Erick Crawler 
While other characters and conflicts are glimpsed in the new trailer for Fallout: Season 2 – factions like the Brotherhood of Steel, Caesar’s Legion, the embattled denizens of Vault 33, and, oh look, a Deathclaw! – it’s the literal journey of Walton Goggins’ Cooper Howard, aka The Ghoul, that serves as the teaser’s narrative throughline.
In the trailer, The Ghoul’s arrival in New Vegas, alongside Lucy MacLean and Dogmeat, triggers the backstory of how Coop went to Las Vegas before the war, where he met with the man who he claims was the main cause of the end of the world: Robert House, played by The Leftovers’ Justin Theroux. (A different actor cameoed as Mr. House in Season 1.)
First off, it should be noted that Season 2 is not adapting the story of the game Fallout: New Vegas, which prominently featured Mr. House. The TV series takes place in 2296, after the events of the games but the show is still considered canon.
Showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet said in an April 2024 interview that Season 2 is set 15 years after the events depicted in Fallout: New Vegas. Whether Season 2 will recreate anything from the game’s storyline involving Mr. House (perhaps in flashback) remains to be seen, it seems likely that Season 2 will undoubtedly include plenty of Easter eggs.
Speaking of which, the Season 2 trailer shows plenty of iconic Vegas landmarks gamers will remember, like Dinky the T-Rex. The trailer opens with the post-war Mojave Wasteland before transitioning to the pre-war glory days of the Vegas Strip. The most notable casinos from the game can be spotted throughout the teaser. There’s The Tops, Gomorrah, The Atomic Wrangler, but most importantly for this season’s story, The Lucky 38.
The Lucky 38 is prominently featured in Coop’s backstory where he visits Vegas while still working as an actor and pitchman for Vault-Tec. The Lucky 38 is the headquarters of Robert House, the RobCo Industries mogul who runs Vegas.
We see Mr. House sitting before a bank of computer monitors, which could foreshadow his fate in the games where his consciousness is plugged into a super-computer that allows him to survive for hundreds of years after the war.
In the end of Season 1, Coop discovered that his wife Barb’s employer Vault-Tec and other captains of industry (including Mr. House) decided they would drop the bombs themselves so they could profit from the inevitable nuclear war. With the Season 2 trailer showing Coop traveling to Vegas with Barb, perhaps Coop will continue his snooping or maybe even try to stop the apocalypse himself by killing execs like Mr. House.
This is hinted at when House recognizes the darkness lurking within Coop that will one day consume him as the Ghoul. House calls Coop “actually quite a violent man” who would do anything to protect his family. “You just don’t want to kill me … yet.”
It seems then that the first steps of Coop’s tragic transformation into The Ghoul begins with his interactions with Mr. House. Is Coop himself somehow indirectly responsible for Mr. House’s role in triggering the end of the world? Might the Ghoul, in the present day, encounter Mr. House in his computer form and pull the plug on him for revenge?
If Mr. House does show up in 2296 when Season 2 is set then that would seem to settle the fan debate over which ending of Fallout: New Vegas is canon. In the game, a victory for Mr. House is one where he survives the Battle of Hoover Dam, pushes out the other factions, and remains in control of Vegas.
Ron Perlman’s narration in that ending says “Mr. House continued to run New Vegas his way, a despotic vision of pre-War glory. The streets were orderly, efficient, cold. New Vegas continued to be the sole place in the wasteland where fortunes were won and lost in the blink of an eye.”
That clearly isn’t the place we see in the Season 2 trailer. This isn’t the “shining jewel in the middle of the desert” as Mr. House promised it would become after his victory. Did something else befall New Vegas in the 15 years since the events of the game?
We do see a glimpse of Ceasar’s Legion in the trailer, although we don’t know where exactly they are. Perhaps the ending where the Legion won is canon for the show and Mr. House is well and truly dead? But the trailer does show The Ghoul encounter Victor, Mr. House’s remote robot scout, which would suggest that Mr. House is still active.
(Side note: Although we see Maximus and the Brotherhood back in action, it’s not clear from this trailer who they’re fighting – The Enclave? Supermutants? – or whether Max will cross paths with The Ghoul and Lucy this season.)
We’ll have to wait and see once Fallout: Season 2 launches on Prime Video on December 17th.
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