Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
What's up? It's Todd McShay, host of the McShay Show at The Ringer and Spotify.
Chapter 2: What are the hosts' initial reactions to 'Fallout' Season 2, Episode 4?
We're building this thing up, and I couldn't be more excited to be back talking college football and everything NFL draft with the most informed audience out there. That's you. My co-host, Steve Mench, and I will be with you three times a week throughout the football season with all the latest news, analysis, and scouting intel from around the league.
Chapter 3: How do the Vault dwellers navigate their challenges in this episode?
For even more insight, subscribe to my newsletter, The McShea Report, to access my mock drafts, big boards, tape breakdowns, and other exclusive scouting content you can't get anywhere else. It's going to be a great season, and I hope you'll be with us at The McShea Show every step of the way. What's up, big boys? Welcome into The Ringers, your Nexus feed for all things fandom.
You know what they say, wherever you end up, it's where you belong. So clearly, you belong with Button Mesh, and with me, your host, Ben Lindberg. Someone else who belongs with me, my co-host for this episode, a man who does not have to apologize for not killing someone, Ringers staff writer, Daniel Chin. Welcome back, DC. Hello, hello. Good to be back. Missed you last week.
You and Van have sort of an alternating episode set up going this season. It's sort of like Fallout itself. We check in with certain characters some weeks.
Chapter 4: What developments occur with Maximus and the Brotherhood in this episode?
We skip over others. We return to them. So now we will get your thoughts on the season as a whole. And unlike Maximus, we do have a plan this week. We will be covering Fallout Season 2, Episode 4, The Demon in the Snow, directed by Stephen Williams and written by Jane Espenson. a prolific creator of nerd culture TV.
Check out the IMDb writing credits ranging from Deep Space Nine to Firefly to Buffy to Battlestar to Thrones to Jessica Jones to Foundation. So we'll give our big picture thoughts on this episode. We'll go beat by beat through the three major settings and character groupings. And we'll close with a few questions for the second half of the season.
And then I'll have a quick conversation with the man who designed the original New Vegas. Joe Sinabria, the lead artist for Fallout New Vegas and the art director of its DLCs. So, a lot of Fallout episodes come full circle.
Chapter 5: How do Coop and Lucy's storylines evolve throughout the episode?
Last week, we started and ended with Thaddeus in the Sarsaparilla bottling plant. This week, we start and end with a Deathclaw and someone saying, okie dokie, what else is new? And this installment marks a major milestone. We have hit the halfway point of the season, and our heroes or antiheroes have finally reached New Vegas. They've at last come face to face with living Deathclaws.
So, momentous episode. What did you think of episode four? I enjoyed it overall. I'm really having a lot of fun with this season. I will say there's so much happening. I know. There's really so much happening at all times. I watched this sometime end of last week and I just re-watched it again today. with the screeners and I like forgot some of the things that were happening.
It's just like trying to remember week to week. It's been really interesting to see how much of a difference it's made from having the binge structure from last season to going week to week for this season. Yes. much more conducive to weekly coverage on the Ringverse, which is good for us. But yeah, I like this episode too.
It was definitely jam-packed, but it felt a little less scattered and lore-heavy and world-buildy than... last week, which was kind of my complaint about that episode, that there's just so much thrown at us in terms of exposition and some long monologues about characters and factions. And that stuff sort of paid off to some extent this week, or at least
it felt more connected to our characters and to our main plot line, as opposed to we're just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall. So there is a lot to keep track of, but I feel a little more grounded in this world. Maybe it's just because the first few episodes have set things up and now we kind of know who the players are and we're not getting new factions.
Well, we kind of get one new faction introduced briefly and dispatched just as quickly. We'll get to that, but it felt a little more controlled.
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Chapter 6: What insights does Joe Sanabria share about the art of 'Fallout: New Vegas'?
To me, just all those moving parts sort of marshaled in service of a story that is heading somewhere as opposed to just sort of treading water. And it's about time, I guess, because we've waited a while to actually get to New Vegas in season two and to see a deathclaw. So it's about time. Yeah, I definitely agree with all that.
I think the only thing that, at least in regards to how many plates they're spinning at once when it comes to this episode, was Norm's section being like two minutes. Yeah. That scene, when I rewatched it, I actually counted. It was like two minutes and 15 seconds. Yes. And it's like there's a lot of intrigue going on. And I'm really excited to see where the storyline goes.
But it's tough when you don't see characters or stories progressing that much from week to week. And then when it does happen, you get two minutes. Yeah, definitely giving some characters, some plot lines, short shrift. Some characters were absent entirely from this episode or multiple episodes in a row. We'll talk about that at the end of the episode that we're doing.
And I guess that's a good place to start. So we have the vault dwellers and we have multiple vaults involved here.
Chapter 7: How does the design of Deathclaws contribute to the episode's tension?
We also have Maximus and the Brotherhood and everything happening there. And we have Coop slash the ghoul and Lucy in the past, in the present. So those are the three main plot lines, character groupings in this episode. And those will be our three main sections for this podcast. And maybe we can go in ascending order of intrigue or relevance or screen time. And we'll start.
underground with the vault dwellers. So we have one vault where Reg and his nice jugs are a big draw at the products of inbreeding support group, which is flourishing because Betty has put rationing in place, but the snack budget is baked into the charter and somehow the overseer's rationing does not supersede the charter's
snack budget apportionments, I guess her approval rating is suffering as it is. So if she tries to crack down on the snack budget at the inbreeding support group, that could be the last straw. So how do you think this fits into what we're seeing this season, this sort of side plot with Reg and his power grab here and the inbreeding support group?
Chapter 8: What are the implications of the characters' decisions in the wasteland?
Does this feel a little out of place to you? Because it kind of did for me in the season premiere and still does to some extent. I assume there's some reason why we are keeping up with our old pal Reg. That's definitely the way I felt about it and leading up to this episode. And now it seems like this is when they're starting to piece it together and making it into more of a conflict.
I think the dynamic and the emerging conflict between Betty and Steph is pretty compelling. especially just seeing how screwed Fall 33 is. All of it is going towards the snack budget right now. There is not clearly enough thought being into figuring out how they're going to survive and just have drinkable water.
But this whole thing that's coming up with Steph and that secret meeting that they had between her and Betty that I was about to call him Dylan, but that's his name. I'm having that problem too.
When I see Zach Cherry here, it's like Severance and Silo and Fallout all just kind of blend together in my head because there's like subterranean mysteries and it doesn't help that Zach Cherry is in a couple of them and is like trying to find out what is happening and his character is kind of in the dark underground.
It's just, yeah, there's a lot of, it's almost like his innie and his outie are on these two shows or something. I think Dylan would have been much better equipped for this situation than Woody is, though. Yeah, definitely.
But yeah, I mean, Woody is just... The way that Woody responds to this is exactly showing how well this experiment is working out in terms of breeding this group of Vault Dwellers to be so compliant that he's reporting the Overseer to the Overseer.
But I like that they're actually starting to show where this is starting to go, at least in terms of the mention of keepsake box and the fact that the cat's kind of out of the box. The cat's out of the bag right now in terms of it's kind of vault against vault now. Mm-hmm. Could be a cat in the box. We don't know what's in the box. It's a mystery.
The snack budget, it does remind me of the classic drill tweet that's like food, $200, data, $150, rent, $800, candles, $3,600, utility, $150. Someone who is good at the economy, please help me budget this. My family is dying. It feels a little bit like that. The candles budget. Indril's tweet is kind of the snack budget in Reg's support group here.
So I don't know if this is like kind of a coup via cookies and extra water or what this is shaping up to be. But yes, I do find the Betty slash Steph showdown kind of compelling. We get this overseer conference going. Betty confirms that Bud Askins is dead, which I wasn't sure about. I thought that maybe he was just incapacitated, just upside down or something. But no, evidently not.
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