| Fallout TV show - more in-depth thinky thoughts - Ep. 4 |
[May. 6th, 2024|05:52 pm] |
Aaaah, this episode. The fingers, the scene with Roger, and then the Super Duper Mart. So much good stuff between Cooper and Lucy. Also, I really like how the actors really knew what they were about in this. The Ghoul's condition is played well, with it just being a little cough at the start and then progressing to coughing fit and collapse. There's a few other places where...you can see the actors just doing things that are in-character but not really calling attention to them, which is always lovely to see. Folks put a lot of thought into not just what the character was saying, but what they were doing, as well, even if they were subtle things not everyone would pick up on.Spoilers through the end of the series. Read This...- The clinic and Roger- I've spent way too much time thinking about this scene, sorry
- Roger says he "did OK", at 28 years since he first started showing as a ghoul. So if 28 years without going feral is "OK", then Cooper being over 200 is rather suspiciously old. Roger even says he's "outlasted us all". Cooper suggests that it's just that he's good at making money/keeping himself in meds, but...something in his eyes when says that makes me wonder. IS it just that Cooper's lucky/good? Or is there some other reason that he's a particularly long-lived ghoul? I just wonder because they made a POINT in this show to change how ghouls in CA work vs. in the games. The games have non-feral ghouls who are perfectly stable and fine people without any sort of medicine needed: either you go feral or you don't, but either way, you stay that way. The addition of this mysterious medicine as a mechanic must have been done for a reason, and it makes me wonder if there's something we don't know yet about it and about why Coop's apparently one of the oldest ghouls out there. I can think of several possibilities, most of them centered around Barb and her possible access to Vault-Tec tech/meds.
- Cooper is unexpectedly kind to Roger. That comment about food, about ice cream and apple pie...he's being kind, giving Roger something nice to focus on, so Roger doesn't see the shot coming.
- Aaaah, the cannibalism. I already mentioned my theory on this (basically, that he's taking the time to cannibalize Roger because he's eating Roger's kidneys--which might be actively filtering out some of the medicine from the vials at Roger's side--to get some small amount of the medicine back out of Roger.) On second watching, I still like this theory. Also, oddly....the first thing he takes from Roger is a tooth. Like...just one? We see later on someone using teeth for bullets, but...he seems to use actual bullets, so why just take one tooth from Roger? I'm open to thoughts on this, because it's a headscratcher.
- Lucy mentions "The Great Plague of '77", when folks had to quarantine and there was famine and her dad lost a ton of weight. Something else happened in '77, we find out in Ep 6: the fall of Shady Sands. Sounds like Hank might have manufactured a plague in order to hide the fact that his wife and kids had disappeared and that he had to leave the vault to go after them.
- The fingers scene - corruption arcs and the lies we tell ourselves- I've also thought way too much about this scene, sorry not sorry.
- Obviously, the theme of Cooper and Lucy's interaction arc is "idealism/altruism vs. selfishness/self-preservation". Cooper has obviously already slid down this axis like it's a freaking slip 'n slide. He's gone from being a good man who doesn't even want to shoot an unarmed fictional character in the head to a very selfish man who will sell a woman to keep himself alive for another two months. And here he is confronted with this woman whose Golden Rule sounds very much like the ideals he used to uphold. So...now that he has her in his power, and knows that he might need to sell her to a terrible fate...how does he treat her? What I see him doing is a more intimate, extended version of how he treats others he doesn't trust: he pressures her until she breaks her own code and does something terrible, then uses that as permission to do something terrible back. It's like how he goads others into shooting first: it gives him permission to kill them in a way that him just shooting first doesn't. Likewise, I think he's pressuring Lucy (denying her water, taunting her, all the way through cutting off her finger) to get her to fight/attack/break her code. Because it will make him feel like hey, she's just another piece of shit like him, he doesn't have to feel bad about selling her. That's why all of his taunts are about the corruption of her moral code ("Oh, I'm you, sweetie...just give it a little time." "How's that Golden Rule jiving with what's going through your head right now?") He doesn't threaten her with violence or gloat about what he's going to do with her...no, he's focused on her supposedly pure intentions, and that's what he needles her about. It's the same when she bites off his finger: "there you are, you little killer." He's not mad that she's injured him, he's not even particularly angry that she tried to run away. No, he almost seems...satisfied? That he's gotten her to do something she obviously finds shocking. He's happy that he's shown her (and himself) that when pushed far enough, she'll be just as ruthless as everyone else.
- The finger cutting: Ostensibly, he's taking her trigger finger because he needs a replacement for the one she bit off. But one wonders why he couldn't just pick up the finger she spit out and sew it back on. Unless for some reason that wouldn't work, this is hands-down the cruelest thing he does in the show. Which is why it's so wonderful how it's played. Afterwards, he's not ANGRY, or gloating, or sadistic. He just gives her the "That right there is the closest thing we've had to an honest exchange so far." line. He's making a POINT to her (and to himself), that it's cruel and terrible out here, and see, this is just how it is. People take things from you, and you take things back. And he takes only and exactly what she took from him, but no more. This strikes me as a man who is oh so carefully walking along the tattered remnants of his own moral framework. It might SEEM like sadistic cruelty, but I don't think it is.
- The Super Duper Mart:
- All that said about the Ghoul and Lucy...he does cut her hands free before he makes her go in. Maybe to him that was him giving her a fighting chance. Or maybe it was just plot convenience, who knows.
- Do the organ dealers also make the anti-feral medicine? They were only holding live ghouls, while evidently the non-ghouls just get processed. Why keep the ghouls, though, especially ferals? Also, Snip-Snip says Lucy's being sold for "60 vials". If they sold a bunch of different things...wouldn't he say vials of WHAT? That he doesn't suggests that the anti-feral meds are the only thing they sell vials OF. This, combined with the trapped ghouls....makes me wonder if they make the anti-feral meds from live ghouls somehow.
- The ghoul that says "thank you!" before he runs off is seen in the last episode, in Shady Sands, where he obviously recognizes Lucy ("that's her!").
- The weird ignorance around Vault 32's fate - Vault 32 died 2 years before Moldaver shows up, but way after Rose left. Which makes you wonder what Moldaver's plan was supposed to be. Was she planning on opening 32 and killing everyone in there so she could pretend to be the 32 overseer? In fact...why wouldn't Hank have known that 32 had died? Surely 31 must have known, right? Was intervault communication so sparse that no one would notice that 32 had been silent for 2 years? Only thing I can think of is that 32 never got off a distress signal (for some reason), and Moldaver opened 32 by chance awhile ago, found it dead, and managed to fake regular communications to the others so that they never knew anything was wrong. I don't think we know WHEN the raiders first opened the door.
- Lucy wins - You can see Lucy think about shooting Cooper while he's helpless, once she comes out of the Super Duper Mart. And you can see him watching her do it - they both look at her gun. He seems resigned to it, before she gives him the meds. It's a great resolution to their tug of war - she's won, and her philosophy is battered but still intact. For all that she's had to kill in self-defense, she not only won't murder him, but she'll help him, even though he's harmed her. Also, little continuity things: she's picked up the quintessential "leather armor" from the game inside the SDM, and she's also picked up a replacement for her lost shoe.
- Cooper's response - That he IMMEDIATELY goes on a colossal bender is pretty telling. Yes, he's obviously a junkie in a candy store and ridiculously relieved he won't go crazy, but it also feels desperate, like he wants to forget what's just happened, what Lucy just did. He did a terrible thing to her, and she turned around and helped him. In this game of "this world (including me) will corrupt you with our terribleness" vs. "the Golden Rule" they were playing, she won.
- The Man From Dead Horse - it's a double whammy for him that right after Lucy helped him, he's reminded of this compromise of his own morals, ALSO about shooting an unarmed person: he watches himself playing a character being corrupted, turning into a killer saying lines he didn't want to say. Right after he himself was in the "bad guy's" position and was spared. No wonder he wants to get as high as possible as quickly as possible - for a guy I feel is holding onto his last moral with teeth and fingernails, that must hurt.
- Yet more fingers - While he's watching, Cooper goes to mime pulling a trigger...and he can't. >:D Because he doesn't have a replacement trigger finger under his gloves yet. It's a very subtle thing, both him doing it and him looking at it, reminded that it's gone. Fine acting.
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