Amazon’s Fallout present is, miraculously, fairly enjoyable and nice. It manages to seize the satire of the video games and by some means makes it even sharper by trimming a lot of their fats. Due to this, the weather which the present lifts from the video games really feel like they’re lent much more house to shine prominently, and that is very true of the storyline centering the horrors of the Vaults. An easter egg in Fallout’s sixth episode underscores these horrors in a fashion that’s as unsettling as it’s hilarious.
Spoilers for the Fallout present, in addition to background data from the video games, follows.
Although Fallout makes some extent to spotlight the ominous nature of the Vaults immediately, it takes a while for the present to totally play its hand. Within the meantime, it serves up two plotlines—one which follows Norm (Moises Arias) in Vault 33 and one other which follows Walton Goggins’ character, Cooper Howard, earlier than the bombs drop—that work from reverse ends of the timeline towards the identical aim: unearthing what sinister issues are occurring within the Vaults. To that finish, Fallout hides one of many largest hints about Vault-Tec’s true nature in plain sight.
At the start of Fallout’s sixth episode, Howard is filming an advert for Vault-Tec wherein he sings the praises of its Vaults and their skill to enshrine and defend core American values. Because the advert involves a detailed, a telephone quantity flashes throughout the display screen. The quantity reads 213-25-VAULT and sits on the display screen for an oddly very long time for such a small element. With that in thoughts, I paused the present, grabbed my telephone and dialed the quantity, which interprets to 213-258-2858. I nervously pressed the telephone to my ear and anticipated the sound of hitting somebody’s voicemail.
Then, a person screamed into my ear for a number of seconds and the decision dropped.
Of us conversant in the sequence seemingly know that there’s nothing good to be gained from the information of what really happens within the numerous vaults throughout America, however folks experiencing Fallout for the primary time by way of the present are in for a journey over the eight-episode season. For newcomers, the present slowly builds up the dread of what Vault-Tec has been doing this entire time, and although the present’s finale explicitly dives into this, that telephone message—in the event you may even name it that—is a superbly succinct summation of their whole deal that viewers can likelihood upon earlier.
The present finally particulars what many followers of the Fallout video games already know: Vault-Tec used the populations of their vaults as lab rats to conduct product and social experiments. The bloodcurdling scream on the opposite finish of the road is that of a vault dweller assembly their destiny by the hands of Vault-Tec’s inhumane machinations. It’s one of many earliest confirmations for brand new followers that Vault-Tec doesn’t simply appear shady, it’s responsible of literal crimes towards humanity.
If that storyline is of any curiosity to you and also you need much more, begin getting into the video games, which allow you to uncover quite a lot of Vaults throughout the nation and discover out what weird experiments happened there. Since ending the present, I’ve been jonesing for any scrap of the sequence that I can scrounge up, and I do know I’m not the one one. I checked again in on Fallout: New Vegas for the primary time because it launched, and even purchased a set of the primary few titles for lower than three bucks on Steam over the weekend. I’m additionally eyeing a “game-sized mod” that acquired delayed due to Fallout 4’s upcoming next-gen replace. If you wish to take it a step additional, Fallout Shelter really allows you to turn out to be a Vault Overseer, like Kyle MacLachlan’s character within the present, and you’ll run your individual sequence of fucked-up experiments. Level is, the wasteland is your irradiated oyster, people.
