Cooper Howard is already responsible for inspiring one iconic Fallout symbol. In season one of Prime Video’s Fallout series, we learn that Cooper Howard is the original Vault Boy. It’s his thumbs-up in service of marketing Vault-Tec’s Vaults that will one day turn into the grinning blonde figure that is synonymous with Vault-Tec in the world of the franchise and with Fallout in our own universe. But Fallout season two has us thinking, could Cooper Howard also serve as the inspiration for another friendly fixture from the games? Could Cooper Howard have been the human basis for Mr. House’s semi-autonomous robot, Victor the Securitron?
The Fallout series hasn’t confirmed this thought yet. But if we stop and review both the timeline of Fallout‘s events and the facts we’ve learned about Mr. House and Cooper Howard throughout Fallout seasons one and two. It feels… increasingly plausible to us that Cooper Howard could have indeed inspired Mr. House to create Victor the Securitron.
Let’s begin with the timeline as we delve into the Victor Securitron and Cooper Howard connection. Ultimately, neither the Fallout games nor the series tells us exactly when Victor the Securitron was created. But we see his earliest franchise appearance in Fallout season two, episode six, when Cooper Howard comes to Las Vegas for a defense contractors’ summit in the mid- to late- 2070s. Now, Victor the Securitron is a 2060-B model of RobCo’s Securitron robot. (As we’ve written before, RobCo’s Securitrons are large, effective, armored artificial intelligence robots.) And we might take from that name that his model was developed in the year 2060.
But, of course, Victor is no ordinary 2060-B Securitron; he has been modified by Mr. House to have a level of independence and also personality that none of the other Securitrons have. So it stands to reason that it might have taken a little bit longer to complete Victor. And so we might assume that this special Securitron was ready some time after 2060 proper, but before the late 2070s, when we see Victor up and running in the room with Cooper Howard.
And what happened in 2065, on April 14th, 2065, at 5:17 a.m., to be exact, a date a few years after 2060? Well, we might say, Cooper Howard’s daughter, Janey, was born. Or, we might say, Mr. House’s algorithims coeleseced to reveal the date of the end of the world to him. But, we’re going to go with our favorite answer to that question: Mr. House became interested in one Cooper Howard and began to keep track of him. We know this to be true because Mr. House tells Cooper Howard in Fallout season two, “Mr. Howard, I was there with you in Alaska… I licensed a piece of software to West-Tek, which gave me access to the T-45 armor you wore. So I saw what you saw. I saw it all. I saw the demon in the snow.”
Now, in Fallout‘s world, China’s invasion of Alaska occurred around 2066/2067, with the first T-45 Power Armor models deployed in 2067. So that means that Cooper Howard would have encountered the Deathclaw in Alaska at least two years after the birth of his daughter, and it seems clear that Mr. House was already keeping a very close eye on him. An eye that did not abate, and allowed him to know exactly when Cooper Howard met with Moldaver to discuss the potential murder of Mr. House, some years later, in the 2070s, and minutiae such as the minute Cooper bought a ticket to Las Vegas.
All of that isn’t exactly important. It just confirms for us that it would be incredibly hard for Mr. House to have missed the many cowboy movies that Cooper Howard starred in and became famous for, we assume, sometime after he served in the war and into the start of where we meet him in the Fallout series. Incidentally, Cooper Howard would have been starring in those cowboy movies right around the time that House was building Victor the Securitron. And Mr. House tells us one very important detail about himself. He doesn’t like fiction. He doesn’t watch movies. They’re not real. They don’t matter. So, where pray tell did this whimsical Western-movie-based cowboy personality for Victor come from, then?
Mr. House doesn’t really strike us as a cowboy kind of guy, just generally. There’s nothing in his history to suggest the cowboy was important to him as a figure. And he wasn’t watching any Westerns. He wasn’t tuning in to Cowboy movies because, as mentioned, he doesn’t believe in movies… Except… he probably was watching just a very specific subset of movies.
Yes, Mr. House probably did watch Cooper Howard’s films. You know, for research on his important quarry. For science! If you will. And I, for one, find it just too much of a coincidence that Mr. House was so wrapped up in Cooper Howard, a noted cowboy actor, right as he was creating Victor, and Victor’s friendly, cowboy personality wasn’t based on Cooper Howard’s work? In fact, we even know that Cooper Howard only liked to play noble cowboys; he didn’t want his character to needlessly kill a man in Fallout season one. Cooper Howard, like Victor the Securitron, is a kind cowboy. Who we bet just loved to say, “Howdy Partner.”
Honestly, we really want Cooper Howard to be the inspiration for Victor the Securitron on Fallout. Who cares if he’s already the inspiration for Vault Boy? We kind of feel like Cooper Howard looks more like Victor the Securitron, anyway. And we think it’s sweet. Fallout‘s Mr. House doesn’t really have many (any?) friends. But he clearly built Victor the Securitron to be friendly for a reason, and we feel like that reason is Cooper Howard.
Fallout season two is now streaming on Prime Video.
Rotem Rusak is Editor-in-Chief at Nerdist. She is a Mr. House apologist and would be his friend if he asked.