Fallout Season 2 Episode 4 Could Have Solved a Gaming Mystery

This article contains spoilers for Fallout” season 2, episode 4, “The Demon in the Snow”.

“Fallout” is a superb video game adaptation largely because the series understands that trying to translate a story that players have already experienced is a foolish task. Instead, the Prime Video series recognizes that the real star of the “Fallout” franchise is its setting. It’s not the plots or even the characters, but rather the world-building and unique tone of the games that make them so beloved. The TV show has exquisite production design that brings the games’ retrofuturistic nuclear wastelands to life, recreating locations, creatures, and other iconography from the games.

That’s not to say that Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet’s adaptation, produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, doesn’t care about story. Quite the contrary, in fact. Throughout the first season and a half of the series, we’ve seen compelling character stories that take us to different corners of the “Fallout” universe. The series also does a lot to delve deeper into the games’ history by exploring the world before the bombs are dropped, like explaining how the franchise mascot came to be or reveal who decided to end the world.

Granted, there has been some controversy over how the games’ timeline is depicted in the series. Because the TV adaptation is canon, it answered questions that remained unanswered in video games, like what happens to Shady Sands or Caesar’s Legion. In the series finale, “Fallout” unravels a pre-war mystery from the games and confirms that the terrifying Deathclaw was used in the Sino-American War that preceded nuclear Armageddon.

Episode 4 opens with a flashback to a pivotal moment in the history of the “Fallout” world: the Alaska Front. It is the front line of the Sino-American War, a devastating conflict that lasted 11 years and ended in a nuclear winter. In the series, we focus on Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), here just a soldier in Power Armor. His armor malfunctions, his vehicle is destroyed and he is surrounded by the enemy. Things get even worse when Howard starts hearing a growling sound.

We don’t get a good look at him, but we see his terrifying evil horns. We also see how he annihilates Chinese soldiers without breaking a sweat. He’s big, he’s incredibly strong, he has huge teeth and he looks like he fought his way out of hell. It is of course a Deathclaw, the most dangerous creature in the “Fallout” universe.

The flashback ends when Howard hears a message to the troops that the Red Army is withdrawing and congratulates them on their work. But Howard knows it wasn’t power armor or American weaponry that scared the other side away, it was a monster.

Well, technically, was In any case, American weapons. Like the The trailer for “Fallout” season 2 finally revealedDeathclaws, the incredibly hard-to-kill mutant monstrosities, were originally genetically engineered by the U.S. government as super soldiers. We know from the games that the Deathclaws escaped from their laboratories during the nuclear apocalypse and bred to become the apex predator of the desert. What we didn’t know until now was whether the Deathclaw actually witnessed the fight.

“Fallout” continues to explore aspects of the game’s story that have never been explained before, and we can’t wait to see where Cooper Howard’s story leads.