Did Old World Blues GET to you too?
Completing Dr Borous' personal quest unexpectedly moved me.
Up until this point, he was the most obnoxious and silly scientist in the Think Tank to me. Borous' hams it up and rejects any responsibility in spreading pain and suffering through his creations (e.g. the Cazadores, Nightstalkers and Cyberdogs).
Then you go through his recreation of high school in X-8 and...he's such a loser. He was a grown man when he designed that test facility and conceived of the K-9 project. It's been over two centuries and he's still hung up about his chain-smoking high school crush and high school bully. It really makes you think he deserved to be stuffed into a locker. You kill his giant robot dog named "Gabe" and it's silly too. It's just a scaled-up in-game model of a normal K-9 dog and it blows up after a joke countdown by the Think Tank when you kill it.
But if you interact with "Gabe" and go to Higgs Village to Borous' house and retrieve Gabe's dog bowl, you can confront Borous with it.
The slow build up to Borous being overwhelmed with guilt moved me. Gabe loved him like only man's best friend could. That mutt was there for him, offering the sad, lonely, nerdy kid Borous was with all his love, day after day through all the bullying and rejection Borous went through in those formative years. Borous loved him and Gabe loved him back.
In return, Borous put that dog through hell. Poisoned his food with chems, maimed him with cybernetics, transformed a sweet dog into a killing monster to realize his K-9 project. But Gabe still wagged his tail whenever he was with Borous. Even when the mad scientist had him flayed out on a operating table, lovingly replacing his innards with steel in the basement of his home.
The guilt Borous felt when he realizes he's hurt in the most extreme ways the one thing in his life that truly, deeply loves him with no strings attached...and that Gabe still loves him despite the torture Borous put him through...who hasn't truly and deeply wounded a loved one with careless thoughts or actions, only for them to respond with even more love instead?
Ironic juxtapositions and Atomic-Age absurdism sit side-by-side in Old World Blues, comedy contrasting with scientific horror to bring out the thrill of experiencing emotional highs and lows. Under all the wacky '50s SCIENCE hi-jinks, Old World Blues is a story about what it means to be human. To re-connect with your humanity and melt a stony heart thought permanently hardened by calamity and callousness. If war never changes, then men must change. How? Perhaps by re-discovering what it means to be human and what it means to connect to others...
This DLC is Fallout pure-cut from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. I love it and it pains me that we'll likely never get this kind of Fallout again (for a long time at least).
Tl;dr Dr. Borous and his stupid dog made me tear up and for that I'm shooting up the whole Think Tank. Wanna join me?