The “demon in the snow” Cooper Howard saw during the Battle of Alaska was more than just a monster. It was a warning to Robert House that someone even more powerful and knowledgeable was ahead of him in the shadowy struggle for global dominance. Now we know exactly who that “player” was. Fallout‘s season two finale confirmed a terrifying fact it had teased throughout the season: the Enclave was secretly controlling Vault-Tec before The Great War. And The Enclave is still the biggest player in the Wasteland today, with plans even more nefarious than we ever imagined. Yes, the Enclave is the major villain in the Fallout series, and it’s just getting started.
Although the Fallout video games have never had a single antagonist, one organization always stood as the franchise’s most evil group. Now Prime Video’s Fallout series has centered that monstrous faction, the Enclave, as the ultimate big bad of the wasteland. The show’s season two finale was full of revelations about the cruel, anti-communist, paramilitary organization that named itself the rightful heir to the U.S. government following The Great War.
House first learned someone/something, a proverbial “player” in the game of world domination, was out there when he learned about Deathclaws. Despite his resources, algorithms, and genius, he never fully learned everything he needed to know about his “invisible adversary,” like how it invested in Vault-Tec. When Vault-Tec asked for a special executive vault in New Vegas, it was really on behalf of the Enclave, as the same person(s) ran both, even though most members of both did not know. One person who did was the Enclave’s “acolyte,” Fallout‘s Hank MacLean.
Vault-Tec executive Hank, like the Last President of the United States whom Coop gave the diode to, was always working for the Enclave. He even had a secret, special Enclave Pip-Boy he took with him into the vaults. We learned about it when his secret first wife, Stephanie Harper, used it to call out to the group she didn’t actually work for. Hank told Steph the Enclave is “always listening” and it surely was. We saw the Enclave headquarters in (what appeared) to be the Rocky Mountains. It’s the same place Siggi Wilzig, who worked for the “player” two centuries before and gave his life to get cold fusion away from the Enclave, escaped in season one. It’s also where Barb and Janey Howard might have gone after leaving their cryopods in New Vegas.
In Fallout season two, Hank had been working in the secret Enclave vault, perfecting miniaturization of the mind-control device Robert House had traded with Vault-Tec years before The Great War. Hank succeeded. And not just at shrinking the tech.
He told Lucy his new R&D was already out in the wasteland. No one will even know who out there is automated and who isn’t because the device is so small. But even more terrifying is that those unwitting soldiers—with personalities shaped by sweet, good-hearted Congresswoman Diane Welch’s (thankfully now dead) head—are carrying out orders. They’re orders, Hank says, that were written centuries before.)
Those orders came from the same people he worked for right up until his last act of service. In Fallout season two’s finale, Hank erased his own memories for the Enclave. That guaranteed Lucy couldn’t learn about those orders, who gave them, and who is really in charge. That includes learning more about the scariest thing her father told her. “You think this is the real world,” Hank said. “The surface is the experiment. Not the vaults.”
That is really scary since the Enclave and Vault-Tec, even before we learned they were really two parts of one evil whole, had long experimented on vaults. Stephanie just called in Phase II for her own vaults, which will involve FEV. And yet, somehow, the surface, and therefore nuclear war itself, is apparently all one big experiment. The Enclave, specifically whoever or whatever controls it, blew up the world to see what would happen on Fallout. And since then, they’ve been listening and watching everyone and everything out there. They made life itself a test subject.
The Enclave killed the world so it could study the fallout. And that wasn’t enough. Now it has slaves following commands no one even knows about. Robert House is right. So long as the Enclave endures, “there is no safety.” Not for anyone anywhere. And that’s been true for a long time.
Fallout season two is now streaming on Prime Video.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow Mikey on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.