The Fallout series dares to reveal one of the saga’s best-kept secrets
Episode 7 of season 2, “The Handoff,” shows the White House tenant for the first time when the Great War broke out and connects him to the Enclave.
The twist comes at the end of “The Handoff” (episode 7 of season 2). In one of the flashbacks focusing on Cooper Howard, the series places him in a crucial handoff that ends with a closed-door meeting: Cooper manages to meet with the President of the United States in an unmarked vehicle, after Congresswoman Diane Welch acts as an intermediary. The scene is presented as a reward for viewers who have been following the thread of pre-war agreements for weeks, but also as a narrative alarm: the president finally appears, and his mere presence rearranges suspicions about who was pulling the strings when the world was about to go up in flames.
That cameo is played by Clancy Brown, and that’s where the fun lies for veteran fans: he’s not just a guest actor, he’s making a comeback. Brown was already part of the original Fallout (1997) as the voice of Paladin Rhombus, the tough and doctrinaire member of the Brotherhood of Steel in Lost Hills. Almost three decades later, the series brings him back to play the most symbolic role of all, a nod that links the screen with the roots of the first game.
The president in Fallout: almost always off-screen
In video games, the “president on the day of the bombs” has deliberately been a ghost. There was no face, no full name, no final speech. What existed were breadcrumbs, almost always in documents, terminals, or notes that the player could overlook. The most direct example is in Fallout 4, in the terminal entries in the Boston Bugle building: there, the White House is described as having its West Wing “dark” for more than half a year, and a question is asked: “Where is the president?”
In another of these pieces, the same thread ends up pointing to an even more disturbing answer: the president had been running the country from a Poseidon Energy platform off the coast of San Francisco, whose real designation was “Control Station Enclave.” In other words, the idea of a power already displaced from Washington and already confused with the Enclave existed (but was almost never shown).
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Fallout 76 adds another oddity: a note called “Letter from the President” that ends with an incomplete signature, “Di-,” specific enough to fuel theories, but vague enough to maintain the mystery. And, if you broaden the focus, the saga has indeed shown “presidents,” but not necessarily this one: Fallout 2 introduces Enclave President Dick Richardson on the oil rig, and Fallout 3 makes John Henry Eden, a different figure, now fully post-war, “president.” But who was president when the world fell has never been touched upon. The series, therefore, is touching on a historical gap that the games had preferred to surround with paper, radio noise, and mystery.
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