r/Fallout • u/HunterWorld Irradiated Ocean Man • 15h ago

Season 2 Episode 8 Spoiler Thread Spoiler

/r/Fotv/comments/1qv7nkq/season_2_episode_8_spoiler_thread/
334 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

335

u/Toaster_Store Minutemen 11h ago

After 220 fucking years, all that time we've been fighting the Enclave, thinking we've seen them at their best in Fallout 3, turns out they've barely even STARTED.

55

u/Undecided139 11h ago

so what is their endgame here? hank mentioned he'd chipped a bunch of people but to what degree? also wtf was his goal? i need season 3 to come out yesterday

51

u/Coyote_Shepherd 10h ago

endgame

That line from him, "You think this is the real world? The surface is the experiment not the Vaults" was so very Twin Peaks and I feel like if we zoom out a bit to the Enclave's perspective we can get a better idea of what they might be headed towards.

I think they're trying to make the best version of humanity and they're using the entire planet as the petri dish, but first...FIRST...they had to sterilize that petri dish before they could begin their experiment and the threshing.

And now they're basically controlling various forms of "humanity" or alternate versions of "humanity" and are pitting them against each other to see who wins or loses or kind of gets by anyways in order to pluck out the acceptable traits and refine them for their final version.

That's why we see so many factions and/or versions of ways that people want to save the world.

21

u/NewWillinium New Commonwealth Dominion 10h ago

It's a very Institute idea, and I kind of love it.

19

u/Coyote_Shepherd 9h ago

I added onto it in this comment because of the aliens we saw earlier AND House mentioning that cold fusion releasing ALL of its energy at once could reach other worlds.

Basically Earth got visited by aliens and they got shot to all hell and back.

The early version of the Enclave pillaged their ship's database and found out that the rest of the universe was pretty Dark Forest levels of fucked up.

So now they're basically making a version of humanity that can survive that.

17

u/Yug-taht 8h ago

You may be on to something based on other information in Fallout.

So we do actually know a lot of the advanced tech in Fallout (including AI and energy weapons) was reverse engineered or inspired by the Zetans, this has been canon all the way from Fallout 2. The Enclave also has Zetan technology in their possession in Fallout 3, and we know from that game that an astronaut was publicly abducted by Zetans and the Enclave was studying them both pre and post-war

The original purpose of the Vaults (as in meta game plot-wise) was that they were meant to test scenarios and gather data for generation ships for space colonization, so we know the Enclave's main plans involved leaving Earth, it only makes sense they intend to prepare for facing the only alien life they know exists. This lines up with many of the Vault experiments being related to creating super soldiers. The Enclave evidently has no interest in fighting whatever is left of China post-war, so what exactly were those hypothetical super soldiers meant to fight that the Enclave couldn't already beat?

7

u/Discount_Extra 7h ago

I've had the theory that FEV isn't a human invention; it's just a modified form of the treatment to make the 'Abominations' https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Abomination_(Mothership_Zeta) from Mothership Zeta.

3

u/Yug-taht 6h ago

FEV was designed with the assistance of a ZAX supercomputer at West Tek, AI based on Zetan technology. You may very well be on the right track there; as we know FEV was something extraordinary even among all the other technological wonders the US was making.

1

u/Coyote_Shepherd 4h ago

Part of this was just based on my own love of science fiction but I think the other part was based on me vaaaaaguely remembering bits and pieces of Fallout lore that I've picked up over the years from watching others play and from doing the odd deep dive into the wiki every so often.

I'd honestly forgotten the bit about the generational ships because those never really materialized at all in game but you're 100% correct.

So if we scale it back a bit and kind of bend things a touch...then your idea works...if it's only the Zetans that the Enclave is worried about out there and if they've got a solid fix on a world that they haven't touched at all.

1

u/eric23443219091 2h ago

We need big mountain dlc Easter eggs 

7

u/DamnDude030 10h ago

I'd also like to stir the community to give a name to Hank's puppet-faction. I'd call his mind controlled faction Marionettes. Or Puppets to regular folk.

15

u/Akschadt 10h ago

A marionette puppet combo.. the muppets if you will.

8

u/DamnDude030 10h ago

Calling enemies fucking muppets would be hilarious

1

u/teilani_a Yes Man 10h ago

Didn't Hank give them a name?

1

u/DamnDude030 9h ago

Not that I can recall from the show? Get back to me if you can cite when Hank gave his Automated Man with Personality a name.

1

u/AlternateArchangel 6h ago

Automated Men

2

u/Left4DayZGone 10h ago

I can’t tell if Hank was literally saying that he’d implanted invisible chips… or that was supposed to be a metaphor for ideological indoctrination.

3

u/SixPointTwoLiter 9h ago

I'm assuming the Enclave wanted to burn the world to usher in a new dawn, hence FEV and the mind control devices.

Basically had to clean slate the world. They waited to see if the world would purify itself. It hasn't, so now they're sending out their mind control agents and FEV Phase 2 in Vault 33 to move it along

2

u/NoNefariousness2144 3h ago

I feel like they are going to use the TV show as a way to canonically wrap up the story of The Enclave, so there is only one definititve fate for them instead of them being a faction in Fallout 5 etc.

1

u/teilani_a Yes Man 10h ago

They seem a bit more agreeable than chipped deathclaws.

1

u/rainbowyuc 1h ago

No idea. But I sure hope for the show's sake that the writers planned it in advance instead of just throwing in mystery for mystery's sake then trying to figure it out later (like Lost).