Fallout fans spent years debating who dropped the bombs — then the show made a call

12.04.2024 - 15:55 / polygon.com / Walton Goggins

Fallout, the new TV drama based on the post-apocalyptic game series, premiered earlier this week on Prime Video. And instead of directly adapting any of the games (like HBO’s The Last of Us) or creating a separate continuity inspired by the series (à la Paramount Plus’ Halo), Fallout takes a wholly different approach: telling an original story set explicitly within the continuity of the games.

Which is what makes the reveal during the eighth episode of Fallout such a bombshell, pun intended. After more than 26 years, Prime Video’s new series might have offered an answer to one of, if not the most persistent question of Fallout’s universe: Who dropped the bombs first?

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of Fallout season 1.]

Fallout takes place in an alternate universe set approximately 219 years after a nuclear war between the U.S. and China has destroyed civilization and irradiated the planet’s surface. Prior to the nuclear war that decimated the Earth, Walton Goggins’ Ghoul character was an American actor named Cooper Howard who at one time worked as the spokesman for Vault-Tec, a prewar defense contractor responsible for building the vast network of underground shelters seen throughout the series. Through flashbacks, we learn that Cooper’s wife, Barb (Frances Turner), worked as an executive at Vault-Tec.

When Cooper begins to feel uneasy about his reputation as “the pitchman for the end of the world,” he begins to suspect that his wife is withholding something from him with regard for the true nature and scope of Vault-Tec’s intentions for the Vaults. Desperate to assuage his concerns, Cooper bugs his wife’s Pip-Boy — a portable, wrist-mounted computer designed to integrate with Vault-Tec’s systems — in order to learn the truth. In the final flashback in the season finale of Fallout, Cooper offers Barb a ride to work and, while she’s away at a meeting, waits in her office in order to listen in on what’s being discussed.

It’s at this point that Cooper learns the horrible truth: Not only is Vault-Tec conspiring to perform illicit human experiments within the Vaults in the event of a nuclear apocalypse, but the company is willing to go so far as to drop the bombs itself in order to ensure that its investment pays off.

“A nuclear event would be a tragedy,” Barb tells the room full of executives, “but also an opportunity. Perhaps the greatest opportunity in history, because when we are the only ones left, there will be no one left to fight. A true monopoly. This is our chance to make war obsolete, because in our current societal configuration, which took shape without intentional guidance, we have friction, we have conflict, and we have war [...] and war never changes.”

This is, by far,