James Lucas is an Executive Editor from Newcastle, England. They have written for sites like IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, with a special focus on FPS games, Soulslikes, and survival horror.
Fallout Season 2 is here, and the very first episode wastes no time jumping into the Mojave action with a Novac shootout and a trek through the desert, narrowly missing Deathclaw Quarry. But what’s interesting about this opener is the detour to Vault 24, finally closing the giant mechanical door on a 15-year-old mystery.
For context, Fallout: New Vegas was made on a tight 18-month deadline, which means there’s a lot of cut 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’s been discussions here and there for over a decade now on what the vault might have entailed, but with nothing to go by, there’s simply no way of knowing. Even project director Josh Sawyer wasn’t sure what Vault 24 was about, suggesting that the team could “have generated a few additional vault suits from vaults” that were never intended to be in the game as part of a collection quest for Sarah Weintraub.
Vault 24 Is A Brainwashing Experiment
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 into the back of the subject’s neck that has the rather unfortunate side effect of making their head go boom.
The vault is found in a cave behind the Starlight drive-in (referencing the same chain which appeared in Fallout 4), where The Ghoul and Lucy stumble onto the aftermath of this nasty trial, hot on the trail of Hank MacLean. Inside, they find a mass of skeletons wired up to various machines, sitting in front of a still-whirring projector that is forever hypnotising them through old black-and-white propaganda footage and optical illusions.
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Yes, even in the TV show, Bethesda is using skeletons for environmental storytelling.
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