After learning the truth about Vault 4, Lucy and Maximus resume their quest for the head.
Tropes:
- Agony of the Feet: Thaddeus' smashed foot is very grisly. If he hadn't received his miracle cure from the Snake Oil Salesman, it would have absolutely needed to be amputated.
- Ambiguous Situation: Someone kills all the raider prisoners with poison. Veronica, the receptionist outside, is arrested for the crime, but proclaims her innocence. It's unclear who actually did it.
- Ankle Drag: The Apocalyptic Log ends with the Gulper dragging the doomed scientists by the legs out of the camera's view.
- Apocalyptic Log: Lucy is shown a video diary of the lead lab scientist from Vault 4 in which a Gulper violently breaks out of containment and starts slaughtering the staff.
- Armor-Piercing Response: When Norm calls Chet a coward for meekly accepting his new life with Stephanie and abandoning their investigation, his response leaves Norm speechless.Chet: "We all are, Norm. That's why we live in a vault."
- Audible Sharpness: The sword at Lucy's trial makes a loud *zing* sound when Benjamin picks it up. It's then subverted when Benjamin finds it's too dull to actually cut her restraints.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- When the Ghoul eats his dinner at the house of the bullet hunter, the focus on the meat on his plate and his history of harvesting meat from other ghouls suggests that he may be enjoying the daughter of the house as his meal... But then the daughter comes in from the yard.
- Savvy gamers will recognize the Snake-Oil Salesman medication as Hydra, a Chem that does, in fact, cure broken limbs. Except it's not, and instead causes ghoulification.
- Best Served Cold: Defied by the Ghoul, who kills the middle son of the bullet hunter, as the former has no wish to end up on the wrong side of a My Name Is Inigo Montoya someday.
- Big Damn Kiss: Between Lucy and Maximus after he offers to sacrifice himself by tricking the Brotherhood with a fake head. For added hilarity, the two severed heads they're holding are lip-to-lip.
- Blessed with Suck: Thaddeus becomes a ghoul, giving him a Healing Factor and improved durability! All at the cost of being forever outcast from the Brotherhood and the inevitable struggle against becoming feral.
- Blindfolded Trip: Lucy gets blindfolded by Vault 4 staff and then taken for public trial. When Maximus sees her being carried away with a sack over her head, he changes his mind about staying and armors up to rescue her.
- Booby Trap: DJ Carl has surrounded his radio tower with traps to deter would-be critics of his music tastes.
- Breather Episode: While it still has its fair share of big revelations, this episode is considerably Lighter and Softer compared to the rest of the series. There are more comedic and lighthearted moments, including:
- The Vault 4 Overseer dramatically sentenced Lucy to death... by banishment, awkwardly trying to cut away her restraints with a ceremonial scimitar, and sending her out with 2 weeks' worth of provisions.
- Maximus' Roaring Rampage of Rescue quickly results in him apologizing after Lucy clears the air that she's okay.
- Woody having a freak-out in front of everyone and trying to run back to his home in Vault 33 just before Betty sends him and everyone else chosen to settle into Vault 32.
- Curse That Cures: Thaddeus is saved from a deadly injury when the Snake Oil Salesman deliberately infects him with the ghoul mutation.
- Death Trap: The space around his radio tower is filled with death traps and their victims.
- Dramatic Irony: After explaining the truth about Vault 4 to Lucy, the Overseer asks her what her Vault's experiment is, which understandably confuses her since she has no reason to believe her Vault was anything other than the safe haven it was advertised to be. Little does she know there is a dark secret to it, one Norman is slowly uncovering.
- Eat the Camera: The Apocalyptic Log ends with the Gulper's mouth engulfing the camera.
- Emperor Scientist: The "experiment" of Vault 4 — the ruling class would be scientists. As the scientists involved were of the Mad Scientist variety, things went roughly as well as almost all of the other Vaults.
- Enemy Eats Your Lunch: When the father and his son return home from their daily work in the dunes, the Ghoul waits for them at their dinner table eating their food, deliberately playing up the idea that his daughter is the main course before she steps out.
- Failed Attempt at Drama: The awkward moment when Benjamin fails to cut Lucy's cuffs with the apparently blunt sword.
- Foreshadowing: After healing his foot with an elixir, the Snake Oil Salesman gives Thaddeus directions to a radio tower near Shady Sands. When Thaddeus objects that the area is irradiated the Salesman tells him that he's not going to need to worry about that anymore (because he's become a ghoul).
- Gilded Cage: Maximus eventually decides he likes the comfort, safety, and good food of Vault 4, and is content to lounge around in his bathrobe. It's only when he spots Lucy being taken away for what appears to be an execution that he reluctantly decides he can't stay like this.
- Good All Along:
- The residents of Vault 4 aren't experimenting on surface dwellers. They are the experiments (or descendants, rather), who took over after the Vault scientists running the original experiments were killed by their creations. They "punish" Lucy by banishing her to the surface without otherwise harming her, reasoning that whatever's up there will kill her for them.
- The creepy cult ritual undertaken by the former surface-dwelling residents of the Vault is weird, but ultimately is not as sinister as it appears when combined with the above.
- Healing Factor: Thaddeus gains one after buying a special serum from the Snake Oil Salesman. Not only does it restore his mangled foot, but it allows him to safely remove a crossbow bolt lodged in his trachea. Maximus believes Thaddeus has become a ghoul after witnessing this, and all ghouls are implied to have one, given that The Ghoul survives numerous gunshot wounds unharmed and restores a severed finger to working order just by stitching it back on.
- Heroic Sacrifice: With the Brotherhood inbound, Maximus stays behind with the wrong severed head so Lucy can rescue her father with the real one.
- Hollywood Hacking: Downplayed. Norman uses a command line bypass command to access the Overseer's terminal resulting in a Matrix Raining Code running down the screen, but that's as far as that lets him go while on his gambit—to actually break into Vault 31, he has to rely entirely on Social Engineering their Overseer into letting him in by pretending to be Betty.
- Hourglass Plot: Last episode, when the duo arrived in Vault 4, Maximus was deeply suspicious of them while Lucy insisted there was nothing to worry about. In this episode, they change positions, with Lucy becoming desperate to leave while Maximus falls into Vault 4's Gilded Cage.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Seeing that Lucy and Maximus have caught up to him, Thaddeus empties the entire cylinder of his 10mm at them. Fortunately for them, he's rubbish without a scope, as he complains after failing to so much as land a shot near them.
- I Will Wait for You: When the two are forced to part ways, Lucy declares she will be waiting for Maximus at Vault 33.
- Major Injury Underreaction: Thaddeus has two of them.
- His foot gets horrifically crushed during his fight with Maximus but besides a limp and the occasional wince, he ventures on just fine.
- Later, he is shot through the neck with an arrow after stumbling into a booby trap and continues to have a nervous conversation with the people around him while waiting to die. Played for Laughs at first, then Played for Drama when he realizes he is becoming a ghoul.
- Mythology Gag:
- Fallout 4 players will recognize the music played on DJ Carl's radio station from the Minutemen's Radio Freedom. And just like fans didn't like it in the game (there are plenty of mods to mute or replace it), DJ Carl has to deal with his fair share of unhappy listeners.
- Norm hacks into the Vault 33 Overseer terminal through the same hacking minigame seen in Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4.
- The lead farmer is wearing the armor of an NCR Ranger, as depicted on the cover of Fallout: New Vegas.
- The Snake-Oil Salesman's magic cure is very similar to Hydra, but with extra ghoulification.
- Like the Sole Survivor in Fallout 4, the Ghoul finds his Dogmeat at a Red Rocket gas station.
- No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: There is only one fusion core for each Vault, and Maximus stealing it for his power armor would mean the end of Vault 4. Lucy changes his mind and makes him return the core to the Vault (via the trap room that they used to enter the Vault).
- Pop-Up Texting: When it's announced via Pip-Boy which of the denizens from Vault 33 are to move to 32, the number for each character pops up on-screen for easier reading.
- Post Apocalyptic Gasmask: The father and his son searching the wasteland for metals in the opening scene wear NCR Ranger gas masks against the radioactive dust they're digging up.
- Roaring Rampage of Rescue: Played for Laughs when Maximus steals Vault 4's fusion core to power up his T-60c Power Armor and comes to Lucy's rescue. He ends up destroying the two weeks of provisions the overseer had provided for Lucy, throws a Nuka Cola vending machine across the room, and knocks out an innocent dweller before Lucy reveals that she's alright and there's no need for alarm. He immediately apologizes for overreacting.
- Skewed Priorities: As Vault-Tec scientists are being slaughtered by escaped test subjects, one decides that rather than escape, he should make an Apocalyptic Log to make it clear to anyone seeing it that despite mounting evidence to the contrary, a society run by scientists without regulations or restrictions is still the ideal template for civilization. Then he gets eaten.
- Snake Oil Salesman: The recurring salesman selling miracle cures offers one to Thaddaeus for his broken foot. He turns out to be legit, in a sense, as his cure does in fact give Thaddeus a Healing Factor... by turning him into a ghoul.
- Sniff Sniff Nom: When the Ghoul finds traces of what appears to be blood in the sand at the gas station, he doesn't hesitate to taste it to make sure.
- Stab the Salad: Benjamin raises a sword over his head and announces Lucy to be sentenced... to death! But the next shot shows him cutting her cuffs with the sword. Unfortunately, the sword is not sharp enough which ruins the "dramatic" moment and he decides to manually rip the cuffs open.
- Suicide as Comedy: When Thaddeus encounters the Snake Oil Salesman, he is shown putting a rifle barrel in his mouth and trying to pull the trigger with his toe. He stops when he recognizes Thaddeus as a potential customer and runs after him.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: The raider prisoners in Vault 33 turn up dead one day, their food having been laced with rat poison. The culprit is not explicitly revealed, but it's implied Betty did it and framed the cell block guard to cover her tracks.
- This Is Gonna Suck: Thaddeus' reaction to becoming a ghoul, particularly as he was about to rendezvous with the Brotherhood.
- Tomato in the Mirror: It takes being shot through the neck with an arrow and pulling it out with no pain for Thaddeus to realize he's been turned into a Ghoul.
- Unishment: Lucy is sentenced by the Vault 4 governing body to... go back into the Wasteland, which is what she wanted in the first place. And they "punish" her further with two weeks of supplies! But don't worry, they'll have someone help carry the supplies up there. They're not monsters.
- Unwanted Rescue: Maximus comes to rescue Lucy from being executed, but it turns out her life was never endangered in the first place, and his Big Damn Heroes moment only makes things worse for everybody.
- Wham Line: The Overseer's question to Lucy hints at the true nature of the Vaults, and for fans of the games, this line definitely sticks."What was the experiment in Vault 33?"
- Worst Aid: Pulling the arrow out of his neck is just about the worst thing Thaddeus can do. Thanks to his new Healing Factor, he comes out okay anyway.
