Fallout Season 2 recreates one of the most shocking moments from Pluribus

There are only two episodes left of Fallout Season 2, and the series just borrowed one of the most shocking moments from Apple TV’s Pluribus. Spoilers ahead…

Prime Video’s post-apocalyptic show is based on the video game franchise from Bethesda, and Season 2 brings the world of New Vegas to life with the likes of Robert House (Justin Theroux), Caesar’s Legion, and the New California Republic.

Despite its reverence for the games, the series isn’t afraid to add its own mythology into the mix. Much of the second season has revolved around Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) working on fine-tuning a mind control device for Vault-Tec which would let the nefarious company take over the wasteland for good.

In Fallout Season 2 Episode 6, Hank rolls out the device after all of his gruesome failed attempts of getting it to work. But the show borrows one of the most shocking moments from Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus when Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) finds out the true extent of her father’s plan for the Wasteland.

Fallout Season 2 uses the same hive mind creation scene from Pluribus

When Lucy wakes up in the Vault-Tec facility, she finds a room full of mind-controlled wastelanders who all work in unison to build more mind control devices. It’s almost identical to the first episode of Pluribus when the Others work in unison to create contaminated petri dishes that spreads the RNA sequence to add more humans into the hive mind.

It seems highly unlikely that one scene inspired the other since Pluribus only finished airing one week after the Fallout Season 2 premiere.

The similarities between the two scenes are just a happy coincidence, but it is funny that two of the biggest shows of the year share DNA – especially given the context of the hive mind and the Vault-Tec device.

Obviously they both function very differently. The Others share one consciousness in Pluribus, while Vault-Tec’s device lets the company control a person’s behavior and their actions rather than putting them into a hive mind.

Vault-Tec uses all the vaults to run experiments in Fallout

Vault-Tec working on a controversial experiment is not exactly groundbreaking, even for Fallout newcomers, since the show has already established that the company uses all the vaults to experiment on its inhabitants in some way. Obviously, some are crueller than others.

In Season 1, Lucy and Maximus (Aaron Moten) came across Vault 4, whose ancestors were Vault-Tec scientists who were tasked with genetic experiments on the Vault Dwellers which created human/creature hybrids.

Meanwhile, Fallout players are well-versed in Vault-Tec’s cruel and twisted experiments that make up some of the most interesting encounters in the franchise.

In Fallout: New Vegas, Vault 22 tested a pest-control fungus on its inhabitants which created monstrous plant hybrids. Fallout 3 included Vault 87, where Vault Dwellers were used as test subjects for the Forced Evolutionary Virus, becoming Super Mutants and Centaurs.

The third game also saw players encounter Vault 112, in which the Overseer had all of the Vaulties hooked up to a virtual reality like an even more twisted version of The Matrix. All of this is to say that it’s really no surprise that Vault-Tec is dead set on creating a way of controlling the population of the Wasteland.