Fallout Season 2 already revealed a major twist from the Fallout: New Vegas video game from Bethesda. Amazon Prime Video's hit post-apocalyptic drama returned for more irradiated fun on streaming, ushering fans back to the Wasteland alongside Ella Purnell's Lucy and Walton Goggins' Ghoul. Part of the Season 2 premiere included this pair of lovable wastlanders coming across another one of the franchise's signature vaults.
In the world of Fallout, these underground shelters were sold to the public as a place to hide from the seemingly imminent nuclear war. However, they have proven to have a much more nefarious purpose, with each of them serving as the host to a specific set of experiements orchestrated by their corporate creators.
Warning - The rest of this article contains spoilers for Fallout Season 2, Episode 1.
Over the years, fans have had a taste of a good smattering of vaults and their trials across the franchise. However, one vault in particular has eluded the Fallout faithful. After first being introduced in Fallout: New Vegas but never fully explored, Fallout Season 2 finally took the deep dive into Vault 24 (a fallout shelter located in the Nevada desert).
This particular steel-lined domain gets the spotlight in the show's second-season premiere, as Lucy and Ghoul enter looking for Lucy's on-the-run father. No, they do not find her dad (as he is well on his way to New Vegas, at this point); they do discover something a bit more sinister.
The pair discovers that Vault 24's scientific secret involved brainwashing its residents into a communist embrace. The Vault appears to be doing this through a machine called the Brain Computing Interface (BCI), which manipulates brainwaves and literally rewrites thought.
It is unclear why exactly vault-creators Vault-Tec would want to play around with creating an army of communists (especially considering the franchise's Red Scare setting before the bombs dropping). Still, it is fascinating to see it happening.
Vault 24 was referenced in Fallout: New Vegas but was never explored quite like this. According to files hidden within the game's code, there were plans to include this particular vault in the game at one point; however, it was cut during development. A Vault 24 jumpsuit can be found in the hit RPG's final release, but that is the closest gamers have gotten to the desert-based refuge.
Fallout Season 2, Episode 1 is streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The new series continues the adventures of Ella Purnell's plucky survivor, Lucy, as she turns her back on her tranquil life living in an underground fallout shelter to explore an irradiated wasteland decades after a nuclear war. New episodes of Fallout Season 2 drop every Wednesday.
Why Was Vault 24 Brainwashing Its Residents?
Seeing Vault 24's brainwashing experiment in Fallout Season 2 will almost certainly bring up some questions among fans of the franchise. In theory, each of the vault experiments was meant to further the pursuits of their corporate overlords.
These iron-clad fallout shelters served as the perfect controlled environments to test everything from human mating patterns to full-on cloning. But why would the US-based Vault-Tec want to brainwash a particular community into being a bunch of communists, especially as, when these experiments were being developed, it was at the height of Fallout's version of the Cold War?
Perhaps this brainwashing experiment was an attempt to understand their enemies. Maybe by creating a controlled environment of communist sympathizers, Vault-Tec and its investors could learn about life behind the Iron Curtain. Brainwashing was just the easiest way to flip a switch rather than capturing and imprisoning real communists.
This could also be an attempt at a more general manipulation of brainwaves, at the request of a fellow Vault-Tec ally. As shown off during the Season 2 premiere, Justin Theroux's Robert House had been playing around with the outright control of brainwaves before the bombs dropped.
Given Mr. House's tech billionaire status in the pre-Great War world, there is a chance that the character had Vault-Tec conducting experiments for his RobCo Industries, and Vault 24 was the result of that.
