The finale of Fallout season 2 is set to drop in a matter of hours, and there are a lot of questions that need answering in the space of a mere 60-ish minutes. How is Cooper responsible for the end of the world? Why is Representative Welch’s severed head powering Hank’s brain control chips? Will Norm’s message get through to Lucy? And what is Thaddeus turning into exactly?
Of course Amazon already greenlit a third season in May of last year, so nobody should be expecting things to wrap up neatly by the end of tonight. In fact, the Fallout games famously refuse to wrap up most of their ongoing mysteries. The original Fallout is almost 30 years old, yet we still don’t know who dropped the first bomb. So fans should be ready to sit with some open-endedness.
And yet, there’s still one question I need an answer to in tonight’s finale, because it has been gnawing at me ever since it was pointed out on the show’s subreddit last month: Why do the date and the time at which Mr. House’s computer determined that the world would end match up almost perfectly with the installation of a computer that operates the presidential metro system?
For anything I just wrote to make sense to you, you’ll likely need both a recap of what happened in the fifth episode of Fallout’s second season and some context regarding M.A.R.Go.T., the “Metro Authority Rapid Governmental Transit System” that appears in Fallout 3’s Broken Steel DLC.
When Robert House and Cooper Howard meet in the Lucky 38’s penthouse, House reveals that the moment “the data coalesced” indicating that the world would end was precisely “April 14th, 2065, at 5:17 a.m.” Coincidentally, this is also the exact date that Coop’s daughter, Janey, was born.
House’s line has confused several people online, with some misinterpreting it as a prediction of when the world would end. If it were, it would be plainly wrong, as we already know exactly when the bombs fell: October 23, 2077. However, House isn’t saying that the bombs will fall on that date; he plainly states, “The date of the end of the world may not interest you, Mr. Howard, but the date the data coalesced might,” before stating the date. What House is saying is that the date and time on which his “calculator” figured out the world would someday end was April 14th, 2065, at 5:17 a.m.
Who (or what) is Fallout 3‘s M.A.R.Go.T.?
Now, on to M.A.R.Go.T. (or Margot, as I will refer to it from this point on). Margot is a non-sentient computer (an important distinction in the Fallout universe) in charge of operating the presidential metro line in Washington, D.C., a trainline that connects the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Adams Air Force Base.
This is important because we know, thanks to the Fallout Bible, that the President of the United States fled from the White House in March 2077 and ended up at Control Station ENCLAVE in San Francisco. Oh, by the way, the president is a member of an evil group called the Enclave. I’m sure they’ll get to that in tonight’s episode. Anyway, this implies that the president used the presidential metro system to get a flight from Adams Air Force Base to Control Station ENCLAVE, potentially even directly after Cooper handed him that vial of cold fusion in the previous episode.
But none of this answers my original question: why was Margot installed and activated three minutes after Mr. House figured out when the world would end? Clearly the birth of Janey Howard indirectly influences the date the world ends, but it can’t be a mere coincidence that Margot boots up minutes after she’s born.
My theory? Janey’s birth is the leverage that the Enclave used to convince Barb Howard to help facilitate their plans, and the confirmation of her birth led them to set the rest of their plans in motion. However, although that does neatly tie things together, it’s still odd to me that the Enclave rushed to make sure that Margot was “installed and activated” on the same day Barb goes into labor.
Thankfully, we won’t have to wait long to find out for sure. Or, at least I hope we won’t, because if I have to wait another year to get the answer to this oddly specific connection, I’m going to have to resort to emailing Todd Howard myself.