Before MAJOR SPOILERS for Fallout, both the games and the show, below.
All eight episodes of Fallout are out now to watch on Amazon Prime Video, and by and large they are delightful. This post-apocalyptic sci-fi series translates everything fans have long loved about the Fallout video game series to the small screen, including the gallows humor, the 1940s retro-futurist aesthetic, and tons of iconography like the Pip-Boy and the Vault Dweller suits. At the same time, the show is accessible to newcomers, who can enjoy the adventures of Lucy — a naive Vault Dweller who explores the irradiated surface of a ruined United States for the first time — without having played any of the games.
But those viewers will miss a lot of easter eggs meant to be picked up by those who have played the Fallout games. Take the season finale, "The Beginning," when flashbacks show us how the world came to be destroyed. Naturally, corporate greed was to blame. The company Vault-Tec had invested a lot of money into making advanced underground bunkers people could use to shield themselves from the effects of a Great War then being fought between the nations of the world. If those nations settled their conflicts, Vault-Tec's investment would be lost, so they decided to drop some bombs themselves, to make sure that their investments paid off.
And they didn't do it alone. In a key flashback scene, we see that Vault-Tec roped in other prominent players in the world at this time, enveloping them in a conspiracy to ensure that after the world was destroyed, they would rule over the ashes. There are six people present at this secret meeting, some of whom are invented for the show and some of whom are drawn from the games:
- The character we know best is Barb Howard, a Vault-Tec executive and the wife of Cooper Howard, who later becomes The Ghoul.
- Bud Askins is another Vault-Tec executive who masterminded a plan to cryogenically freeze junion executives so they could oversee the running of Vaults long into the future, using the populations as breeding stock. Like Barb, he's invested for the show.
- Leon Von Feldon is a character from the games. He was a scientist at West Tek, which developed technology which led to the creation of the power armor used by the Brotherhood of Steel.
- Julia Masters was the Chief Finance Officer at REPCONN, an aerospace company that sold rockets. She's also from the games.
- Frederick Sinclair was an executive at Big MT (Big Mountain and Research Development Center). He was also the owner of the Sierra Madre Casino, which featured in Dead Money, an expansion to the popular Fallout game New Vegas, which brings us to the man of the hour...
The biggest name sitting at that table is Robert House, better known as Mr. House, the man who rules of the city of New Vegas in 2010's Fallout: New Vegas. The head of Rob-Co Industries before the bombs drop, he survived the apocalypse by putting his body on life support and hooking up his consciousness to a supercomputer. He rules New Vegas with an iron fist, proud of maintaining his oasis in the midst of ruin. He's a major character in the game, and given that the end of Fallout hints that we'll be visiting New Vegas in season 2, we can bet that he'll return. Watch actor Rafi Silver play Mr. House in the video clip at the top of this post.
Unfortunately, we don't know if Amazon will renew Fallout for a second season, although the positive reception among audiences and critics, it seems very likely.
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