[ You know what they say: If you’re in a Vault, and you’re not conducting an experiment, you’re the experiment. That’s the lesson I think Lucy MacLean ought to take from her madcap adventures in the mysterious Vault 4, which come to a surprising conclusion in this, yet another charmingly nasty episode of Fallout. It’s … Read more
[ Preemptive surrender is the thing they always warn you about with fascism. The danger becomes acute when people decide it’s gonna happen one way or the other, so they may as well show they’re on the side they expect to emerge victorious. In so doing, they help ensure that victory. Cooper Howard starts Fallout … Read more
[ Without having played any of the games, I can’t tell you what elements of Fallout are taken directly from the source material and what aren’t. That said, one can make some educated guesses. For instance, when Maximus unwisely reveals his identity to his “squire” Thaddeus, Thaddeus easily incapacitates him by removing some doohickey from … Read more
[ About fifteen seconds into Fallout Episode 4 (“The Ghouls”), I finally hit my breaking point: This cheery 1940s-1950s Americana musical bullshit is too goddamn much already! Even when I looked up the lyrics to the first song, an inane ditty about how “Life’s worth living when nature’s giving,” and found out that the video … Read more
[ Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I’ve never played a Fallout game. Other than recognizing its ubiquitous blond-haired mascot man and understanding it takes place after some kind of nuclear apocalypse, I knew nothing about the franchise at all prior to pressing play on the television adaptation’s first episode. But … Read more
[ Although Israel’s Gaza war is most visibly being waged against Hamas, the ultimate adversary is Iran. If Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts should sometime bring it into direct confrontation with Iran, the result could be an immediate escalation between these two adversary states. In such a plausible scenario, even a still-pre-nuclear Iran could elicit a “limited” … Read more
