How Fallout Season 2’s Ending Sets Up Season 3

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You also don’t have to be a diehard Fallout gamer to see how the Season 2 finale set up some clear roadmaps (quite literally) to where Season 3 is headed. We’ll break it down below, but obviously, there will be MAJOR SPOILERS THAT FOLLOW!

Fallout Season 3 Is Headed to Colorado

The Season 2 finale of Fallout saw Howard Cooper/The Ghoul finally achieve his 200-year goal of locating the cryogenic tubes of his wife Barb (Frances Turner) and their daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith) at Vault-Tec HQ in New Vegas. However, when Robert House’s computerized “ghost” opened the tubes for Cooper, it was revealed that Barb and Janey had already been woken from cryo-sleep. Barb left a postcard in her tube, directing Cooper to search for them in the state of Colorado, which Cooper set off to do.

In terms of lore, Colorado has never been a featured setting of the Fallout games, but it almost was. Before Fallout 3 became what it is, there was an alternate version of the game that was set in Colorado. Codenamed “Van Buren” during development, the game would’ve followed an escaped prisoner wandering the American Southwest and avoiding a squad of robotic prisoner guards, capturing and delivering other prisoners as bartering chips. There were iconic locations in states like Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, which would’ve all been part of the game map.

The story of the game would’ve revealed that mad scientist “Victor Presper” had infected the protagonist with a virus that was being exponentially spread through the encounters with other characters in the game. Though the game had multiple endings, the gist of it was that Presper planned to use the new infection as a pretense for yet another apocalyptic nuclear attack using the orbital missile system, which would “cleanse” the world while Presper and some select others would ride out the carnage inside Colorado’s Boulder Dome, which was converted into a bomb-proof research facility. Other parts of the game would’ve featured story arcs about the Roman legion, Brotherhood of Steel, and the New California Republic, factions that were all either introduced or further developed in Season 2 of the show.

Fallout Season 3 Could Easily Be Doing A Van Buren Remix

The Fallout TV series is about much more than just Cooper Howard’s story. Season 2 saw Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) finally deal with her evil dad Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), but not before he enacted his plan to use miniaturized mind-control boxes to create his own secret squad of programmed agents out into the wasteland, on behalf of a secret cabal he belongs to, known as the Enclave. Meanwhile, Hank’s former wife (and Vault 32 ruler) Steph (Annabel O’Hagan) contacts the Enclave over radio to initiate the start of “Phase 2,” while out in the wasteland, Norm MacLean (Moisés Arias) is desperately trying to get back home to the vault and protect his people, after getting wind of the Enclave’s Phase 2 plot from a (now deceased) team of Vault-Tec executives.

It seems like an easy flip to take the abandoned story for Van Buren and work it into being Fallout Season 3. Victor Presper (or a similar character) would be a fitting new big bad, and his connection to the Enclave is easy to establish by making the Colorado facility their secret HQ. The road to Colorado would also have many familiar characters and factions clashing, while simultaneously expanding the world beyond the canonized lore of the games. Since Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (the team behind HBO’s Westworld) wanted this show to be ‘in the world of the games’ and not a direct adaptation of any one game, this approach to Season 3 seems like a perfect fit.

“Well, the Ghoul certainly has now an incredible reason to go to Colorado and head to Colorado. But of course, it’s the wasteland where you’ll get sidetracked by bullsh*t every goddamn time,” teased showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet, when ComicBook interviewed her. “So you know just how quickly he can get there. What, what might be along his way. You know, I hope the fans are as curious about it as we are.”

Fallout is streaming on Prime Video. Discuss the Season 2 finale with us on the ComicBook Forum!