Thanks to the wonders of downloads and DVDS, some time in the last few years I discovered that the TV shows I enjoyed the most were ones that had been off the air for thirty years or more. Perhaps it was because the people who created them felt no need to be deep and meaningful and realistic. Who knows? I just find them fun. At the moment I'm into Dark Shadows and Classic Doctor Who - but don't be surprised if I suddenly talk about Adam Adamant Lives! or The Sweeney instead!
Finally got my hands on a copy of Platform Decay and one thing I really appreciate that I haven't seen mentioned is that Murderbot is studying human evolution to understand humans better.
Maybe it's because I'm mid-Star Trek rewatch but I do get tired of the weird outsider character always being like "wow humans are so weird and illogical and make no sense" and the humans always being like "yup! aren't we quirky and weird (in a positive way)!" and just. As someone who has taken exactly one (1) class in human evolution, no?? Once you account for social signaling and the incredibly complex layers of cultural evolution we've built up, it all makes very reasonable sense actually.
Why do we small talk? Social bonding. What is the point of celebrating this holiday/event? Social bonding. Why is courtship so emotionally fraught? Because picking an appropriate partner is a big deal, both socially and like, evolutionarily, and social rejection is bad, which our brain signals to us via emotional responses. But don't your people understand that you're no longer living in a survival context? Sure, we no longer have to worry about starving to death because we have no friends to share food with during the famine, but have you considered: have you provided adequate "true" signaling to prove that you are willing to risk your life to save me from the Borg? Because if not, I'm probably not risking my life for yours. Get your ass over to that birthday party and appreciate it.
And of course, we're getting it from Murderbot's perspective, so its response is "sounds fake but okay." XD
The thing is, Murderbot has human neural tissue, so to extent human evolution affects the way it is too. Look at the way it connects through human media/storytelling for example.
It would probably rather die than admit that, though!
when i think about walton goggins saying that cooper paid for the cherry tomatoes he took because stealing is against the ghoul’s morals, my brain goes to a special place.
I think symbolically/metaphorically . This is the moment where she realizes she has a taste for violence. To me it’s a parallel to this moment of the ghoul in the Filly episode:
Like Ghouper she’s competitive, she likes violence on some level and we know she’s a crackshot. I feel like we’re going to see this side of her more as the show progresses, but hopefully using it for good.
I think the drugs remove her inhibitions where she would normally feel shame about violence even against feral ghouls which she was previously against.
The fact that she’s lying in her back, blood on her face, while cooper watches mind you, tells me there is a sexual element to this. The whole episode is riddled with sexual tension from the moment she wakes up in the NCR camp to the drug scene. Cooper is also enjoying the show she makes of killing ferals. Not only are connected by their enjoyment of drugs and violence in this episode, but there is also a sort of sexual gratification on both ends.
For cooper it’s probably getting off a bit on the fact that he’s a bad influence on her, for Lucy, it’s finally getting some release from the frustration of being treated like shit by everyone she meets. There is a release for both of them, they’re both finally getting something they’ve been subconsciously craving.
And the fact that she’s always looking to him for approval after each altercation tells me there’s some awareness of an exchange, a push and pull between them that is (and maybe my brain is just broken by kink) almost like a BDSM dynamic.
She needs release, she looks to him for permission, he gives it, they both get release
Rinse and repeat
So orgasm in the literal sense? Perhaps? Maybe a tiny one? But in the psycho sexual dynamic of violence, control, enabling, and freedom between them? Yes. Absolutely.
This little moment is one of my favourite scenes of season 1.
At this point the show has established how badly many in the wastelands treat Ghouls. We saw how the people of Filly excluded Ghouls, and Lucy personally witnessed Ghouls being enslaved and put on display in the Super-Duper Mart.
And when she finally tracks down Moldaver and the survivors of Shady Sands, what does she find? Not just people and families living communally and caring for each other, she also sees them caring for one of the Ghouls she saved.
The idea that people in the NCR are much more accepting towards ghouls and mutants is something the show has been building up for a while. We saw it with Max all the way back in vault 4, and we also see this expanded upon in his arc for season 2 and with our encounters with the NCR.
And it's a theme that I think the show will continue to explore further in s3 and beyond. It's one of those things from the lore that we mostly only hear about in the background and in the codex, but the tv show have an opportunity to explore it on screen, like in this scene, and future scenes with the NCR.
wait murderbot's mentioned once or twice that secunits were "originally designed for" stuff like de-escalation, quick and efficient rescues, absolute minimum force and the like. ive always wondered why exactly they were designed with human faces in the first place given they're mainly used to enforce corporate slavery and having visibly expressed emotions is a detriment to that. but it would make sense if they were "meant" to be used in more of a rescue capacity, where showing empathy and being visibly familiar would be advantageous. anyway this leads into: if secunits' emotional capacity and skillset are geared towards rescue and they're used as enforcers of abuse.... well it does explain something about how fucked up they are
Growing up, I played a lot of Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, and whatever other games we had on the family Wii. But the first game I remember truly playing and falling in love with was Fallout 4 when I was a pre-teen. I had done all this work to be able to play it on the family Mac, and the pay-off was well worth it.
I put hundreds of hours into the game, and after my first run-through I got Fallout: New Vegas, which is still my favorite of the games. However, 4 still holds a special place in my heart -- and not just because I spent so many hours trying to figure out mods -- but because that's what started my love for this era of fashion.
Fallout's aesthetics -- both pre-War and post -- are heavily mid-century inspired, drawing from retro-futurism and atom punk. The fashion itself, at least before the Great War, is consistent with popular 1950s fashion.
Photos from Reddit, originally from 'The Art of Fallout 4' by Bethesda Softworks
While seeing these fashions, and later the remnants of them, in the games sparked my interest; years later getting to see the world brought to life in Prime Video's Fallout (2024-) brought me right back into my middle-school obsession.
I don't think I can think of any complaints for the costuming of the show off the top of my head, (though I may be biased) my favorite to see on screen every time was Frances Turner as Barb Howard. Turner shared some details about her character's wardrobe, and the work that Head of Costumes Dayna Pink put into the looks in an Instagram Post.
"With one exception, every look from episodes 5-8 was conceived of, designed, and handcrafted by our costume department under Dayna’s direction, with vintage fabrics used whenever possible. The beige suit Barb wears in New Vegas? That’s a sourced original vintage Lilli Ann" Turner wrote. "Lilli Ann, the iconic mid-century label known for beautifully tailored and polished silhouettes, feminine structure, and that elevated “put together” glamour is a major inspiration for Barb’s wardrobe in S2."
Photos from @francesturner on Instagram. Concept art by Imogene Chayes
Photo from @francesturner on Instagram.
The costumes of the post-War world of Fallout are a whole other cause for appreciation. After nuclear annihilation, fashion is hardly a priority. There has been some debate on the logistics of clothing production in post-War America, but the clothing that we do see -- in game and on screen -- is clearly far from new.
Outfits are scrapped together from the remains of a world that's no longer there. Wastelanders foregoing any notion of fashion for survival (and in a nuclear fallout, who's to blame them). Both in obtainable clothing in-game and on NPCs, we see outfits that are the tattered relics of the mid-century fashion that defined the pre-war era, often fitted to be more tactical for survival.
Left to right: Photos from Fallout Wiki, The Art of Fallout 3 courtesy of Reddit
The Art of Fallout 4 by Bethesda Softworks
However, one of my favorite examples of this "scrapbooking" comes from what we see of New Vegas in season two of Fallout. While stepping away from the traditional, 1950s inspired outfits we see throughout the rest of the world, we see the glittery remains of Las Vegas (which is doing considerably okay compared to the rest of the world).
Top photos and bottom left from Reddit, bottom right from Mari Mayol-Worden on Instagram
Here, we can see a hodgepodge of bellhop uniforms, showgirl bodysuits, and various costumes from what one can imagine were once worn before the bombs dropped. I'm a sucker for little details like this. (Both good and bad. Looking at you, Dinky)
Another example featured in both the show as well as Fallout: New Vegas, is that of Caesar's Legion. Now, I never gave them too much credit, in all of my hours logged in the game, I never spared them more than I had to. A detail I again want to appreciate is the various "armor" of the legion. While the group as a whole is going "more of a Roman theme" as Ella Purnell's character says in 'The Profiligate', their armor consists of a lot of sports equipment. While they are still adorned with pteruges and even furs and wolf heads to hone their aesthetic, ultimately it is a similar case to the citizens of New Vegas; people making do with what they have.
It's the small details like these that help with world building. They aren't written in, nor are they often granted their own screen time aside from being seen in the background. But without them, you would have an empty world.
This is why good, well-though costume design is so important, whether it's a game, series or movie. Among many, many other things, one of my issues with Emerald Fennel's Wuthering Heights adaptation was the costumes. Now, period-media with costume historical inaccuracies is far from rare, and is oftentimes celebrated, such as Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006), but Wuthering Heights has sparked recent conversation about when it goes too far.
From Vogue
From Inviting History
Of course in writing this, I'm speaking from a love of the Fallout universe. This post is almost full circle in a way; I had discovered the game when I saw people post about it on Tumblr more than ten years ago. My spring/summer wardrobe is inspired a lot by retro silhouettes and patterns, and I think that if you took Amy Winehouse and Fallout out of my head, that wardrobe would look a lot different.
If you've read this far as someone who has no knowledge or experience of the world of Fallout, let me take a second to encourage you to do so. You don't have to start by playing a nearly 30-year-old game, nor are you expected to have even a fraction of an idea of all the lore surrounding the universe. But, maybe you can sit down and watch some of the show. If you have more time, you can play one of the newer games. They even have a mobile game where you can run your own Vault if that's your vibe.
However you dip your toe into it, Fallout has so much to offer. If my post about the costumes of it can get you interested, imagine what else is in there for you.
gotta be honest don’t totally understand when people claim ghoulcy is barb erasure………did we watch the same show? not trying to yuck anybody’s yum but that seems like a pretty good reason for shipping Something other than barb and cooper
She was the one signing off on the vault tech experiments. She was made aware of the water chip failure rate and didn’t try to change it, knew about the FEV. Barbara is an interesting character, and honestly I hope they don’t dumb her behavior down to a sobbing “I had no choice!” at Cooper’s feet.
I hope she stands on business, believes that her choices were her own, no matter how flawed. I want her to be a little twisted, proud of how her and her daughter made it to safely while the world fell around her. I hope she has more ties or allegiances that she hasn’t mentioned, more plans that she’s been quietly waiting to fall into place. Whether she’s unredeemable to Cooper or not is irrelevant, imo.
I think to take a strong, intelligent black woman and dumb all of her actions choices down to “I was just following orders”, is a shame.
If she does sob at Cooper's feet, I hope it is as a calculated act.
One thing I've been wondering is how Janey would react to Barb's actions when she's old enough to understand what Barb has done. Horror? Guilt when she learns that Barb "did it all for" her? There is so much dramatic potential there.
So, the choices made with Barb’s character are neither a retcon nor a redemption; they’re a lazy fucking backtrack, and we were all idiots to think that the very important and necessary questions raised by Barb as a character (questions of power and culpability) were going to be addressed well or at all by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.
Barb is a great character, and an incredibly important *type* of character. She’s a mirror and a barometer for every viewer. The question posed by her existence is, “what would *you* do?” How many evils could you, viewer, capitulate to before you can no longer be separated from those evils? How many innocent families would you believe your own to be worth? What excuses would you, viewer, believe are acceptable shields against the consequences of your complicity? What actually makes a monster? Does evil triumph when good people do nothing, or does it require the many helping hands of average people unwilling to risk what it may cost to do the right thing?
These are good, necessary, important questions - especially these days. And we were all fucking kidding ourselves that Amazon was going to give weight to even a single one of them.
So, here are a few details that should not be forgotten when talking about the direction Barb’s character has been taken;
1) Barb made Cooper an accessory to genocide, and she knew she was doing it.
It’s one thing to decide for yourself that you are willing to abet a nuclear holocaust for the sake of ensuring your family survive it. That is, again, a very personal barometer for how shitty someone allows themselves to be. But Barb used her marriage to Cooper and his trust in her to manipulate him into leveraging the career he built with his own two hands to convince people that they should pay a company money for the privilege of being brutally experimented on into perpetuity.
She knew she was doing it. She was the head of the vault project.
In his very first photoshoot for Vault-Tek, he asks if the vault suit he’s wearing is actually rad proof, and we watch her instruct her flunkies to lie to him.
Cooper loses a movie deal and gets boycotted by his coworkers for his work with Vault-Tek. His job is negatively impacted by work he took for her sake and NEVER would have consented to if she’d given him the information that human decency dictates he was entitled to before he put his face and his credibility behind selling her Nexus of Unspeakable Horrors to innocent people. He did it because he loved and trusted her, and she knew that. Which is a betrayal of their very marriage. She could have had an affair, and it wouldn’t have been on the level of betrayal she actually committed.
When Barb tells Cooper that dogs won’t be allowed in the vault, Cooper starts asking good and fair questions about which constitutional freedoms (which he took an oath to uphold) he was being expected to leave at the big lead door. She immediately guilts, gaslights, and moves the goalpost on him. She switches the narrative to how hard it was for *her* at home while he was (checks notes)… barely not getting his face bit off by a dinosaur Minotaur, or exploded in his metal meat coffin by Reds. She makes her veteran husband feel guilty for asking about his basic rights. On. Purpose.
2) Barb’s justification… isn’t one.
Suggesting that the fact of a child’s life matters more than the quality of a child’s life is abusive pro-life nonsense.
Hear me out.
Janey won’t be a little girl forever. Hell, chances are fair that Janey won’t be a little girl by the time Cooper finally finds her. She’s going to have questions about why and how they survived, she’s gonna get curious, and she’s going to end up knowing what we know about her parents roles in the end of the world.
Either Janey is going to wake up as a little girl in a world where everyone and everything she’s ever known exploded and was replaced by mutated super monsters and wasteland, or she already has. Best case scenario - other than that she is either still asleep or was just woken up around when Hank got to Vegas - is that she grew up in a corporate hellscape where the sky was stolen from her and she was likely brainwashed into the Vault-Tek/Enclave way of thinking (a la Fallout 4). And there is genuinely no end to the worst-case scenarios.
Every one of those scenarios, best and worst and worse-worst and way-worse-worst because please don’t forget that this is Fallout y’all, are exactly what her mother signed her up for. Because there’s no way we’re expected to believe that this extremely shrewd and intelligent woman could head the vault project and never consider that the shadowy death cult organization running things, that has already told her in no uncertain terms that she’s extremely expendable, might experiment on them, too.
Your mileage may vary, but I would rather we all explode together than run the risk that a day might come when higher-ups run the numbers and decide my non-irradiated, prewar nine-year-old is a great candidate for a new Vault 68-ish project while I’m far too refrigerated to do anything about it.
3) Please keep in mind how deep into the construction of the Vaults Barb had to get before having even 17 fleeting seconds of conscience about it.
And I appreciate that Barb has a line, and that line is consistently whatever allows her to keep her family.
However, by the time we watch Frances Turner act her ass off with every cracked micro expression in that boardroom scene, Barb has already known about and advanced every step of this manufactured apocalypse. She’s not running this machine, but she is one of many sets of hands who help turn these cogs, and she’s a high-up and well-paid one.
By the time she’s sitting opposite a bunch of suits talking about the visual marketing impact of 5 vs 10 ton nukes, and excitedly assuring that they’d know which vaults to give faulty watering chips to by the time they needed to be installed, she’d already seen every vault blueprint showing exactly where and how they were meant to go wrong and torture people.
And even when she did stop and go, “hey, no, wait, this is really fucked up” it took one ounce of pressure from a nerd in an elevator and she folded like a paper airplane.
It’s because her family is her line that she was willing to help Cooper as soon as he confronted her (and he should have done so sooner, but she also should have come to him probably years sooner), because her actions had become what was going to lose her her family. Nobody but cooper realistically could have gotten her to pull the fusion chip out of Hank.
She didn’t do it because it was the right thing to do, hell she outright said that “the only way to save our family is to save the world”. I’m not about to say she doesn’t care bout anything else, but her shame and disgust never motivated her enough to risk her bottom line (getting to keep Cooper and Janey). It wasn’t until her actions, or rather her corporate inaction, inspired exactly that kind of shame and disgust towards her in the man she loved that there was finally a force in her life more powerful than Vault-Tek. Which is beautiful, but not redemptive.
A penitent nazi collaborator is still a nazi and all.
Barb is sympathetic, well written and consistent. But she’s not good and she’s not a victim, and there *are* victims. HER victims. The victims of everyone who worked under her all the way down to the drawing board.
Because evil like in the show, like in history, like in the fucked up world we’re all living in right this second, is not the result of a few powerful hands twirling mustaches in the shadows; it’s the result of normal people refusing to stop it. Of good people pushing the levers on awful things and telling themselves there’s no other choice just because those choices are hard and scary and inconvenient.
People like Barb Howard exist and always have. And their reasons have always been reasonable to them. Hell, they might even be relatable to you. People like Barb might tug your heart and jerk your tear, they may make you empathize and sympathize with their position, and it is both normal and human to do so. But I NEEEED you all to remember that at the end of the day, when the bodies are being counted, those sympathetic, empathetic, tear-jerking, heart-tugging people still deserve to be put against the fucking wall.
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