Did Fallout Season 2’s Best Cameo Confirm Next Season’s New Villains?
Ron Perlman’s latest character might change everything.
Lore. Lore never changes. Fallout fans will recognize this playful take on Ron Perlman’s iconic voiceover, but it also serves as a bedrock truth for Amazon’s smash-hit series. Fallout the show cannot escape Fallout the game, for better or worse. There is a voluminous history it must draw from, a fact that carries a lot of risk thanks to the legions of devoted fans ready to cry foul when deviations occur. It’s also a tremendous opportunity.
Amazon’s Fallout is set in 2296, nine years after the most recent game Fallout 4. It is uncharted territory, story-wise, and so it can plant seeds all its own. Perlman’s appearance as a Super Mutant in episode six wasn’t just fan service to a franchise legend. His character could portend the resurrection of a major villain for season 3.
Perlman’s Super Mutant enters the season in heroic fashion. He saves The Ghoul from near certain-death after he gets impaled on a broken lightpost on the streets of New Vegas (courtesy of a Powerfist punch by Lucy, but that’s another story). He brings The Ghoul to an abandoned church, stained-glass windows and all, for a bit of atomic first aid. The pole left a sizable hole in The Ghoul which Perlman’s character heals with a sizzling chunk of uranium. “Bad for them, good for us,” he says.
He then explains that the divide between humans and metahumans goes deeper than wayward neutrons and gamma rays. The humans created their “kin,” ghouls, super mutants, et. all, and soon drove them to the brink of extinction. He tells The Ghoul there is a war coming, and they need to unite against their common enemy — the Enclave. The Ghoul dismisses the offer, which brings an abrupt end to the encounter. The Super Mutant’s last words before knocking him unconscious are “if you won’t join our kind, then you can’t know where we live.”
Who is this “we”? Fans of the original Fallout know the likely answer: Unity.
1997’s Fallout introduced us to The Master. Will Amazon resurrect him 30 years later for season 3?
To understand Unity you need to go back to the very first Fallout game, set during the in-game year 2162. Unity was a paramilitary operation run by an entity known as The Master. A once-human man named Richard Moreau, The Master is a twisted amalgamation of flesh and computers that formed when Moreau fell into a vat of F.E.V. in the abandoned Maricopa military base. If that sounds familiar, it should, because the Forced Evolutionary Virus is the big secret Norm discovered moments before being bludgeoned by Vault 31 goons.
Maricopa military base has also been teased this season. In episode two Quintus tells the story of Roger Maxson, who created the Brotherhood of Steel after witnessing the F.E.V. experiments at pre-war Maricopa that led to the creation of Super Mutants. The base was demolished in the subsequent fighting but the F.E.V. was unsecured and Super Mutants continued to emerge from the ruins. Moreau and his team were sent to investigate it.
Moreau was abandoned by his team after his accident, and mutated so aggressively he became enmeshed with the computer system inside Maricopa. With total control of the base he began to use the lab equipment to create his own Super Mutants, among other creatures, to repopulate the Earth with a new race of beings.
Unity was the key to his plan. His followers began setting up fake medical clinics in abandoned hospitals and churches to lure fresh victims. In fact, the entrance to the Master’s headquarters in Fallout was concealed aboveground by a large church protected by a cult known as the Children of the Cathedral.
The Cathedral played a significant role in Unity’s plans.
So will we see Unity and The Master in Season 3? Perlman’s erudite Super Mutant fomenting a race war from the ruins of church certainly seems to indicate that Unity is still alive. The Master, maybe not so much. This is where the timelines become important. The first Fallout game concludes with The Master being killed by a nuclear bomb inside his headquarters 136 years before we get to the TV show. Unity is mentioned in subsequent Fallout titles but no one from the faction ever appears, which seems to indicate they’re long gone.
But we must consider the power of TV magic, and Bethesda’s relationship to the lore as well. On the TV side the showrunners have stated they are trying to create a world that honors player choices as much as possible. Creating a narrative where Unity, or at least its guiding principals, survive amongst Super Mutants in the Wasteland fits nicely with how they’ve handled world-building thus far. But going against a game-ending canon event to resurrect the Master might be a sin too great.
The same cannot be said for Bethesda, who are not the creators of Fallout but merely its current stewards. The first two games in the series were created by Interplay Productions, who laid the narrative foundation everything else is based on. This includes, presumably, a dead Master. Yet when Bethesda acquired the rights to Fallout they intended to make an online game as their first entry. It never came to fruition but it got far enough for there to be a teaser, which seemed to indicate “the Master lives.”
Obviously the implications of a new faction and potentially a new big bad boss are huge for season 3. We’ve already seen The Ghoul flashback to life as Cooper, caught between factions bent on world domination. To relive that fate once again would be a cruel irony. We’ve also seen a lot of empathy for metahumans from characters in a world that is cruel by default. Big-hearted Lucy lives by her golden rule. Maximus may have started a civil war in the Brotherhood to save a factory full of ghoul children. A factory that happened to be run by his rapidly-mutating friend Thaddeus. If season 3 wants to follow those lines they’re already being drawn.
There’s still one more episode left in the season which could reveal more answers. It seems unlikely to bring an actor with as much franchise history as Perlman for a one-off role, so we’ll almost certainly see him again. And if he continues talking about metahuman brotherhood and human extinction, then we can consider Unity back in spirit if not in name. Because lore, lore never changes.
