crop up in the season premiere<\/a>, so it\u2019s nice to see him here. The episode even starts with a flashback to his backstory, with Shady Sands being ruthlessly nuked on Hank\u2019s indifferent orders, leaving Maximus the only survivor of the colony with no real idea of what happened or why. But that lack of certainty and understanding is what made the Brotherhood of Steel seem so initially compelling, even though it\u2019s a thoroughly psychotic organisation.<\/p>\nPersonally, I find the Brotherhood very funny. The multi-chapter meeting in this episode is brilliant stuff \u2013 \u201cThat was one squire, and he was well within his rights!\u201d \u2013 but it\u2019s funny because it\u2019s nuts, seeing these cosplaying idiots hopelessly bicker over cold fusion, war with the Commonwealth, and various matters of even less importance. Maximus\u2019s arc in \u201cThe Golden Rule\u201d is about realising for himself that the Brotherhood isn\u2019t what he had idealised it to be.<\/p>\n
This takes a heavy-handed form in Maximus having to fight and kill a much bigger Knight in the pit-fighting celebration thrown to celebrate everyone rallying around Elder Quintus to war with the Commonwealth over limitless energy. But it\u2019s threaded throughout the entire hour if you\u2019re looking for it. This subplot also excuses the introduction of Kumail Nanjiani\u2019s imperious Paladin Harkness, who arrives towards the end of Fallout Season 2, Episode 2, to lend a bit of gravitas to proceedings.<\/p>\n
Lucy and the Ghoul, meanwhile, are not getting on, and largely for the same reasons as usual. The Ghoul is well practised at ignoring the plights of those suffering in the wasteland \u2013 \u201cPeople have been screaming for two hundred f*cking years\u201d \u2013 while Lucy is too pathologically peppy \u2013 \u201cDid it ever occur to you that if you helped them they would stop?\u201d \u2013 to ignore a single cry for help. But that cry for help is emanating from a woman dressed in a tunic, which the Ghoul clearly recognises as membership of Caesar\u2019s Legion, but instead of just saying that outright, he acts all coy and psychopathic, I think just to annoy Lucy.<\/p>\n
After a fun fight with some mutant scorpions, Lucy and the Ghoul part ways (again). She leaves him badly injured to take the woman she has just rescued back to her home, but immediately finds herself surrounded by men in Roman Empire attire. In a roundabout way, the Ghoul was right, but the fact that this is happening entirely because he didn\u2019t explain his line of thinking or warn Lucy about the Legion feels a touch too artificial for my taste. A side quest is fine, but a side quest for the sake of it is another thing entirely.<\/p>\n
In Vault 31, Norm manipulates the newly awakened Dwellers to help him escape the place, and at Vault-Tec\u2019s old headquarters, Hank continues to test the brain-computer interface, first on lab rats and then on humans. The human stuff constitutes pretty biting anti-capitalist satire of a kind that really helps to situate us in the universe of the Fallout games \u2013 one of the guys he wakes up is some rich dude who bought himself a premium doomsday survival experience but left his family to die \u2013 similar to how the endlessly stellar production design does. People have been needlessly snooty about the introduction of Robert House, as I expected they would as soon as we entered New Vegas territory, but I\u2019m not sure that most of the criticism feels especially genuine \u2013 this still feels very much like the games to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary Fallout Season 2 is very much in side quest mode in \u201cThe Golden Rule\u201d, but things are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[5136,156,111,139,69,7687,437],"class_list":["post-199992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-drama","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science-fiction","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}