Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 References Cut New Vegas Vault

Fallout Season 2 is here, and the very first episode wastes no time jumping into Mojave action with a Novac shootout and a trek through the desert, barely missing the Deathclaw Quarry. But what's interesting about this opener is the detour to Vault 24, which finally closes the giant mechanical door on a 15-year-old mystery.

For context, Fallout: New Vegas was made with a tight 18-month deadline, meaning there is a pulp of clipped content, from a mr. House romance and a pre-Lonesome Road Ulysses to a mysterious Vault 24 jumpsuit, with no bunker to call home.

There have been discussions here and there for over a decade now about what the vault might have meant, but with nothing to go by, there's simply no way of knowing. Even project manager Josh Sawyer wasn't sure what Vault 24 was about, suggesting that the team might “have generated some extra vault costumes from vaults” that were never meant to be in the game as part of a fundraising mission for Sarah Weintraub.

Vault 24 is a brainwashing experiment

Skeleton in a communist outfit connected to a machine.

Spoilers for Fallout Series 2 Episode 1.

Thankfully, after 15 years, the Prime Video series finally gives us a concrete answer to Vault 24: it was a brainwashing experiment that turned its inhabitants into communist agents, using a computer interface planted in the back of the subject's neck that has the rather unfortunate side effect of making their heads go up.

The vault is in a cave behind the Starlight drive-in (referring to the same chain that appeared in Fallout 4), where The Ghoul and Lucy stumble into the aftermath of this nasty trial, hot on the trail of Hank MacLean. Inside, they find a bunch of skeletons connected to various machines, sitting in front of a still spinning projector that forever hypnotizes them through old black and white propaganda films and optical illusions.

Yes, even in the TV show, Bethesda uses skeletons for environmental stories.