Fallout‘s second season has come to an end, and after a more measured journey through the city of New Vegas and beyond, the bigger picture of where the show wants to go next is finally here: some of it we could already take a pretty good guess at, and the rest is tied up in a lot of nods to the lore of the Fallout games.
“The Strip” takes a bit of an awkward approach to touching on the various story threads that come to a head in the episode—less of a flowing narrative and more a series of vignettes as the show chose what to cap off and what to leave open for season three. So let’s take a similar approach and break down some of the big reveals from the episode point-by-point to see how they connect to the games and what they mean for the future of the wasteland.
The Battle for New Vegas
Season two ends with Maximus and Lucy finally reunited but with quite the mess on their hands. With Mr. House’s survival thanks to the Ghoul giving him cold fusion to power his computer systems (which now contain an upload of his mind that, after helping Coop find his way to the special vault his family was kept in—more on that later—seems to be playing it secret that he’s still around in some capacity), New Vegas has now become the staging ground for a new conflict in the Mojave.
Not only do we get to briefly revisit the Legion after their infighting spills over—and learn that Macaulay Culkin’s mysterious Legate is covering up the former Caesar’s desire for the Legion to end with his death, taking on the mantle himself—and see them rally to take New Vegas as the hub of their future empire, but we also see Maximus get his ass saved from the Deathclaw breakout thanks to a bolstered force of NCR rangers and troopers arriving in the town just in the nick of time.
The NCR’s brief appearance earlier in the season, combined with their defeat at the climax of season one (as well as the destruction of Shady Sands), seemed to give the hint that the faction was no longer a major player in the region, but that’s clearly not the case here. Going forward, it looks like season three will see the NCR and the Legion duke it out for the soul of the wasteland: either the tyranny of the Legion or, at least, the spark of hope that the NCR could do what they did in Shady Sands and start rebuilding a strong post-apocalyptic community all over again.
Oops, All Enclave 
© Prime Video
While we already had an inkling after Ron Perlman’s surprise Super Mutant showed up to help the Ghoul out a few weeks ago, “The Strip” makes it clear that Fallout‘s unifying focus going forward is going to be the arrival of the Enclave from out of the shadows. Which means, of course, having to confirm that a bunch of secret Enclave agents are already out there.
It’s not too surprising to learn that Hank himself was working for the Enclave after all, given that much of his time in season two has made it clear that he had ulterior motives outside of either New Vegas’ own internal politics or even Vault-Tec itself, but aside from confirming that—and that Coop unwittingly aided the Enclave’s pre-war efforts by handing the cold fusion diode over to the U.S. President, who, just like in the games, was secretly a member of the organization—we also learned that he has already planted a bunch of unwitting Enclave agents in the wasteland already with his miniaturized brain chips.
One tragic sacrifice later to activate his own at max strength, seemingly erasing his memories of Lucy, we also learn that pre-war Steph charmed Hank into matrimony to get her chance at getting into the vaults, making herself an agent of the Enclave in the process. Now that the vaulties have turned on her after Chet exposed her past to them, she’s now fully on the Enclave train, using a secret Pip-Boy to communicate with the organization and make an appeal for… well, let’s get to that.
Phase 2 and the Real FEV 
© Prime Video
Trapped in her Overseer office in Vault 32, Steph contacts the Enclave and demands that they launch “Phase 2,” an activation that is left a mystery in the finale but one we can divine has connections to another of season two’s plots: the “Future Enterprise Ventures” Norm uncovered in his brief sojourn out of Vault 31 with Vault-Tec’s cryogenically frozen managers of tomorrow (don’t worry, most of them are now conveniently suffering from death-by-surprise-Radroach-attack).
Fallout fans already know what Norm eventually discovered: that FEV actually stands for the Forced Evolutionary Virus, a bioweapon with origins from before the Great War that was a major part of the original Fallout and played a persistent supporting role across the rest of the series. A radiation-immune attempt to create a new breed of supersoldiers for the coming apocalypse, the FEV ended up interacting with survivors already exposed to radiation poisoning in a mix of wasteland discoveries and even internal vault experiments, leading instead, among other strains, to the creation of Super Mutants.
But in Fallout 2, the Enclave decides to utilize its own strain of FEV to develop a genocidal toxin it wants to use to purge the wasteland of any “impure” humans—whether mutants, ghouls, or survivors exposed to radiation—setting the stage for its takeover of what was left. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if the “phase 2” that Steph kicks off is the Enclave ramping up its own experimentation with the FEV and kickstarting a similar attempt, which would be in line with the coming war the mysterious Super Mutant mentioned to the Ghoul.
Colorado Bound 
© Prime Video
Speaking of the Ghoul, he finally gets what he wanted in “The Strip,” when House guides him to the secret executive vault Coop’s wife and daughter were frozen in… only for him to find that they’ve already been defrosted at some point. All that’s left in Barbara’s cryopod is a postcard, indicating that she picked up on her and Coop’s pre-war plans to go to Colorado before the U.S. government (and through them, the Enclave) arrested him, presumably taking Janey with her.
While the Ghouls’ new path is clear—taking him away from Maximus and Lucy entirely for now, it seems—Colorado is a location that, by and large, Fallout has yet to previously cover in one of the games. Well, that’s only true to a point. While the main Fallout games and their continuity have never taken players there, one game has: Fallout Tactics.
The 2001 tactical RPG spinoff was eventually decanonized by Bethesda’s relaunch of the franchise with Fallout 3 years later but was set around Colorado as the home of Vault 0, intended to be a hub for the brightest pre-war minds to be stored, ready to rebuild the United States after the apocalypse. It was run by a powerful supercomputer known as the Calculator, using some of the brains of the vault’s inhabitants to fuel itself, but generations of wear and tear through age and exposure corrupted it, causing the Calculator to attempt to exterminate all life in the wasteland.
Some of that, or none of that, could come up in Fallout season three—but whatever happens, it’ll be new territory for the show to explore.
Liberty Prime Alpha 
© Prime Video
Season two might have, by and large, dropped the Brotherhood of Steel’s civil war plotline once Maximus got out of dodge, but a post-credit scene returned us just to provide one more major video game connection. We catch up with a bloodied Quintus, who declares himself the Destroyer, rather than the Unifier, after his plans to unite multiple factions of the Brotherhood against its Commonwealth chapter descended into chaos. His plans? A blueprint for a massive mecha labelled “Liberty Prime Alpha.”
Liberty Prime appeared in both Fallout 3 and 4, another pre-war relic. Developed by the U.S. as a communist-hating superweapon in its resource wars with China, Liberty Prime was a 100-foot-tall giant robot meant to use overwhelmingly advanced weaponry to eliminate America’s foes, but an inability to sufficiently power its systems led to it being left unused in the depths of the Pentagon by the time the Great War started. In Fallout 3, it’s recovered by a DC-based chapter of the Brotherhood and eventually gets its power issues solved so it can be used to stop the Enclave, but by the events of Fallout 4, the robot has entered a state of disrepair again and can be fixed up if players side with the Brotherhood against the mysterious faction known as the Institute.
The attachment of “Alpha” seems to suggest that Quintus’ blueprints are for creating a distinct version of the robot than the one already seen in the games, but it’s clear the plans are still going to be similar for it: help the Brotherhood resurge as a major player in the wasteland again… and they’ll probably need to head to New Vegas and take the cold fusion diode for themselves again if they want to power it, potentially creating a three-way fight for the city’s future between the Legion and the NCR.
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