meet Caesar's Legion. You will meet the cons. You will like, the kings are there.

But like that doesn't mean the show is going to become about these things. So as much time as you may have spent with them in the game, but believe the first time I've now watched my screeners a couple of times. And the first time I was genuinely like sad. I was like, well, why aren't we doing more with these factions? Like, oh, because that's not the point of the show. This isn't a New Vegas faction show. This is Ella Pernell Walton Goggins and the other guy make their way to New Vegas show.

Yeah, right. And that's a thing I like about this series is that, yes, it's a game adaptation. It's pulling from the Fallout universe. But it's not giving us something that we have played and seen just, you know, to a T before, which means that there's something new for us. And for you, someone who I believe has replayed the entire Fallout series this year in preparation for the show. Is that right? I'm currently.

Yeah, I recently finished all the new Fallout 76 content. I'm still grinding away. It has become a sickness. I don't understand why. I started playing the first one earlier this year and just kept going. I spent way too much time 100%ing New Vegas because I couldn't stop. It's just so good. I did not do that for Fallout 4.

Well, if you've 100% in New Vegas, then you've heard certain songs incessantly, and they must haunt your dreams. And I appreciated that because in the shootout at the beginning of the premiere, Big Iron by Marty Robbins is playing. And if you've played Fallout at New Vegas and you've listened to the radio stations, so there's kind of the iconic, there's a DJ, Mr. New Vegas, who's your host for the show and is playing songs and giving news updates. and then there are other stations that you can play on your pit boy as you wander around. And there's a great soundtrack in this game, but there are about a dozen licensed popular songs. And even if you sort of play this game somewhat speedily and say 30 hours or so, you will be hearing Big Iron and several other songs so many times that they will just be emblazoned on your brain forever. And so the sense memories of hearing Big Iron as they were doing the shootout in the scene, that was a nice little nod to people who have played that game and have heard that song

a zillion times. And see, as a game player, those are the kinds of touches I like. I'm glad they're pulling stuff from the game. And honestly, they're doing it the way I want. Like you, I don't want a direct adaptation of the story of Fallout New Vegas. I did that. I played that. I think that's a thing that a lot of, look, I love the first season.

of The Last of Us. I did not love the first season of The Last of Us, too. I've played that story. I don't want to do that story anymore. So, like, I just was able to kind of move on. This, it carved out its own space in season one. And now in season two, it's carving out that space in a familiar setting. Yes. Which is really exciting. Right. And it's not too heavy handed with it, where there are these winks that we can pick up on and that are meaningful to people who've played that game or the games in general. But if you didn't play them, then you will not feel any FOMO. He will not be aware that you're missing out on anything, that there's some reference or Easter egg here, because that's the worst. When you feel like you have to do homework and that someone

else is getting a fuller, richer experience of this thing, that can be bad. You can feel kind of left out or excluded or gate kept in a way. And that's not happening here. So clearly, there's a lot of love for that title and for the universe and the setting. But it's all worked in in a way that it's not so obvious, right? So if you're unaware of that, it will wash over you and you won't be aware that you're missing anything. And so you won't be, essentially, and that's good. I am replaying this now on Series X. So it's probably the simplest way to play if you have an Xbox. You know, you can buy it for five bucks. That's the nice thing about playing 15-year-old games. They're super cheap. Or you can play it on Game Pass if you have Game Pass and it won't cost you anything extra. And, you know,

it plays pretty well. Like, there's a lot. the frame rate boost, the loading happens very quickly. In fact, you know how older games they built in loading time? So they would show you text on the screen while you're waiting for the new area to load and you'd learn a little bit about the world. The loading times are so fast on Series X for Fallout at New Vegas that I don't even have time to read all the little lore tidbits. That's pretty awesome. Yeah, it just loads instantly. And only once has the game frozen and crashed on me, which I feel like it's the authentic Fallout New Vegas experience.

Oh, yeah. You got to have at least one crash for old times' sake. If it didn't utterly blow up in your face, would you really feel like you played Fallout New Vegas? The answer is no. No. It's part of its charm. Yeah, it's dated in some respects.

Obviously, this is Xbox 360 era and graphically it's not quite up to snuff. Though, you know, just because of the design, it holds up pretty well, I would say, you know, just because it's interesting areas and locations and a lot of thought and care went into that. And so even if it's lower res than you're used to or the landscapes are a little emptier, less populated than they might be today, that's okay. You know, once you acclimate to it and you're kind of back in that era of 15 years ago games, then you get used to it and it doesn't stand out to you anymore. So that's probably the easiest way to play if you have an Xbox, if you have a console and you want the convenience of the couch and the controller. But I do feel like I'm maybe missing out a little

bit on the PC experience. As you said, you might have to do some digging to actually get it to work, but a little bit, thanks to the community and the mods, like if you want to play the prettiest, most fully fleshed out version of New Vegas, it's probably going to be on PC with all the latest and greatest bells and whistles from people who really love this game. So I am missing out there. So you can go for the convenience and the ease, or you can go for the modernization, or you can maybe you wait for the 15th anniversary edition and see if it has an extra layer of pretty polish. Or alternatively, you could be like me. I'm going to, I did the piece of thing.

I'm absolutely getting the 50th anniversary edition. Yeah, both. Do both. There are some games and movies. If it gets put out, even if I have it, I'm going to buy it because it deserves my support. Falladue Vegas has joined Jaws. Sure, yeah. You can release, repackage, remaster as many times as you want.

We will line up and plunk down our five bucks, preferably. that would be nice. Yeah, I will be talking to some of the creators of Fallout New Vegas later on this season. And we'll get their insight into how it was made and their thoughts on how it's been adapted and reflected on screen. Is there anything that you'd care to share about Mr. House here since he was introduced in this episode, since we heard from Justin Thoreau, either how that character is regarded by the Fallout fan base or any of the lore that you think it's safe to share here without spoiling anyone's season. to experience? I will say Mr. House is rightfully hated by the fallacy.

Because, look, he is the quintessential billionaire old man trying to remake the world in his image, which is a very interesting story to focus in on right now in the year of our Lord 2025. But he's also a really interesting person because, like, in the games, the way Mr. House works is that, like, he is still alive, sort of in this distant future. and you're only taught, you basically, you interact with him via a computer screen that includes his intelligence in it. And you eventually, obviously, more is revealed as time goes by. They're doing things with Mr. House the season that I find really interesting that I think

makes sense, would make sense in the world of the game. So I'm excited to see how that goes. Honestly, I'm excited to hear what Justin had to say because he is, I would say, both visually and attitude-wise, exactly the right kind of actor to have playing. a Mr. House type character. A guy who, like, even if he's not, just look, I'm like, this guy is so suave. I bet he can talk anybody into just not anything because that's what Mr. House has to do.

He does horrible things and convinces people, it's all for the greater good. Yes, yes. And hated in the sense that he's a villain and you're supposed to hate him, but also revered as a character. Yes. Yes.

As a piece of fallout lore, like, he's beloved. He's central to, he was, like, originally he was central to New Vegas, but I feel like he's just become more and more central to the franchise as a whole in the minds of fans over the years. And now this show is making him more central to the, like the concept of the franchise. And I like that, like, he's a guy I love to hate. So it makes me happy.

Yeah. Yeah. And this is interesting because it's taking the framework, the templates of this character who's kind of iconic in the franchise. But then also showing us a. different portrayal of him and maybe pulling back the curtain a little bit on his origins because, yeah, you don't know exactly his whole history and what part he played and who exactly dropped the bombs and who did what. And so there's the potential to find out more about him here and the open

question of whether he will appear in the present in the second season of the show. So there's a lot to learn about this character, even though it's a familiar face in some respects. But honestly, bless the flashbacks because like even small moments where we get to see him in the pre-war days and kind of get a vibe for the kind of person he was like that is such really good context just for the

state of New Vegas as a whole because yeah he he is the central figure and like I cannot wait to see how they sort of bridge that story together with the game story and what exactly that's going to move. All right I appreciate the overview

of an important game in the Fallout For a moment, we'll keep comparing and contrasting as the season proceeds. We senior editors have to stick together. Senior editor solidarity. Thanks, Chris. Thank you, sir. Okay, if that peaked your interest, maybe you would want to play in Fallout, New Vegas. As the season goes on, you can play it along with me as I work my way through it.

I welcome your questions about the game, about the show, about what might come next. Send them to Ringervverse Gaming at gmail.com. Maybe we can do a mailbag segment or just work some questions into future recaps. Our pod on episode two will drop immediately after that episode does. So early next Wednesday morning, Christmas Eve, we will put that podcast under your tree. And Button Mash will be back before then with our 2025 Games of the Year draft. Thanks to Devin Ramaldo for producing this podcast, stitching it all together. Three segments, just like the three leads on Fallout.

Thanks to our Juno Ramgo Powell for his senior podcast management. War never changes, but Button Mash does. And we'll be back with more Mash on Monday. Feels like every product claims real protein these days. But real doesn't start on a label. It starts at the source. Like real California milk from California farm families, it's real dairy delivering high quality, complete protein,

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