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Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Fallout season 2, episode 5.
In one of the flashbacks in Fallout season 2, episode 5, Robert House makes it clear that he wants something from Cooper Howard. House is the new big bad of Fallout season 2. In the New Vegas video game, he’s a major antagonist, and the facilitator of a handful of the game’s many possible endings. But in the TV show, he’s an enigmatic presence.
Through various flashbacks this season, we’ve seen that Cooper had a long history with House before he became the Ghoul. He was initially asked to spy on his wife Barb, who attended a meeting with House, but the mission escalated to a full-blown assassination. In the season’s latest episode, we finally see Cooper come face-to-face for a tense confrontation with House.
This episode introduces a lot of new details to the Fallout mythology. It expands on the Deathclaws that we briefly glimpsed in last week’s episode, and it establishes the threat of the F.E.V. (the Forced Evolutionary Virus). But the biggest revelation about the world of the show is in that pivotal conversation between Cooper and House.
Robert House Reveals His True Identity To Cooper Howard In The New Vegas Flashback
In Fallout’s latest flashbacks, Cooper is shocked to learn that the man who calls himself Robert House on TV — the public face of RobCo Industries — is essentially just an actor like him. He’s basically a body double whose job is to deceive the public. That way, if someone wants to assassinate House, they’ll kill the wrong person and the real House will be safe and sound in his hideout.
This was a clever way to avoid the confusion of a recast. When House was first introduced in the Fallout TV show in its season 1 finale, he was played by Rafi Silver. But when the writers made House the main villain of season 2, they wanted a bigger star to play the part, so they brought in Justin Theroux for a more recognizable face.
Rather than leaving the recast unexplained, like most TV shows would do, Fallout has used a body-double storyline to make both actors a part of the canon. Cooper becomes one of the few people to meet the real House in Fallout’s latest episode. He’s greeted by the familiar body double, but he’s taken to see the real House in his command center, sitting in front of various screens.
How Robert House Knew Cooper Was Sent To Kill Him
Almost immediately after House meets Cooper, he reveals that he knows he’s there to kill him. It’s a great way to show that House is always one step ahead of his enemies. He’s a clever villain, which makes him the most formidable kind of villain; he won’t be fooled so easily. But how did House know that Cooper was sent to kill him?
House doesn’t explain exactly how he knew Cooper came to Vegas to kill him, but he does explain that he uses sophisticated calculations to determine the future. Through the magic of mathematics, he can figure out, to a degree of certainty, exactly what’s going to happen, and it seems that Cooper’s mission to assassinate him came up in one of these predictions.
What Robert House Reveals To Cooper About The Fate Of The World In New Vegas
House reveals that he was with Cooper on the Alaskan front, so to speak. He licensed software to the military, which allowed him to see through the soldiers’ armor, so he was looking through Cooper’s eyes during last week’s cold open. House confesses that he saw the “demon in the snow” (the Deathclaw that attacked Cooper), and believes it’s “connected to the future of this great nation, and to your wife.”
While showing off his gadgets, House tells Cooper that he recently acquired cold-fusion technology, and he plans to use it to achieve immortality. He plans to transfer his consciousness out of a living body and into a robotic body to protect him from “the coming nuclear war.” That’s the main takeaway from House’s grandiose speech: he knew the nukes were coming.
Theroux’s performance is very Walt Disney-coded, so it makes sense that House is obsessed with using cutting-edge technology to prolong his life; Disney is notoriously rumored to have cryogenically frozen himself to cheat death. House tells Cooper that the world is about to end. He even used a probability algorithm to predict the date of the apocalypse: Cooper’s daughter’s birthday.
Why Cooper Howard Refuses To Believe Robert House's Warnings
During their mysterious interaction, House warns Cooper that Vault-Tec is full of heartless bureaucrats and can’t be trusted, but Cooper is a bit of a skeptic. As far as he knows, House can’t be trusted; for the most part, these warnings just sound like House is slandering Cooper’s wife, and he has no evidence besides his own calculations.
After his horrific experiences in the Sino-American War and his dubious dealings with Vault-Tec, Cooper is wary about trusting anyone. Plus, it seems a little convenient that the end of the world is fated to happen on his daughter’s birthday. The whole thing smells fishy, but if Cooper had listened to House’s premonitions, the story of Fallout would’ve turned out very differently.
English (US) ·