Fallout season two is starting to enter its endgame, and although so far its story of familial revenge and apocalyptic survival has taken plenty of inspiration from one of the most beloved games in the franchise—Fallout: New Vegas—its latest twist is drawing on some very intriguing ideas from elsewhere in the series.
“The Other Player,” the sixth episode of Fallout‘s sophomore season, shakes up a lot of what we’ve seen in the series so far, after the Ghoul’s betrayal of Lucy leaves her in the hands of her father, Hank, and leaves him, well… largely impaled on a New Vegas street after she smashed him out of a window for betraying her. After a few more flashbacks to the Ghoul’s life as Cooper Howard as he struggles to get out of his gory dilemma in the present, eventually he’s rescued by a mysterious figure that drags the Ghoul away to his hideaway to start patching up the massive hole in his torso.
It turns out that mystery person is a familiar face playing a familiar-ish face, as the figure uncovers their hood to reveal the green, monstrous form of a Super Mutant… and their growling voice reveals that said Super Mutant is played by none other than Ron Perlman.
Perlman is a great get for the show, considering he has some big Fallout history—he’s best known as the voice of the narrator that has opened the vast majority of Fallout games from the very beginning that reminds players that war never changes (in a fun moment of foreshadowing, this episode’s story recap includes the moment Cooper’s wife Barbara dropped that iconic line in the final episode of season one, to boot). But it’s even more interesting to introduce him as the face of the Super Mutants to tease what might be the real big bad of the remainder of the season beyond whatever Mr. House and Hank are up to.
This is the first time we’ve actually seen a Super Mutant in a significant capacity on the show, after the corpse of one of the hulking beings briefly appeared early in season one. Different from the ghouls we’ve seen in the show so far, like the Ghoul or Maximus’ friend Thaddeus, who were mutated into their current forms by exposure to radiation, Super Mutants are created by exposure to the Forced Evolutionary Virus, a pre-war bioweapon that has had a significant presence throughout the Fallout series, notably in the original game.
Genetically transformed to have enhanced strength and resistance to disease, various strains of FEV have created differing kinds of Super Mutants, with human subjects with minimum radiation exposure typically creating Super Mutants that retain a great deal of their intelligence—and Perlman’s mystery mutant definitely seems to be in that vein, as he makes his case to the recovering Ghoul that their kinds have a kinship, especially so in what he describes as a coming war with their shared enemy in the Enclave.
The Enclave hasn’t had much of an appearance in the show thus far, outside of Doctor Wilzig’s backstory in season one, but the arrival of the Super Mutants as their own faction within the wasteland seems to suggest they’re about to make themselves known again in a major way. The primary antagonists of Fallout 2 (as well as having major appearances throughout the rest of the series), the Enclave are a fascist paramilitary that existed prior to the outbreak of the Great War as a shadowy cabal of elites that shaped the U.S. in the run-up to the Great War to their own financial and political gain, before re-emerging in the apocalypse to try and wipe out the “unpure” of the wasteland and establish themselves as the de facto ruling power of America’s remains.
After their genocidal dreams were put to an end in Fallout 2, the Enclave shattered into various remnant factions, but given the time frame of the show, we could be seeing the seeds sown for at least one of those remnants to become a major player in its story going forward. It remains to be seen just how many threads the Enclave already have their shadowy fingers pulling at in the show already, but it looks like the various power players of the wasteland might be getting an enemy of their enemies to band together over.
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