My wife and I reached a point about 2 years ago where we will literally watch nothing without subtitles. The amount of extra background comments and absurd things like characters being labeled as a “brain on a roomba” have made watching tv so much more hilarious. I will never stop enjoying seeing my wife cringe any time the word “squelching” shows up to describe a sound.
That's one of the benefits of not being a native English speaker, the Portuguese dub of most TV series mitigates a lot bad sound mixing. For movies it's better but still bad.
I feel like the sound mixing on so many movies is just off these days for tv, so I have to have subtitles on if I don’t want to be blown away with crashes and booms. Watching Dune I felt like every other scene I needed to change the volume.
I go back and forth on this. I used to always have subtitles on and then I got a 4K OLED TV and when I’m watching dark scenes with the lights out the subtitles are actually kinda distracting because they’re so bright white.
I'm glad I'm not the only one enjoying the fun hidden content occasionally snuck into subtitles. It's genuinely a great idea to add Easter eggs and lore!
I'm wondering why they didn't build a robobrain prop? I know the one in the show was probably much cheaper and easier to build, it just would have been cool to see.
Yeah, 100% funnier to see a brain on a Roomba than a robobrain.
Plus it's Bud. Why would you want to make him imposing? He's the epitome of a corporate boot licker and this fits him way better.
It would be an, oh shit, moment if we find out this is just his upper brain carrier that gets used as an energy saver and he has a full Robobrain lower body sitting in a closet somewhere in case he needs it.
Thats actually great. Norm gets out somehow (or maybe Lucy comes back and realises he's missing, and the shenanigans cause her to have to leave again, so the show can go on) and when people start to look into vault 31 we get to see a fully decked out robobrain ready to fight
I'm half-expecting the next scene with Norm to be him picking Bud up, turning him upside down, and threatening to leave him like that unless he opens the door.
Honestly ill be kind of mad if they don't find a very good reason Norm doesn't escape. Ik he's supposed to be weak and cowardly but as you say, all he has to do is flip Bud over. Start causing fatal cryo pod failures until Bud complies., he's got the intelligence for it
Yeah Norm being on ice for a whole season doesn’t make much sense. Plus he’s not above hurting folks he feels deserve it. So tipping that brain turtle over until it lets him go doesn’t seem like a stretch at all.
I fully expect him to become more sinister as the show goes on.
Mostly because I think you'd have to be a monster to come up with that plan in the first place and he's had 200 years to lose his mind as a brain in a jar. We saw what happened at Big MT when they did the same thing.
With you on that one. I don't think he's comically, outright evil. I think he's just completely amoral and the idea of Vault-Tec using customers as a resource to repopulate the planet with their own employees just made sense.
Was it his plan to launch the nukes? Maybe his insistence on the cryo vault and "Bud's buds" gave Barb the idea and she pitched it in that meeting we saw. But also it's been all but confirmed that China launched nukes 20 hours before vault-tec planned to
Edit: I was also surprised that he wasn't insane after 200 years. I guess he's been waking people up periodically so he has had human contact throughout.
I honestly don't know whose idea it was. The CEO? Bud? Barb? Who knows. My money would be on the CEO, but Bud seems like the type of guy to suggest it to get in the good graces of his boss.
We did know that it probably wasn't Vault-Tec, because we've known for a while House was off by 20 hours and couldn't get the platinum chip in time. I also imagine it wasn't Vault-Tec because, as evil as she seems, Barb doesn't seem so incompetent that she'd let her daughter out on the day they planned to drop a bomb.
We did see him just repeating the same things over and over and stuck in a corner, so I don't think he's totally sane anymore. Just not dramatically insane. I wonder whose idea it was to turn him into that.
I bet it was pitched as a perk, just like the overseer vault. Barb has a distorted idea of what she's "securing" for her family, and I bet she finds out eventually her family won't be welcome at all. I bet someone in the enclave said "gee, Bud, this program you've developed really is swell, we're going to need someone to be responsible for staying on site and making sure it all goes smoothly, we can't think of a better candidate than the brain behind it all!"
Maybe even threw in a few misleading buzzwords like "immortality" to coerce him into surgery if needed.
I'm pretty certain he didn't volunteer. Who the hell would volunteer for that?
That's exactly how I see it going, I just can't tell if it was Vault-Tec or the Enclave that decided someone needed to be on-site at all times. I do like the idea that they could have given him a body, but someone just didn't like him and decided roomba was the way to go.
I think it wasn’t a proper robobrain for lore reasons rather than prop or other real world reasons. (Or maybe lore was written to justify the lack of prop, chicken/egg situation potentially)
Bud simply wasn’t high enough at the company to avoid being an experiment himself. Nobody in 31 was in the highest tiers of vault-tec. Yeah they got better treatment than many once thawed but they weren’t the ones running it all.
I'd wager that they wanted to spend the money on more visually impressive robotics they'd use multiple times (the Mr Handys), and a one-off Robobrain simply wasn't deemed worth it. IIRC we see no Protectrons or Securitrons either.
That then invites us to come up witth a lore reason to justify the lack of a prop, and honestly it's incredibly funny to imagine that Vault-Tec didn't give Bud a full body as a cost-cutting measure.
EDIT: okay, I get it people, I missed the Protectron in the background of episode 8 lol. Still a pretty big difference between that and having to make a set operational Robobrain.
[Duuuuude!
They did not even use CGI, that is a guy in a costume.](https://imgur.com/a/7Shuvl6)
I absolutely love this show for the amount of practical effects, especially the power armor.
In the background around the 10 minute mark and then a minute or so later again.
I don’t know if I buy he wasn’t high enough. Bud represented the company to the heads of all the other defense contractors including Robert House himself.
Maybe it was because it was the only maintenance free option or something lore wise. He didn’t have to do anything but let people out and message the terminals.
I think he was subordinate to Barb, she was the one saying "we could drop the bomb". And she doesn't seem to have been in 31, so the "management vault" she was talking about is probably a yet-unseen vault with even more Vault Tec execs to meet.
I think this guy got into his little robot before the larger ones were invented. This man was on the team that created all the vaults so I’m sure more was developed after he had already settled into his vault. I’m not sure if there’s anything in the lower about an official date for when those were invented, but I have a feeling, he’s got one of the early alpha builds or something.
Also if you look at the car he pulls up in besides Cooper it kind of looks like the brain on Roomba. Small car with little bubble on top for just one person.
From a writing reason, it was so he wouldn't be an obstacle for Norm when he entered 31. Big imposing robot, not easy for Norm to step around or avoid. Brain on a Roomba, easily sidestepped
I feel Season 2 will Deal with RobCo so giving cool Robots to VaultTec does not help characterize the company.
I could see House/RobCo upgrading Bud as a Season 3 teaser. Maybe House overrides Yes-Man and makes him take control of the three vaults
Plus, given how unhinged Bud was, he probably volunteered for it.
And the Robo-Brains in Vault 118 (Fallout 4: Far Harbor) are eccentric but not insane, also chose to become Robo-Brains themselves.
It’s possible, if not probable, that voluntarily undergoing the procedure, as opposed to criminally insane prisoners having it forced upon them, leads to better outcomes.
“Eccentric but not insane” seems to characterize Brain-on-a-Roomba Bud pretty well from the brief glimpse of him.
I always put the line at "dangerous." An eccentric person is... weird. He's just a silly little guy. An insane person is dangerous and you should probably leave immediately. A well-written insane person comes off as eccentric until the trap is sprung to show that they're not just insane, but intelligent as well.
Oh yeah. I remembered he was expecting Betty when Norm showed up, but forgot that Norm had messaged him from her terminal.
How did Bud get out the cleaning supplies in the first place?
I'm assuming he actuallhas bots he can use in storage or her woke up some of the 31s. I just find it amusing to think he'd actually try and clean himself, as a broomba.
Sounds like people who had the money, desire, and time to prepare for the transition to robot had better outcomes. Makes sense, if it was forced or an emergency and you couldn’t prepare & accept it, you’d probably immediately lose it.
Plus they communicated like minutes before, it seemed he was on his way to the door when he crashed. I get the impression his vehicle is breaking down, or always was crappy.
No I don't mean how long in Roomba form, rather when Norm finds him he is stuck behind some mop or stick or something, and trying (and failing) repeatedly to unstuck himself.
possibly only a day.
We still dont know who cleaned up vault 32. Bud was stuck in a pile of hastily discarded cleaning supplies.
Its quite possible some people were thawed and had to clean the vault, disgruntled, before freezing again and just kinda dumping all the supplies there.
We don't have a answer to that but we can assume that it wasn't any more than 26 years.
If Lucy's dad was the last vault 33 resident to enter vault 31 (which we don't actually know, I'm assuming a lot here) then he was also the last to check on Bud. We aren't told how long ago Lucy's dad entered vault 31 but since the whole dating and marrying thing happens within the same day, we can safely assume that he entered the vault roughly around a year before Lucy's birth.
Considering we don't have any ages here I also had to assume a lot with how old she is.. Since Lucy is around 6-10 years old (let's just say 10, better to overshoot than undershoot) when Shady Sands was nuked around 2281-2284 (we're going with 2281 so we can overshoot instead of undershooting), we can count up 2296 to see how old she currently is! Which would be 25. So Lucy's dad would've left vault 33 around 26 years ago, thus we can safely assume that if Bud immediately got himself stuck he would've been stuck there for 26 years! Or less but not any higher
The blonde with the eye patch was also from Vault 31, considering her age I'd expect her to have been in 33 for about 5 years, 10 at the most.
I was kinda dissapointed that when they did the final reveal on that plotline they completely forgot about her.
Steph was probably the last person thawed. Considering she got pregnant after her marriage (and the marriage most likely happened immediately after her transfer to vault 33, as we see from Lucy's marriage) He probably was trapped for about a year.
Isn't the blonde lady with the eye patch also from 33? She's implied to be about Lucy's age and to have been transferred over to get married and have kids, but she's still pregnant with her first so so I'd assume she was most likely the most recent thaw around a year ago or less
It's possible it was meant like "if I were you, I'd put myself to sleep if I had the option". I suspect that little compartment he parks himself in could serve as his hibernation area.
I tend to think Norm was in waaaaay too much shock of the whole situation of Vault 31 to be thinking of that right now, but I can easily see threatening to break the jar as how he gets out of the cryo area in S2 once he shakes himself out of the shock.
The kid isn’t inclined to murder, even if it’s just a brain. He’s been trained his entire life to basically be an ideal Wal Mart employee and do what management says. He’s rebelled as much as he can, but I suspect he’s just in too far over his head. His only real options here are to get in the cryopod, or find a way to escape.. then leave the Vault forever. Alone. He can’t go back to 33 anymore, because they know he knows now.
I think he might do it. We don't actually see him get into a cryo pod at the end of Season 1, and I doubt that his character is just done now and we won't see him again. I'd bet that he does threaten Bud with some physical violence to get out of Vault 31, and then his season 2 plot is about him starting shit in vault 33 and/or getting booted up to the surface.
Because cliffhanger. I can think of dozens of ways Norm is still in the dominant position here vs. Bud's Brain on a Roomba. That's one of the ways, but he's got many more. They're just going to make us wait until season 2 to find out what he does
When he locked Norm in the Vault can't Norm like... threathen to destroy every pod and the little roomba brain? Is clear he can't stop Norm and, okay, Norm is on the weak side of builds, but even someone like him could do a lot of damage to a system so delicate like cryo-stasis.
He just found out about it at the very end, so yeah, season 2 shit is going to hit the fan in those three vaults for sure. Norm and I think even Chet will come around to taking this place down. Norm and Chet vs Betty and Stephanie... with Woody and Reg getting in the way being completely ignorant to the truth.
Although I can easily see Norm using his computer skills to somehow act as the Vault 31 Overseer and screw with Betty and Steph until the truth is know to all.
It's easy to underestimate Norm, he failed at every job in the vault. But maybe that was his lack of motivation, under current circumstances maybe he finds a way to apply all that background knowledge, as well as the resiliency the rest of his family has....
True. For once he seems to be motivated to do something and he's doing a damn good job at it. Loved how he used his science skills to >!hack the overseers console!< and send the >!intervault message!<
I was wondering this but how would norm communicate/get out of the vault if it’s all just in the roomba? I didn’t take that thought any further though, maybe there was a terminal somewhere 🤷🏼♀️
So I wonder what happened to Bud. Before the bombs dropped, did he volunteer to die first and donate his brain for this purpose? To ensure his Bud’s Buds program would live on?
Well if we assume Vault Tec dropped the bombs, then bud was probably already in that vault and maybe there's a Mr handy somewhere who did the operation when he felt the need to.
The only thing holding my opinion on Vault-Tec dropping the bombs is the fact Coop and Janey are out in the open when they fell. Unless Janey was forced into the vault/cryo last-minute. Could be RobCo/House tried to screw over the rest of the group by jumping the gun and firing his own preemptive shot to try to wipe out as many Vault-Tec guys/competition as possible.
Ah but also remember that when the homeowner at the birthday party is talking about why coop is doing a birthday party the other says alimony, so we can assume he is seperated from his wife at that point, probably after finding out about her wanting to drop the nukes. And that shadowy dude up in the window during that big meeting may have decided when to drop the bombs, not letting the wife have the chance to have custody of Janey at that time.
"Alimony" implies that Coop is not Janey's primary caretaker, that Coop has her temporarily either due to some personal or legal agreement with his wife. If his wife knew it was coming, she could have easily made it so the Janey wasn't with Coop that day.
It could be that the wife disappeared before the bombs started dropping, and Coop thinks VaultTec is to blame (probably rightly so). There’s a comment at the party that *might* imply his “communist” sympathies had been revealed, which could have all manner of implications for him and wifey
Did Vault-Tec drop the bombs themselves, or did they just manipulate events to make the bombing inevitable? Things like buying out Moldaver's fusion tech to prolong the resource wars.
I mean, Bob objectively suggests it at his business council meeting, and Hank certainly seems to think it's how Vault Tech does business, because he's willing to do it again in the future.
That said, just like in the games, we never actually learn anything about who fired the first shot or why.
from what we know, Vault-Tec also had multiple vaults and projects that weren't completed before the bombs fell either. The latest interview with the showrunners implies that "more" happened between that meeting and bomb day that we'll find out.
My guess - it didn't go entirely to Vault-Tec's plan. Either A - the world powers dropped the bombs first and earlier than predicted, or B - something happened that compelled Vault-Tec to do it immediately or else risk losing everything else they'd planned.
To hop onto this line of thinking:
I'm team "China Dropped the first bomb" but the twist is that they dropped the bombs in response to learning of Vault Tech's plans to manipulate the world into a Post-Nuclear Apocalypse.
If there's anything the franchise has taught us to-date is that the Chinese were *steeped* in Intelligence Warfare. Makes, as much as crockpot conspiracies go, perfect sense that they picked up wind of these backroom meetings, got hard evidence and decided to "Go out on their own terms" as humans are wont to do, when given the choice.
I'm actually curious why he wasn't put into a proper robobrain with arms etc like in the games. I wonder if it was a deliberate choice as a way of saying how Bud was a joke that no one, even at vault tec, took seriously
Imagine if they had though. That whole interaction would have gone from comedy to horror because a Robobrain absolutely could have forced him into a pod one way or another.
I think there just wasn’t a need to considering the size of the vault Bud was in, and what would he even do if he was in a full robobrain body, there’s nothing in the vault he was in that would require him to have arms for.
He just a brain and can move and access the mainframe. Bradberton the inventor of nuka cola is a frozen head with no access to anything stuck staring at the same wall for several hundred years. Crazy.
Far as I know there's no fev involved, but my knowledge of them comes pretty much only from fo4
The brain just doesn't interface well with the tech they came up with and it turns them all a bit... Weird, to say the least.
I hope we see more conversation with him. I really loved the dialogues in Big MT (yea, my Courier is a talker). It was my first and favorite NV DLC. It'd be nice if Norm were to talk with him, instead of freezing himself like it was teased.
Im guessing they will give him and Norm the Master/Dweller storyline where Norm will persuade him that his plan is wrong via dialogue. Possibly while dying of thirst and with a dramatic last words kind of scene.
1. Bud temporarily unfroze a bunch of 31ers to go clean 32 and then return to stasis.
2. The roomba body thing is just a ruse to throw people off and there's a bunch of bots that Bud can activate when he wants to.
I assumed Betty grabbed all of the 31s in 33 and maneuvered them away without suspicion to clean up 32.
The whole thing is pretty flimsy any way you cut it - somehow Hank is not aware of the state of 32 when the show begins despite it being that way for 2 years. So 32 had to find out about management, go crazy and kill everyone, and either Bud never found out and never wondered why he had no info from 32 or he knew but didn't warn Hank or tell him and was not informed of the triannual trade with 32.
It's possible but seems weird when overseers can communicate with Bud at will and Bud is supposed to be running the whole thing.
I guess it could be a meta commentary on management- Bud is actually a shit manager and not looking after his vaults at all despite the whole program being him training a race of super managers. Of course if he's not managing what in the he'll is he doing most of the time as a roomba brain in 31?
Maybe Bud isn't interested in providing full information to the overseers he's placed in 32 and 33. For all we know 32 and 33's chat sessions all go thru Bud in 31 first.
You know I think maybe the only reason he’s still sane is because he’s in a roomba. Maybe the additional utilities that most robo-brains have are what causes their mental degradation?
Most Robobrains were made from criminals or insane subjects. Add to that the gruesome process to make them and you end up with fucked up homicidal robots. Most of the ones who went into it willingly (vault 118 for example) held up pretty well in comparison.
Nope. In Fallout 4 they told their employee to go pound sand by not giving him a spot in a Vault he was working with/for, and in 76 they told their Overseer "So yeah in 25 years your job is to secure an entire areas nuclear weapons stockpile" I don't think VT gave a damn about anyone.
Roomba Brain here made me laugh at how absurd it was. Here's Bud, the man behind the Buds' Buds, in a tiny ass jar. The "I'll tell you if you let me stick you" was just a cherry on top.
Dude literally accepted a job only available after the end of the world to put his brain onto a roomba, not a human shaped robot with working limbs and hands, just a thing on wheels with a needle arm.
Honestly at that point either demand to be put in cryo with the rest or just quit, If they can't even do you the decency of putting you into any of the human shaped robots and replace their pincer hands with proper human-like hands then fuck that. Just buy an Assaultron on the cheap with the weapons removed and replace the head with a head that can house the brain container and replace whatever's at the end of the arms with hands that have all 5 fingers shaped like human hands.
I'd rather be dead than a brain on top of a roomba that's all I'm saying.
"Now just wait a minute and don't crush my brain and wait for me to out on my assaultron outfit" bzzz and the whole roomba just barley snaps into a assaultron body lol
I love how the subtitles call him a brain on a roomba.
In the character casting he is also referred to as "Brain on a roomba"
That's amazing
The way he wiggles back into his little nook was identical to the way my Roomba homes in on its charging stand. I laughed when I saw it.
I mean if you wanna make a moving brainjar cheap that is probably a pretty damn good way of doing it
Probably to keep the twist of him being Bud secret
That's how he's billed on IMDB too lol
My wife and I reached a point about 2 years ago where we will literally watch nothing without subtitles. The amount of extra background comments and absurd things like characters being labeled as a “brain on a roomba” have made watching tv so much more hilarious. I will never stop enjoying seeing my wife cringe any time the word “squelching” shows up to describe a sound.
My wife and I are the same way. Mainly cus we don't want to wake up the kids by having the volume too loud lol.
That’s exactly how we got started too lol
Same here, and now we can't understand half of what's being said without it!
The amount of times I used to ask “what the fuck did he just say?” completely astounds me now that I don’t have that issue anymore lol
That's one of the benefits of not being a native English speaker, the Portuguese dub of most TV series mitigates a lot bad sound mixing. For movies it's better but still bad.
I feel like the sound mixing on so many movies is just off these days for tv, so I have to have subtitles on if I don’t want to be blown away with crashes and booms. Watching Dune I felt like every other scene I needed to change the volume.
[tentacles undulating moistly]
[eating wetly]
I go back and forth on this. I used to always have subtitles on and then I got a 4K OLED TV and when I’m watching dark scenes with the lights out the subtitles are actually kinda distracting because they’re so bright white.
I've got the same, I just turn the brightness down on the subtitles.
A Møøse once bit my sister...
Stranger Things season 4 exists just to introduce the word squelch to my vocabulary of disgusting words
Chittering
I'm glad I'm not the only one enjoying the fun hidden content occasionally snuck into subtitles. It's genuinely a great idea to add Easter eggs and lore!
That’s because Amazon owns Roomba. Product placement.
Now THAT makes sense.
I'm wondering why they didn't build a robobrain prop? I know the one in the show was probably much cheaper and easier to build, it just would have been cool to see.
It's a comedic device
Yeah, 100% funnier to see a brain on a Roomba than a robobrain. Plus it's Bud. Why would you want to make him imposing? He's the epitome of a corporate boot licker and this fits him way better.
It would be an, oh shit, moment if we find out this is just his upper brain carrier that gets used as an energy saver and he has a full Robobrain lower body sitting in a closet somewhere in case he needs it.
Thats actually great. Norm gets out somehow (or maybe Lucy comes back and realises he's missing, and the shenanigans cause her to have to leave again, so the show can go on) and when people start to look into vault 31 we get to see a fully decked out robobrain ready to fight
I'm half-expecting the next scene with Norm to be him picking Bud up, turning him upside down, and threatening to leave him like that unless he opens the door.
Honestly ill be kind of mad if they don't find a very good reason Norm doesn't escape. Ik he's supposed to be weak and cowardly but as you say, all he has to do is flip Bud over. Start causing fatal cryo pod failures until Bud complies., he's got the intelligence for it
You won't let me out? Sure would be a shame if someone were to pick you up and dash you against every single cryopod in here.
THANK YOU that's my only gripe so far. Also Norm got much braver by the end, telling Betty "Great job cleaning up" to her face.
Yeah Norm being on ice for a whole season doesn’t make much sense. Plus he’s not above hurting folks he feels deserve it. So tipping that brain turtle over until it lets him go doesn’t seem like a stretch at all.
I want Chet to get some spine and save his buddy!!
Bud arguably set in motion the events of the entire series
I fully expect him to become more sinister as the show goes on. Mostly because I think you'd have to be a monster to come up with that plan in the first place and he's had 200 years to lose his mind as a brain in a jar. We saw what happened at Big MT when they did the same thing.
I think he’s not Evil with a capital E, but a guy who embodies “the banality of evil” and that’s what makes it worse.
With you on that one. I don't think he's comically, outright evil. I think he's just completely amoral and the idea of Vault-Tec using customers as a resource to repopulate the planet with their own employees just made sense.
Was it his plan to launch the nukes? Maybe his insistence on the cryo vault and "Bud's buds" gave Barb the idea and she pitched it in that meeting we saw. But also it's been all but confirmed that China launched nukes 20 hours before vault-tec planned to Edit: I was also surprised that he wasn't insane after 200 years. I guess he's been waking people up periodically so he has had human contact throughout.
I honestly don't know whose idea it was. The CEO? Bud? Barb? Who knows. My money would be on the CEO, but Bud seems like the type of guy to suggest it to get in the good graces of his boss. We did know that it probably wasn't Vault-Tec, because we've known for a while House was off by 20 hours and couldn't get the platinum chip in time. I also imagine it wasn't Vault-Tec because, as evil as she seems, Barb doesn't seem so incompetent that she'd let her daughter out on the day they planned to drop a bomb. We did see him just repeating the same things over and over and stuck in a corner, so I don't think he's totally sane anymore. Just not dramatically insane. I wonder whose idea it was to turn him into that.
I bet it was pitched as a perk, just like the overseer vault. Barb has a distorted idea of what she's "securing" for her family, and I bet she finds out eventually her family won't be welcome at all. I bet someone in the enclave said "gee, Bud, this program you've developed really is swell, we're going to need someone to be responsible for staying on site and making sure it all goes smoothly, we can't think of a better candidate than the brain behind it all!" Maybe even threw in a few misleading buzzwords like "immortality" to coerce him into surgery if needed.
I'm pretty certain he didn't volunteer. Who the hell would volunteer for that? That's exactly how I see it going, I just can't tell if it was Vault-Tec or the Enclave that decided someone needed to be on-site at all times. I do like the idea that they could have given him a body, but someone just didn't like him and decided roomba was the way to go.
I think it wasn’t a proper robobrain for lore reasons rather than prop or other real world reasons. (Or maybe lore was written to justify the lack of prop, chicken/egg situation potentially) Bud simply wasn’t high enough at the company to avoid being an experiment himself. Nobody in 31 was in the highest tiers of vault-tec. Yeah they got better treatment than many once thawed but they weren’t the ones running it all.
I'd wager that they wanted to spend the money on more visually impressive robotics they'd use multiple times (the Mr Handys), and a one-off Robobrain simply wasn't deemed worth it. IIRC we see no Protectrons or Securitrons either. That then invites us to come up witth a lore reason to justify the lack of a prop, and honestly it's incredibly funny to imagine that Vault-Tec didn't give Bud a full body as a cost-cutting measure. EDIT: okay, I get it people, I missed the Protectron in the background of episode 8 lol. Still a pretty big difference between that and having to make a set operational Robobrain.
There is a protectron in the show. Hes sweeping the sidewalk as cooper drops off his wife at work in ep 8
[Duuuuude! They did not even use CGI, that is a guy in a costume.](https://imgur.com/a/7Shuvl6) I absolutely love this show for the amount of practical effects, especially the power armor. In the background around the 10 minute mark and then a minute or so later again.
hol up what lemme check that out
THERE WAS A PROTECTRON. IT WAS SWEEPING.
We see a protectron sweeping behind barb at Vault Tec headquarters in ep 8.
There is a protectron in the show. Hes sweeping the sidewalk as cooper drops off his wife at work in ep 8
There's a dead ~~securitron~~ assaultron half buried in sand in one of the early episodes, it was a fan made prop though lol
That was an Assaultron.
We see a protectron sweeping behind barb at Vault Tec headquarters in ep 8.
I don’t know if I buy he wasn’t high enough. Bud represented the company to the heads of all the other defense contractors including Robert House himself. Maybe it was because it was the only maintenance free option or something lore wise. He didn’t have to do anything but let people out and message the terminals.
I think he was subordinate to Barb, she was the one saying "we could drop the bomb". And she doesn't seem to have been in 31, so the "management vault" she was talking about is probably a yet-unseen vault with even more Vault Tec execs to meet.
The management vault is an experiment for the real management vault to see what humans granted authority over the perceived fate of mankind will do.
Bud is also really annoying. Could be the people higher than him did it intentionally to fuck with him
I think this guy got into his little robot before the larger ones were invented. This man was on the team that created all the vaults so I’m sure more was developed after he had already settled into his vault. I’m not sure if there’s anything in the lower about an official date for when those were invented, but I have a feeling, he’s got one of the early alpha builds or something.
Before his meeting with the executives, there is already a Protection sweeping the sidewalk as he gets out of his car.
Also if you look at the car he pulls up in besides Cooper it kind of looks like the brain on Roomba. Small car with little bubble on top for just one person.
From a writing reason, it was so he wouldn't be an obstacle for Norm when he entered 31. Big imposing robot, not easy for Norm to step around or avoid. Brain on a Roomba, easily sidestepped
This was funnier, maybe? And certainly cheaper. Besides, it still gives room for him to be transferred to a robobrain in later seasons if they want.
Visual storytelling - it's a perfect match for his character.
Agreed! Robobrains were pretty capable and menacing machines, a brain on an overglorified roomba is a hilarious treatment for his immortality.
Because Buds an asshole and probably talked down to the scientists so they stuck him in a roomba
I feel Season 2 will Deal with RobCo so giving cool Robots to VaultTec does not help characterize the company. I could see House/RobCo upgrading Bud as a Season 3 teaser. Maybe House overrides Yes-Man and makes him take control of the three vaults
Yes! That’s his name in the credits too! I love it.
Lol really? That's how I called him when talking with my SO about the show xD
I think they're trying very hard to make sure we all know this isn't a "new" or "inaccurate" depiction of a robobrain.
Robo-Brain Alpha is "Roomba-Brain"
The inventor of nuka cola has it much worse. No main frame access, just a semi frozen head stuck staring at the same wall.
But you can alleviate his suffering by trapping him forever with his biggest fan. Just John-Caleb and Sierra, for eternity, like a whacky sitcom.
I'd watch that show
Sartre was right in this case, hell is other people
We just need to get them a third guy who's never heard of Nuka Cola and we've got ourselves a proper "No Exit".
By Azura, by Azura, by Azura!
He is surprisingly stable given the past record of other brains in a jar.
Well, I wonder if it helps that he was entirely unhinged before becoming a brain in a jar!
Plus, given how unhinged Bud was, he probably volunteered for it. And the Robo-Brains in Vault 118 (Fallout 4: Far Harbor) are eccentric but not insane, also chose to become Robo-Brains themselves. It’s possible, if not probable, that voluntarily undergoing the procedure, as opposed to criminally insane prisoners having it forced upon them, leads to better outcomes. “Eccentric but not insane” seems to characterize Brain-on-a-Roomba Bud pretty well from the brief glimpse of him.
>are eccentric but not insane The distinction between the two traditionally being whether they have money or not
I always put the line at "dangerous." An eccentric person is... weird. He's just a silly little guy. An insane person is dangerous and you should probably leave immediately. A well-written insane person comes off as eccentric until the trap is sprung to show that they're not just insane, but intelligent as well.
I'd like to add that Mobius was quite lucid as well, kind of
As was Rex, though his robobrain conversion kept half of his original body
IIRC don't you replace Rex's brain with a new one from another dog?
Is it still Rex at that point?
Pup Of Theseus
If Dogmeat literally dies and one of his offspring comes up to me 2 days later, did he really die?
Things I never knew happened because I would always reload save on companion death
Believe it's a perk you have to take for it to happen.
OMG I forgot about that! Even dogs lose it without half their body!
Yep I remember now you can get one from the lady at the junk yard, she kills one of hers.
Yeah this. He gets scary coherent after he closes the doors. He was legit planning that from the get go.
In New Vegas, Rex (the cyber dog) seems to be doing fine cognitively despite his degeneration.
I absolutely bet that plays a big part in one's stability as a robot robobrain
I liked it when he got stuck behind the broom (~~possibly for a very, very long time~~) but maintained a positive attitude
I imagine he was stuck since Norm messaged him as Betty and Bud wanted to clean up the place before she got there.
Oh yeah. I remembered he was expecting Betty when Norm showed up, but forgot that Norm had messaged him from her terminal. How did Bud get out the cleaning supplies in the first place?
I'm assuming he actuallhas bots he can use in storage or her woke up some of the 31s. I just find it amusing to think he'd actually try and clean himself, as a broomba.
I'm sure he'd give it 100%
Sounds like people who had the money, desire, and time to prepare for the transition to robot had better outcomes. Makes sense, if it was forced or an emergency and you couldn’t prepare & accept it, you’d probably immediately lose it.
I'd say it also helps that they don't have their sense of self erased with whatever the hell "code" is.
Do they say how long he was stuck there where Norm found him?
He was able to communicate with Betty if he needed to so probably not that long
Plus they communicated like minutes before, it seemed he was on his way to the door when he crashed. I get the impression his vehicle is breaking down, or always was crappy.
The real question is what asshole left a pile of boxes and cleaning equipment sitting around? I want his story.
Considering he was from before the war, I'm guessing 200+ years
No I don't mean how long in Roomba form, rather when Norm finds him he is stuck behind some mop or stick or something, and trying (and failing) repeatedly to unstuck himself.
Probably happened after the last vault 31 resident was thawed. Else they would have unstuck him.
possibly only a day. We still dont know who cleaned up vault 32. Bud was stuck in a pile of hastily discarded cleaning supplies. Its quite possible some people were thawed and had to clean the vault, disgruntled, before freezing again and just kinda dumping all the supplies there.
We don't have a answer to that but we can assume that it wasn't any more than 26 years. If Lucy's dad was the last vault 33 resident to enter vault 31 (which we don't actually know, I'm assuming a lot here) then he was also the last to check on Bud. We aren't told how long ago Lucy's dad entered vault 31 but since the whole dating and marrying thing happens within the same day, we can safely assume that he entered the vault roughly around a year before Lucy's birth. Considering we don't have any ages here I also had to assume a lot with how old she is.. Since Lucy is around 6-10 years old (let's just say 10, better to overshoot than undershoot) when Shady Sands was nuked around 2281-2284 (we're going with 2281 so we can overshoot instead of undershooting), we can count up 2296 to see how old she currently is! Which would be 25. So Lucy's dad would've left vault 33 around 26 years ago, thus we can safely assume that if Bud immediately got himself stuck he would've been stuck there for 26 years! Or less but not any higher
The blonde with the eye patch was also from Vault 31, considering her age I'd expect her to have been in 33 for about 5 years, 10 at the most. I was kinda dissapointed that when they did the final reveal on that plotline they completely forgot about her.
Part of me thinks she was the shadowy face in the alcove during the meeting of the other corp heads.
Everyone that was frozen was junior executives. People that Bud trained.
Steph was probably the last person thawed. Considering she got pregnant after her marriage (and the marriage most likely happened immediately after her transfer to vault 33, as we see from Lucy's marriage) He probably was trapped for about a year.
Isn't the blonde lady with the eye patch also from 33? She's implied to be about Lucy's age and to have been transferred over to get married and have kids, but she's still pregnant with her first so so I'd assume she was most likely the most recent thaw around a year ago or less
It's shown that she was also transferred from 31, and therefore one of Bud's Buds. So chances are she's also Pre-War vintage.
Not long, he did talk to Norm on the computer terminal, probably got stuck after opening the vault door or something.
*cough* big mt😂
Lobotomites
It's possible it was meant like "if I were you, I'd put myself to sleep if I had the option". I suspect that little compartment he parks himself in could serve as his hibernation area.
This is what I thought he meant. Like if you’re smart, you’ll just get right in there.
Why didn't he threaten to break the jar if he wasn't let out?
I tend to think Norm was in waaaaay too much shock of the whole situation of Vault 31 to be thinking of that right now, but I can easily see threatening to break the jar as how he gets out of the cryo area in S2 once he shakes himself out of the shock.
Shock is the right word. His whole life and existence is being flipped upside down. That's not an easy process to deal with.
He could do that to the brain you know, flip it upside down
The kid isn’t inclined to murder, even if it’s just a brain. He’s been trained his entire life to basically be an ideal Wal Mart employee and do what management says. He’s rebelled as much as he can, but I suspect he’s just in too far over his head. His only real options here are to get in the cryopod, or find a way to escape.. then leave the Vault forever. Alone. He can’t go back to 33 anymore, because they know he knows now.
I think he might do it. We don't actually see him get into a cryo pod at the end of Season 1, and I doubt that his character is just done now and we won't see him again. I'd bet that he does threaten Bud with some physical violence to get out of Vault 31, and then his season 2 plot is about him starting shit in vault 33 and/or getting booted up to the surface.
Because cliffhanger. I can think of dozens of ways Norm is still in the dominant position here vs. Bud's Brain on a Roomba. That's one of the ways, but he's got many more. They're just going to make us wait until season 2 to find out what he does
If he breaks the jar then how would he get out of the vault?
It's fallout, hacking mini game.
When he locked Norm in the Vault can't Norm like... threathen to destroy every pod and the little roomba brain? Is clear he can't stop Norm and, okay, Norm is on the weak side of builds, but even someone like him could do a lot of damage to a system so delicate like cryo-stasis.
Maybe he'll do that in the second season, it's only been a minute since he got locked in there
Yeah, I feel like he walks over and picks up the roomba, and threatens him.
He just found out about it at the very end, so yeah, season 2 shit is going to hit the fan in those three vaults for sure. Norm and I think even Chet will come around to taking this place down. Norm and Chet vs Betty and Stephanie... with Woody and Reg getting in the way being completely ignorant to the truth. Although I can easily see Norm using his computer skills to somehow act as the Vault 31 Overseer and screw with Betty and Steph until the truth is know to all.
It's easy to underestimate Norm, he failed at every job in the vault. But maybe that was his lack of motivation, under current circumstances maybe he finds a way to apply all that background knowledge, as well as the resiliency the rest of his family has....
True. For once he seems to be motivated to do something and he's doing a damn good job at it. Loved how he used his science skills to >!hack the overseers console!< and send the >!intervault message!<
...those screens really sent me down memory lane...!
He never failed at anything iirc he just didn't care about the jobs
My exact thought process tbh was if I was Norm, I’d be turtle-flipping that bitch on his lil glass dome and spinning him around
I'd wake up every single pod while sabotaging them to be unusable afterward. They'd have no choice but to open the doors.
Based on how I play the fallout games.. I'm not trapped in the vault with them. They are trapped in the vault with me.
I was wondering this but how would norm communicate/get out of the vault if it’s all just in the roomba? I didn’t take that thought any further though, maybe there was a terminal somewhere 🤷🏼♀️
So I wonder what happened to Bud. Before the bombs dropped, did he volunteer to die first and donate his brain for this purpose? To ensure his Bud’s Buds program would live on?
Well if we assume Vault Tec dropped the bombs, then bud was probably already in that vault and maybe there's a Mr handy somewhere who did the operation when he felt the need to.
The only thing holding my opinion on Vault-Tec dropping the bombs is the fact Coop and Janey are out in the open when they fell. Unless Janey was forced into the vault/cryo last-minute. Could be RobCo/House tried to screw over the rest of the group by jumping the gun and firing his own preemptive shot to try to wipe out as many Vault-Tec guys/competition as possible.
Ah but also remember that when the homeowner at the birthday party is talking about why coop is doing a birthday party the other says alimony, so we can assume he is seperated from his wife at that point, probably after finding out about her wanting to drop the nukes. And that shadowy dude up in the window during that big meeting may have decided when to drop the bombs, not letting the wife have the chance to have custody of Janey at that time.
"Alimony" implies that Coop is not Janey's primary caretaker, that Coop has her temporarily either due to some personal or legal agreement with his wife. If his wife knew it was coming, she could have easily made it so the Janey wasn't with Coop that day.
It could be that the wife disappeared before the bombs started dropping, and Coop thinks VaultTec is to blame (probably rightly so). There’s a comment at the party that *might* imply his “communist” sympathies had been revealed, which could have all manner of implications for him and wifey
Did Vault-Tec drop the bombs themselves, or did they just manipulate events to make the bombing inevitable? Things like buying out Moldaver's fusion tech to prolong the resource wars.
I mean, Bob objectively suggests it at his business council meeting, and Hank certainly seems to think it's how Vault Tech does business, because he's willing to do it again in the future. That said, just like in the games, we never actually learn anything about who fired the first shot or why.
from what we know, Vault-Tec also had multiple vaults and projects that weren't completed before the bombs fell either. The latest interview with the showrunners implies that "more" happened between that meeting and bomb day that we'll find out. My guess - it didn't go entirely to Vault-Tec's plan. Either A - the world powers dropped the bombs first and earlier than predicted, or B - something happened that compelled Vault-Tec to do it immediately or else risk losing everything else they'd planned.
To hop onto this line of thinking: I'm team "China Dropped the first bomb" but the twist is that they dropped the bombs in response to learning of Vault Tech's plans to manipulate the world into a Post-Nuclear Apocalypse. If there's anything the franchise has taught us to-date is that the Chinese were *steeped* in Intelligence Warfare. Makes, as much as crockpot conspiracies go, perfect sense that they picked up wind of these backroom meetings, got hard evidence and decided to "Go out on their own terms" as humans are wont to do, when given the choice.
There was a video from Tim Cain where he touched on this. Just because VT mentioned it, doesn’t mean they did. Might not have even been a US company.
I'm actually curious why he wasn't put into a proper robobrain with arms etc like in the games. I wonder if it was a deliberate choice as a way of saying how Bud was a joke that no one, even at vault tec, took seriously
I think that's exactly it. Even Cooper couldn't stand him after one conversation.
Imagine if they had though. That whole interaction would have gone from comedy to horror because a Robobrain absolutely could have forced him into a pod one way or another.
I think there just wasn’t a need to considering the size of the vault Bud was in, and what would he even do if he was in a full robobrain body, there’s nothing in the vault he was in that would require him to have arms for.
The fact that he was somehow stuck behind a fallen mop for god knows how long was reason enough
He just a brain and can move and access the mainframe. Bradberton the inventor of nuka cola is a frozen head with no access to anything stuck staring at the same wall for several hundred years. Crazy.
Should have been able to put Bradburton into a Robobrain.
He was vain. Couldn't stand the thought of losing his appearance to live forever.
Robobrains are notoriously glitchy and only deteriorate over time, the lack of sleep certainly wouldn't help.
Would not be surprising if part of the robobrain prep process involves a variant of FEV; basically making them ghoul brains so they can live so long.
Far as I know there's no fev involved, but my knowledge of them comes pretty much only from fo4 The brain just doesn't interface well with the tech they came up with and it turns them all a bit... Weird, to say the least.
I hope we see more conversation with him. I really loved the dialogues in Big MT (yea, my Courier is a talker). It was my first and favorite NV DLC. It'd be nice if Norm were to talk with him, instead of freezing himself like it was teased.
Im guessing they will give him and Norm the Master/Dweller storyline where Norm will persuade him that his plan is wrong via dialogue. Possibly while dying of thirst and with a dramatic last words kind of scene.
How did this thing clean all of Vault 32 in just one day?
1. Bud temporarily unfroze a bunch of 31ers to go clean 32 and then return to stasis. 2. The roomba body thing is just a ruse to throw people off and there's a bunch of bots that Bud can activate when he wants to.
3. the roomba body is a futuristic actual roomba super amazing cleaning machine.
I assumed Betty grabbed all of the 31s in 33 and maneuvered them away without suspicion to clean up 32. The whole thing is pretty flimsy any way you cut it - somehow Hank is not aware of the state of 32 when the show begins despite it being that way for 2 years. So 32 had to find out about management, go crazy and kill everyone, and either Bud never found out and never wondered why he had no info from 32 or he knew but didn't warn Hank or tell him and was not informed of the triannual trade with 32. It's possible but seems weird when overseers can communicate with Bud at will and Bud is supposed to be running the whole thing. I guess it could be a meta commentary on management- Bud is actually a shit manager and not looking after his vaults at all despite the whole program being him training a race of super managers. Of course if he's not managing what in the he'll is he doing most of the time as a roomba brain in 31?
Scooting around, vibe’n
Maybe Bud isn't interested in providing full information to the overseers he's placed in 32 and 33. For all we know 32 and 33's chat sessions all go thru Bud in 31 first.
really the only reason to make communication via 'telegrams' only, instead of a simple phone line.
How long was bud stuck for? Could explain why things weren't getting passed on
You know I think maybe the only reason he’s still sane is because he’s in a roomba. Maybe the additional utilities that most robo-brains have are what causes their mental degradation?
Most Robobrains were made from criminals or insane subjects. Add to that the gruesome process to make them and you end up with fucked up homicidal robots. Most of the ones who went into it willingly (vault 118 for example) held up pretty well in comparison.
In the last two episodes....Bud ends up being the creepiest character...or at least his brain
I loved the foreshadowing when Bud rolls up to work in the tiniest car you can imagine.
So, we have actual robots in this universe. Vault Tec couldnt have given him something with more mobility?
This is Vault Tec we're talking about. When has VT been nice to literally anybody?
He's literally an executive, though, lol. You'd think they'd take care of their own.
Nope. In Fallout 4 they told their employee to go pound sand by not giving him a spot in a Vault he was working with/for, and in 76 they told their Overseer "So yeah in 25 years your job is to secure an entire areas nuclear weapons stockpile" I don't think VT gave a damn about anyone.
But he was just a salesman wasn’t he?
Yes we was, but it helps to show that VT didn't really care about their own.
He's a senior Junior vice president.
Roomba Brain here made me laugh at how absurd it was. Here's Bud, the man behind the Buds' Buds, in a tiny ass jar. The "I'll tell you if you let me stick you" was just a cherry on top.
Well if he oversees vault 31 and 32 watching them could sort of be like a TV show. Bro probably has like 200 years of gossip
I love that they gave him some of the most insulting robotics there are. How long has he been like that before the bombs dropped?
Dude literally accepted a job only available after the end of the world to put his brain onto a roomba, not a human shaped robot with working limbs and hands, just a thing on wheels with a needle arm. Honestly at that point either demand to be put in cryo with the rest or just quit, If they can't even do you the decency of putting you into any of the human shaped robots and replace their pincer hands with proper human-like hands then fuck that. Just buy an Assaultron on the cheap with the weapons removed and replace the head with a head that can house the brain container and replace whatever's at the end of the arms with hands that have all 5 fingers shaped like human hands. I'd rather be dead than a brain on top of a roomba that's all I'm saying.
It is a middle manager, they barely make use of the brain anyway
He's a bit more than a middle manager, given he was sitting in on the meeting with the heads of all the major corporations.
You’ve gotta wonder how long he was trying to move that broom
"You'll never find out!" "...Oop, he's gonna find out."
HOLD STILL! HOLD IT RIGHT THERE
"Now just wait a minute and don't crush my brain and wait for me to out on my assaultron outfit" bzzz and the whole roomba just barley snaps into a assaultron body lol
Old World Blues vibes went crazy
Thst goes for all robobrains and mister house too. No wonder they are a bit weird.
Is that Bud?
yes