Is Aaron Paul Playing A Major Fallout 4 Character?
The Breaking Bad star's surprise casting could be our introduction to any number of new factions vying for control of the Wasteland.
Despite veering off course and setting itself firmly beyond the timeline of the games, the Fallout TV show has been one of the most resounding successes of Hollywood’s current love affair with the video game adaptation. While complaints have been levied at properties such as Netflix’s Devil May Cry show or Zach Cregger’s upcoming Resident Evil film for taking detours from the source material, Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet’s original story set in the Fallout universe has been met with critical praise and love from the fanbase, and it has managed to do it all with a wholly new cast and a mostly original story riffing on the games. The second season of the show introduced New Vegas, the central location from the highly acclaimed Fallout: New Vegas, with Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul, aka Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) converging on the post-apocalyptic tourist resort in search of her father and the truth about Vault-Tec’s conspiracy, while the Brotherhood of Steel’s freshly knighted Maximus grapples with his place in the increasingly corrupt organization as the drumbeat of conflict intensifies in the background.
The finale sets a new course for most of its characters, with Maximus rebelling against the Brotherhood and abandoning his former brethren to find Lucy in New Vegas (just as Caesar’s Legion announced their intent to conquer the city), while The Ghoul sets off for Colorado to find out what happened to his wife and daughter. While season 3 is still a ways away, there’s already lots of speculation as to what it might pull from the games – and with the official Fallout TV show Twitter announcing that Aaron Paul is joining the cast, that speculation is certain to intensify.
Unlike lots of other adaptations, Fallout has been mostly praised for the decision to chart its own course.
It’s hard to pinpoint with certainty who exactly he’ll be playing, as season 2 already introduced a lot of diverging paths with storytelling potential – we meet the last vestiges of the New California Republic (a commendably democratic governing body trying to install some sort of formal order in the post-apocalypse) at the end of the season, and we’re also introduced to a few of the other spread out chapters of the Brotherhood of Steel. It’s possible that he could be playing a new character belonging to one of these factions, but a popular rumor is that the third season will loosely introduce concepts from Fallout 4, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
Despite being set in Massachusetts, a location the show has very much not visited yet, there are still elements of the plot of Fallout 4 running through the show, most notably through The Ghoul – much like in the game, which revolves around a Vault-Tec survivor searching the Wasteland for their son who woke up decades earlier, Cooper is also looking for his wife and daughter. Although Colorado is a very different setting, Aaron Paul’s presence could potentially tie into elements from that game. One of the key factions in Fallout 4 is the Institute, a scientific research society looking to rebuild civilization through any means, including the usage of synthetic humans they created – it’s possible that Paul could be playing one of the scientists from the Institute, or even one of their manufactured synthetics, which would be a bit ironic considering Paul’s role in Westworld, another sci-fi heavy show created by one of Fallout’s executive producers Jonathan Nolan.
Even though the home of the Institute is over 2,000 miles from Cooper’s destination, that doesn’t mean he can’t run into one of their manufactured synths on the way there.
There’s also a slim chance that Paul might be a member of the Enclave, a fascist paramilitary organization that believes itself to be the true “inheritors of America” and harbors genocidal intent towards anyone they view as not “purely human,” which happens to be anyone in the Wasteland. While the Enclave doesn’t play a big role in Fallout 4, they have been referenced several times in the show, with Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle McLachlan) serving as a secret asset to the organization.
The world of Fallout is a sprawling new frontier filled with countless rivaling factions and militias vying for control, and Aaron Paul could be representing any of them or a wholly new space in the universe – after all, one of the best parts of the Fallout show is that it has the freedom to engage with the source material in whatever way it sees fit.
