Amazon’s Fallout show is, miraculously, pretty fun and great. It manages to capture the satire of the games and somehow makes it even sharper by trimming much of their fat. Because of this, the elements which the show lifts from the games feel like they’re lent even more space to shine prominently, and this is especially true of the storyline centering the horrors of the Vaults. An easter egg in Fallout’s sixth episode underscores those horrors in a manner that is as unsettling as it is hilarious.
Spoilers for the Fallout show, as well as background info from the games, follows.
Though Fallout makes a point to highlight the ominous nature of the Vaults right away, it takes some time for the show to fully play its hand. In the meantime, it serves up two plotlines—one which follows Norm (Moises Arias) in Vault 33 and another which follows Walton Goggins’ character, Cooper Howard, before the bombs drop—that work from opposite ends of the timeline toward the same goal: unearthing what sinister things are going on in the Vaults. To that end, Fallout hides one of the biggest hints about Vault-Tec’s true nature in plain sight.
At the beginning of Fallout’s sixth episode, Howard is filming an ad for Vault-Tec in which he sings the praises of its Vaults and their ability to enshrine and protect core American values. As the ad comes to a close, a phone number flashes across the screen. The number reads 213-25-VAULT and sits on the screen for an oddly long time for such a small detail. With that in mind, I paused the show, grabbed my phone and dialed the number, which translates to 213-258-2858. I nervously pressed the phone to my ear and anticipated the sound of hitting someone’s voicemail.
Then, a man screamed into my ear for several seconds and the call dropped.
Folks familiar with the series likely know that there is nothing good to be gained from the knowledge of what actually occurs in the various vaults across America, but people experiencing Fallout for the first time through the show are in for a journey over the eight-episode season. For newcomers, the show slowly builds up the dread of what Vault-Tec has been doing this whole time, and though the show’s finale explicitly dives into this, that phone message—if you can even call it that—is a perfectly succinct summation of their entire deal that viewers can chance upon earlier.
The show eventually details what many fans of the Fallout games already know: Vault-Tec used the populations of their vaults as lab rats to conduct product and social experiments. The bloodcurdling scream on the other end of the line is that of a vault dweller meeting their fate at the hands of Vault-Tec’s inhumane machinations. It’s one of the earliest confirmations for new fans that Vault-Tec doesn’t just seem shady, it is guilty of literal crimes against humanity.
If that storyline is of any interest to you and you want even more, start getting into the games, which let you discover a number of Vaults across the country and find out what bizarre experiments took place there. Since finishing the show, I’ve been jonesing for any scrap of the series that I can scrounge up, and I know I’m not the only one. I checked back in on Fallout: New Vegas for the first time since it launched, and even bought a collection of the first few titles for less than three bucks on Steam over the weekend. I’m also eyeing a “game-sized mod” that got delayed because of Fallout 4’s upcoming next-gen update. If you want to take it a step further, Fallout Shelter actually lets you become a Vault Overseer, like Kyle MacLachlan’s character in the show, and you can run your own series of fucked-up experiments. Point is, the wasteland is your irradiated oyster, folks.
