The second season of Fallout begins with a bang: Mr. Robert House has joined the fold, with Justin Theroux taking on the role. For longtime fans of the Fallout video game franchise, it’s a move that many anticipated. The end of the first season introduces the location of New Vegas, which House has a key stake in. For those unfamiliar with the video games, here’s everything you need to know about Mr. House and what his arrival on the scene might mean for Season 2 of Fallout.
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Who is Mr. House?
Robert House is a major character in the 2010 game Fallout: New Vegas. At the young age of 22, he founded RobCo Industries, which quickly emerged as one of the world’s most profitable companies. After eight years, House claimed to have a net worth of $30 billion by age 30. Using his vast fortune, he began to take stakes in businesses across Vegas, including H&H Tools, his family’s business which his brother initially cheated him out of. (Their parents died when Robert was just two years old). A prodigious talent, House used his business savvy and passion for technology to become the wealthiest man in the Wasteland.
A natural enemy of the working class as his automatons took away their jobs and livelihoods (sound familiar?). House’s dealings led him to be beloved by the world’s most influential people, gaining him key relationships with Vault-Tec, which developed and runs the vast vault system that kept Americans alive after the nuclear war. In the game New Vegas, House could predict when the bombs would drop, allowing him enough time to prepare Vegas to survive the nuclear apocalypse.
After the war, House became the effective leader of New Vegas, employing a technocratic control through which he and his robots ruled the city. He’s not just obscenely wealthy, he’s the single most powerful man in the Wasteland.
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Have we seen Mr. House before?
Those who’ve played Fallout: New Vegas may have noticed that Mr. House actually appears in the first season of the Fallout series. He shows up in the season’s most consequential flashback, where the leaders of America’s most powerful corporations come together to decide what to do with humanity and the vast vault system in order to maximize profit. Various ideas are bandied around, from using vaults to experiment on illegal immigrants to try and turn them into supersoldiers, to separating parents from children and seeing which kids survive (sound familiar?).
“It’s a fun idea,” says a man identified as Rob-Co. “There’s a lot of earning potential with the end of the world. But we’re talking about making a significant investment based on a hypothetical. How can you guarantee results?” The response, from Vault-Tec’s Barb Howard (Frances Turner), is shocking, to say the least: “By dropping the bomb ourselves.” As everyone at the roundtable is identified by the company they run, and since Mr. Robert House runs RobCo Industries, it’s safe to assume that this is officially Mr. House (played by Rafi Silver).
It’s a brief but pivotal moment. It doesn’t completely confirm that Vault-Tec did in fact, bring nuclear war upon America, turning it into a vast Wasteland—it’s possible that something else happened after the meeting (fans of the games have speculated around who dropped the first bomb ever since the first Fallout game in 1997). It does, however, show that these all-powerful CEOs, including Mr. House, were willing to let it happen in order to force people into the vaults and maintain control, thereby continuing the power of the almighty dollar.
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When does Mr. House appear in Season 2?
Mr. House makes himself known in the very first scene of Season 2, setting him up as a major player in the next chapter of the show. Robert House, founder of RobCo industries, appears on a TV screen at a bar, before nuclear war turned America into the Wasteland. It’s a time when humans are revolting against the rise of robots, which are starting to take jobs from the American people. Some patrons shout at the TV, calling House a “parasite” and a “dumb maggot.”
A man on the other side of the bar (Theroux) doesn’t take kindly to this, speaking in support of House: “Every dollar spent is a vote cast. And that fellow right there has more votes than every one of those pan-headed politicians in Washington.”
“You his biggest fan or something?” the man retorts.
House responds: “Why, yes. Yes, I believe I am. And if the will of the American people is to endow that man with a significant portion of its wealth, well, good golly, that can’t be a bad thing, now can it?” He’s a big fan because he is none other than Mr. House. The man on TV (still Rafi Silver) is merely a body double, as House’s pro-robot stance puts his life at risk at a time when anti-robot sentiment is at an all-time high. He continues to speak to the man and his two friends, and before things get violent, House heads outside.
It seems like House is vulnerable, but in reality, he has the upper hand. He shows the men a whopping $31 million sitting in the trunk of his car, which he offers to them in exchange for injecting a device into the back of their necks, which he gently refers to as “market research.” One man refuses, threatening to beat him up and take his money. But House injects it into his neck anyway, and instructs him to kill the other two men. The man, under House’s control, obliges, and then House turns a dial on the device so high that the man’s head explodes.
House picks up the blood-and-guts-covered device off the ground, and, covered in blood himself, smiles. Staring at the device, he utters, “The world may end, but progress marches on.” And that’s the last we see of House in Episode 1.
It’s a perfect start to the second season of Fallout, an appropriately grim and fascinating turn of events. It lays bare what a creepy, yet powerful, guy this is. We see how his calm demeanor allows him to get close enough to the man that he can inject the device into him. He’s persuasive, using his immense power to manipulate the vulnerable to do his bidding. As the scene clearly shows, scientific experimentation is far more interesting (and valuable) to him than people’s lives. As this moment happens pre-war, we don’t know for sure if House is still alive—it has, after all, been hundreds of years since. But considering House is the effective leader of New Vegas in the video games, they’ve cast Theroux, and we’ve seen others live for centuries, it’s safe to say that House poses a terrifying new threat to the heroes of Fallout. House is an extraordinarily wealthy man, and money talks. Hank (Kyle McLachlan) calls someone in New Vegas at the end of the episode about continuing his work, and we’re willing to bet he’s calling none other than Mr. House.
The post How the Introduction of a Major New Character Could Shape Fallout’s Second Season appeared first on TIME.
