Maximus is by far the weakest part and I think it’s due to direction? I want to see what else the actor has been in (last I checked it wasn’t much). I would’ve preferred him a staunch zealot devoted to the Brotherhood who begins to question their beliefs. He’s black sheep with them as well tho and whoever gave him direction told him to be as flat as possible. If he’s a blank, emotionless slate he should be whole heartedly devoted to the cause.
I was so confused by what his apparent trajectory appears to be. He's fallen upward into a position of prominence by somehow becoming the leader's "top guy" or something. I think out of all the characters he's probably the worst hit by shit writing.
1. The expected competency of a trained member of the Brotherhood just isn't there (though to be fair, it doesn't seem to be true for any of the ones we've seen).
2. His dialogue is just
awful (
"When they make it move, it gets all big and hard like a big pimple and then it pops. And they say it can happen to anybody, but it's still, it's... it's gross.")
3. His character is completely absent of maturity, even more so than Lucy somehow. This is shared by every Brotherhood character in the show except the Elder.
It's chicken & egg on whether he got fucked up due to what they have planned with the Brotherhood, or they fucked up the Brotherhood over due to what they have planned with him. I'm guessing they might be trying to give him an arc of maturing into what he envisions the ideal knight of the BOS to be but waiting until the last 2 episodes of the first season to have him make a mature, selfless decision on his own initiative really does a number on his likability. The couple of times he was decent was the instance of him displaying some competency (the bridge scene) or some introspection (when asking Thaddeus why he bullied "Maximus"). Though the latter is undercut severely by threatening to kill Thaddeus when Thaddeus justifiably thinks Maximus had a hand in killing the power armour's previous owner, because Maximus opened with, "let's get our stories straight" instead of explaining what happened.
We've seen the meeting where House discusses with Vault Tec the "divvying up of the spoils" but not what happened after.
My prime (
heh) issue with the show is that the tone is extremely bipolar. It flips completely from mature to infantile, unable to make up its mind, and it ends up making good scenes come out worse. You can make the argument that it's in-line with the games, but that's a rather surface-level look at it, and I'd argue it's not true for any of the games. The games portray its bizarre elements completely straight, and at a push they might be accompanied by a nudge and a wink. Meanwhile the outright comedy was blatant enough that you could tell that's what it was meant to evoke humour rather than be taken with complete seriousness. You don't get the impression from the games that it's creators are embarrassed for creating it, so has to let the audience know constantly that it's "in on the joke", or some such. The ideas you propose here, the ones I proposed even, are reliant on a show that takes itself seriously, which it oftentimes doesn't.
One example is the vault Lucy and Maximus end up in together. The one where the inhabitants were subjects of genetic engineering, hybridisation, and other cruel experiments; they also share their vault with refugees from Shady Sands. Maximus also says, "you want to make my cock explode now?" whilst snacking on popcorn. That conclusion to this detour concludes in misdirection from a potential conspiracy; miscommunication from Maximus, Lucy, and the Vault resulting in a rampage that injures people; a cyclops also saws through a rope with a big ass sword, completely oblivious to the fact his punishment on Lucy isn't a punishment at all and not grasping the fact she's extremely thankful and appreciative for the boon he's allowing her to depart with.
Man, that entire time in the vault was so awful that the show would be improved were it removed entirely. It added nothing, actively made Lucy and Maximus worse thanks to the dialogue they spewed, and may end up spawning a plot thread I feel won't get resolved at all in season 2 (the cult and worship of Moldaver).
When you make the world itself a joke, you end up with
Borderlands, not
Fallout. It becomes less a
world, and more a living setup for the eventual punchline. People don't behave like people in the show, they act like cartoons, and cartoons aren't prone to making logical or mature choices you can follow with any degree of coherency.
Lucy's character is designed to be looked at as someone completely out of their depth finding out almost every aspect of her life has been curated/a lie. I'd imagine it would be like dropping Bill Johnson, your every day American Joe from the 'burbs into the middle of Mumbai. How do you think he would react?
Lucy to me isn't reacting like a person plucked out of normalcy into that situation would, she displays a puzzling level of naivety and lack of self-preservation after watching dozens of her neighbours/friends get massacred by people from the very outside world she's entered into. She doesn't demonstrate any real precaution, sleeping out in the open with a lit fire, and would've been killed in her sleep had Enclave-man not appear from out of nowhere. Almost from the very start she's missing what feels like the bare minimum of wariness from leaving her vault that one would expect, considering the education of dwellers is very persistent about possibly expecting danger and mutants on the outside.
Small aside: this idea of the Vault Dwellers being helplessly naïve has very little in the way of actual precedent. The closest we got to this is Vault 3 I think, but their naivety was the result of a good first impression of the outside which was quickly taken advantage of by bad actors.
"The inhabitants of the Vault were simple traders. They made a good living for themselves for a couple weeks. Then they caught the Fiends attention. I don't think they set up any kind of security, stupid fucks. They all got themselves killed. "
"I guess it isn't a secret. Yeah, the residents of the Vault are all dead. We killed them. Funny thing is, they just let us in. We didn't have to force the doors or anything."
We also have the opening of Fallout 2, where the dwellers of Vault 13 wave at some Enclave before being mowed down, This is because the Enclave sent an
all clear signal (they're the US government after all), assuring the residents within it was safe to come out and so they did. Not really their fault.
Just to be fair though I did look up to find more examples of this, but the only real one I could find was Vault 94, a vault from Fallout 76 where some Christians opened up a year or two after the bombs fell and invited the first group they found back home, where they were all promptly killed.
Lucy's vault might condition her for over-optimism, but I feel that associated naivety and high expectation would've died on her wedding day. You'd have to
will yourself into obvious danger to maintain what you know for sure is just a façade now. It's actually weird thinking about it in hindsight, with one maybe-exception, she's never really put into a situation after leaving home where trusting a stranger backfires on her, and the one time she
does get suspicious of someone's intentions she ends up being in the wrong for it (the vault). She trusts the rough-looking woman in the town who sends her off with Wilzig, Maximus, Walton, Moldaver. The bridge scene might count, but that scene's a weird outlier in the show as is. Otherwise her peppiness and trust in others is vindicated pretty often.
Her character might get better in season 2 since they don't have to bother with the rigmarole of getting her used to the wasteland. This actually applies to Maximus too since his "maturity" act or whatever concluded with him lying to protect Lucy.
He'll look at Goggins and say something like "You might not think me a good man, but I did what I could." It'll show Goggins that it's not money or power that's bad, it's the man who wields it. Gives a chance for Goggins's character to reflect on his actions and remember what made him a good man.
Since they're going to decide on an ending for FNV with this anyway, you could have this moment in the Lucky 38. Maybe the Courier in this show's depiction disconnected house from the mainframe and just left him alive in his pod, leaving any of the non Mr House endings up in the air for what was picked. Goggins can have this convo with a desiccated Mr House and grant him a mercy kill or something.
Having said that, I'm getting the horrid premonition that Goggins is going to grant this kill off the back of a Mr House who
did have a direct hand in ending the world, thus making the act come across as even more noble to the audience than it otherwise would. Worst case: House is alive, responsible, and trapped in his pod. After a convo, Goggins leaves him to rot forever in his pod as "just deserts", likely because at this point Mr House has been made utterly irredeemable; this would also echo how we're introduced to the Ghoul, who was being kept alive in a coffin, unable to escape.
I do agree with you however that it's not
all bad. There's a few things that kept me strung along (not watching it alone helps) and individual moments that I did like/remember.
1. Walton Goggins.
2. The pre-war stuff was good about 80% of the time, because most of the characters actually feel like people.
3. The ghoul mercy kill scene. (Ass-jerky maybe takes away from it a little)
4. Matt Berry (pre-war scene)
5. Most of the vault arc with Norm. He's a main character too essentially so his complete absence from any of the promotional material is baffling. His scenes and uncovering the conspiracy in the Vault ended up being the only real satisfying story thread in the show. It's a shame it ends up being retarded in its own way. Again, the bipolar aspect hit here, primarily with the experiment being to create, via eugenics, a perfect manager class (
specifically managers) once it's time to inhabit the surface. Good sub-plot, kind of lousy resolution due to being mired in cartoon-character logic and any weight being undercut by a brain in a jar.
7. Brotherhood vs Remnant NCR. Blatantly for the spectacle of it, even if wasn't a particularly grand one. Also Kyle MacLachlan actually had some lines to speak.
8. Maximus asking Thaddeus why he bullied him (undercut by Maximus still being an asshole)
9. Kyle MacLachlan.
10. I actually liked Thaddeus.
