“Fallout” showrunner on how those FEV, Barb, and Robert House revelations point to the show's endgame
- - “Fallout” showrunner on how those FEV, Barb, and Robert House revelations point to the show's endgame
Lauren HuffJanuary 14, 2026 at 6:00 AM
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Ella Purnell (Lucy MacLean), Walton Goggins (The Ghoul) in 'Fallout' season 2
This article contains spoilers for Fallout season 2, episode 5, "The Wrangler."
Forced evolutionary virus, Deathclaws, Ghoul impaling, ominous end-of-the-world reveals — okey dokey, then!
The latest episode of Fallout packs quite the punch, literally. It starts out with Lucy (Ella Purnell) and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) dealing with the Deathclaws and eventually making their way to Freeside, just outside of Vegas. In the past, Coop tells Moldaver ( Sarita Choudhury) he'll go to Vegas with his wife, Barb (Frances Turner), to stop the the transfer of cold fusion, but he refuses to do as Moldaver wishes and assassinate Robert House.
Meanwhile, in present day Vegas, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a new test subject, and we see him drive by cryopods bearing the names of Coop's long-lost wife and daughter, but we don't see who (or what — this is Fallout we're talking about) is inside. Meanwhile, things come to a head with Norm (Moisés Arias) and his gang of thawed Vault 31 dwellers, who finally realize he's been lying to them. Norm breaks into Barb's old office, and uses her computer to reveal something called "forced evolutionary virus."
In the past, it all climaxes with a delicious meeting between Coop and House, who reveals that everything Coop thought he knew about the end of the world is wrong, and calls into question who exactly is responsible for the apocalypse. Or, as star Justin Theroux, who plays House, puts it to Entertainment Weekly: "House has done all the calculations to figure out exactly how the end of the world is going to happen. He has created a way of protecting himself from what's about to happen. He essentially was the architect along with a few others on how this was all going to go down. But somehow, Cooper Howard, for whatever reason, and we don't know yet, represents a fly in the ointment. And he needs to try and elicit an answer as to what role Cooper Howard plays in House's algorithm, for lack of a better word."
Lorenzo Sisti / Prime
Justin Theroux as Robert House in 'Fallout' season 2
As for House's major insinuation that Coop could have been more involved than we think in the bombs dropping, Theroux offers, "I think House at the end of the scene has reached a level of frustration with Cooper Howard that he now has to throw all his toys out of the pram and have a tantrum in order to catch his attention and to leave a mark on him in order to stay in his head. I would say that that was probably House's intention, because he had to put a hook in [Coop] in order to get him to come back."
In the present once more, the episode culminates with Hank's lackey trying to make a deal with the Ghoul — take Lucy back to the vault, and Hank will protect Barb and Janey (Teagan Meredith). Before the Ghoul can make good on this deal, which Lucy sees as a betrayal, she punches him through the window, where he gets impaled on a pole down below. Ouch.
Here, co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet breaks down all of that and what to expect from the upcoming episodes.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: We finally get the full Deathclaw treatment at the end of episode 4 and beginning of episode 5 — have we seen the last of them this season?
GENEVA ROBERTSON-DWORET: Well, I don't want to give too much away, but I feel like they're still out there on the strip and someone had better deal with them, I guess is how I generally feel about the Deathclaws. I can't say more than that about who or in what circumstances. But it was tremendously exciting to see in episode 5 the synergy between all of the work that our incredible puppeteers and everyone who was involved in the incredible Deathclaw puppets, and then the layers of special effects, visual effects artists who worked on top of them during our post-production to put it all together — it all clicks together so that we finally got to see the entire effect in episode 5.
We finally learn the acronym Forced Evolutionary Virus on Barb's computer, which is of course tied to various monsters and super mutants in the games. Are we meant to infer that Barb is the person behind the FEV? Or what are we supposed to make of that little revelation there?
I hope at this point the audience is wondering how involved Barb is with the experiments. But as Claudia's dialogue, I think, says in the show, Barb was an executive who oversaw the experiments in some way, or was at least aware of assigning which ones might go into which fault. So we're still, I think, hoping the audience is piecing together the mystery of what Barb's involvement exactly was or wasn't. But yes, Norm finds out that Ronnie has misremembered this acronym as future enterprise ventures and that that is not what it is.
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Moises Arias as Norm MacLean and Rachel Marsh as Claudia in 'Fallout' season 2
This season has introduced a lot of Fallout lore — the FEV, the Enclave, Mr. House, who did or did not drop the bombs, who actually owns Vault-Tec, etc. Should we, as the audience, see these more as just little fun Easter eggs to the games, or is this all sort of pointing toward the end game for the show?
Those are some of the biggest questions, right? Who's responsible for the bombs dropping and why? And which corporations or corporate partnerships, which are such a huge part, of course, of the Fallout universe, may have been colluding and why? Why would it be strategically advantageous to them? And so these are things that we are sort of slowly trying to peel away the layers of the onion on in this show.
Is it fair to say these questions are more for this season or the actual end of the show, whenever that may be?
I think it's a series-long interest that we have, but we are stepping forward this season in certain ways.
The scene between House and Coop is probably my favorite of the season so far — it's so great watching those two engage in a battle of wits. What would you say are House's goals in that interaction?
Two phenomenally brilliant actors. So we're very blessed and it's just honestly fun to watch those two do anything together. But there are certain things, of course, that we set out to do with that scene. One is to underline, and I think this is very true of the Fallout universe, but also real life, is whatever faction that you are part of, if you walk in there with the information from one faction and you actually listen to the other side, it might change your perspective greatly. And how everyone's sense of reality is deeply informed by the ideology or a faction that they are coming from, which in this case, Coop has been provided information at this point by Moldaver largely about what's going on and he then has his suspicions about Robert House. And then he gets to talk to Robert House directly and hear from him things that make him doubt prior assumptions that he had.
And what I think we were always excited about with Robert House is how he uses these prediction algorithms. He has this series of networked mainframes, I believe is sort of the terminology that the game uses, for how he runs these predictive algorithms to try to project and anticipate future events. And he keeps finding through those that Cooper Howard is somehow important in terms of what happens in the future. Graham [Wagner, co-showrunner] and I used to talk about, he's almost like a quantum physicist who has one little molecule out there that is throwing off everything, and why? I think part of what makes the scene fun for me is that they are both detective characters. They're both trying to investigate the other. Coop is trying to find out what is Robert House really up to and why. And Robert House is trying to figure out why is this Hollywood actor important at a global level or the level of determining the future? Why could he possibly matter?
House is presented as someone who knows everything, or more than anyone else at the least. Can we trust that? When he says he doesn't know something, can we trust what he does or does not know?
Well, I think that's what I hope is so interesting for the viewer. That's exactly what Cooper Howard is trying to figure out, is here's a character who on his face is fundamentally sort of duplicitous, right? He literally uses a double and pretends that that is him because it is advantageous to him to be a recluse in his penthouse, and also to be anonymous when he wants to be, which offers a different kind of power than celebrity does. And so he lets his double be the celebrity while he walks through the world anonymously when he wants to, which allows for the cold open of the season and so on to unfold. But I think that's exactly what Coop is thinking: Well, this guy seems like he is really finally telling me answers that I really want to get, which I really want to hear. But on the other hand, he's fundamentally not a very trustworthy person. So is he telling me the truth or not? And I hope that we are wondering that, as is Coop.
I couldn't help but notice that when we finally see Barb and Janey's cryopods, they're frozen over, so we can't actually see if anyone is inside...
The pods are frosted over, so they are on. We can say that.
Fair enough. What can we expect from Mr. House in the back half of the season?
Well, I think House has given Coop a great deal of revelations. And now the question is, what will Coop do? How will he act on them? Will he trust House's information or will he take his own path moving forward? And we still don't know exactly as an audience yet what form Robert House exists in or not in the present day post-apocalyptic wasteland. So I'd say I hope that is a major question in audiences' minds. Victor said, "Oh, he's gone." But what does that mean? That answer from Victor is quite vague. Victor doesn't seem entirely sure.
Victor also seems like he's seen better days.
He has. I mean, and that's meant to imply things as well, is that of course the Securitrons, we've seen a lot of deactivated ones this season. We've seen a lot of battered ones, and poor Victor maybe is not at his best.
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Walton Goggins as The Ghoul in 'Fallout' season 2
And what can we expect from everyone else?
Things I hope people are as excited about as I was as we worked on this story was: What is going to happen between Lucy and her father? She's seen that the wasteland is a very difficult place, full of suffering. And she's seen the cruelty of the Legion, she's seen the rampant factionalism, and as she reunites with her father and we, the audience, have been privy to some of what he's been working on, what is she going to make of it as he tries to convince her that he is on a mission to save the wasteland? What will she make of his work? And I think she's in a spot where she has been not just treated cruelly by a lot of wastelanders, but also by the one friend she thought she had on the wasteland, which is the Ghoul. And so all of this, I think may make her more receptive to what he is suggesting, but she's still Lucy. She's someone who also has a real, very deep core sense of morality and she doesn't trust her father and she knows he's a mass murderer and judges him tremendously. She's very conflicted about him. So I hope that audiences are excited to see what happens when the two of them are together.
I hope audiences are excited for, now that Coop has heard a lot more from Robert House, what will unfold between him and Barb this season. I mean, starting in this next episode, in episode 6, is he going to continue lying to her about what he knows or not?
And in Norm's storyline, he has uncovered something big about his home vault and what experiment might be unfolding there or that he now is learning that maybe Bud's Buds is not the only element of the experiment unfolding there. So what will he do now with that knowledge?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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