Prime Video‘s live-action Fallout series did a fantastic job at implementing the aspect of vault experiments carried out by Vault-Tec and their co-conspirators in more ways than one. While what we see in Vault 4 is certainly enough to confirm this, we also watch Norm MacLean uncover an experiment of sorts within the vault he calls home, Vault 33, and its connected sister Vaults 31 and 32.
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If you’re still digesting all of the information that the Fallout series provided and you need a refresher on what exactly the deal is in Vaults 31 – 33, it’s deeply rooted in Vault-Tec’s lies, arrogance, and overall self-importance and entitlement. Bud Askins’ hand-picked group of junior Vault-Tec executives whom he personally trained were then cryonically frozen in Vault 31, while the other Vaults 32 and 33 were populated with people with traits he found genetically desirable who would live as normal as possible in the vault, though their intended use was always eugenics.
Eventually, Askins’ junior executives would be sent to the other two Vaults to become their overseers and breed to create generations of workers loyal to Vault-Tec, passing on these desirable traits. As we see at Lucy MacLean’s wedding in the Fallout series, Vault 31 has existed with the purpose of ensuring their population continues to flourish until “Reclamation Day,” the day in which the vault dwellers will exit the vault and begin to re-inhabit the Earth in full.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen Vault-Tec and it’s co-conspirators use cryotechnology to suspend the lives within the vaults for their uses. In Fallout 4 the central playable protagonist known as the Sole Survivor is frozen along with their family, their infant boy stolen from the cryo chamber he was inside with the Sole Survivor’s spouse. Additionally, Vault 96 which is featured in Fallout 76 also uses cryogenic chambers in to store pre-war and post-war animals to test mutation experiments on.
But the similarities with the vaults between the Fallout series and Fallout 76 don’t stop there. The idea of vault inhabitants reclaiming the world above and repopulating the Earth – “saving America” – following the long-term nuclear fallout impacts of the Great War isn’t unique to the series, as Vault 76 itself was designed the “Official Vault of the Tricentennial” by Vault-Tec. The inhabitants of Vault 76 were promised their own Reclamation Day as well where they would emerge and repopulate Appalachia, however theirs was set for only twenty years after the doors were sealed.
The occupants of Vault 76 were some of the best pre-war America had to offer including military personnel, Vault-Tec University students, the former White House Chief of Staff, and more. Vault 76 did successfully open for reclamation five years after it’s originally scheduled date, with its residents receiving their Reclamation Packages before being uh…encouraged…to go out into the world (they really didn’t have any other choice, so whether or not they felt safe leaving the vault was irrelevant).
Where they do differ is that Vaults 31 – 33 did have an experiment attached to them thanks to that pesky Bud Askins and his “Bud’s Buds” program, so while they were filled with frozen Vault-Tec employees, they could not truly be listed amongst the franchise’s few “control vaults,” or those that were built to actually be used for their intended purpose rather than carry out horrific experiments on the residents within. Vault 76 falls under this classification, with additional confirmed control vaults including Vault 3 (Fallout: New Vegas), Vault 8 (Fallout 2), and Vault 13 (Fallout, Fallout 2). It’s mentioned there are a number of others throughout the franchise, but these have yet to be explored…though with more Fallout series in the future and Fallout 5 in-development as well, it’s possible we’ll get to see the results of some of these additional control vaults in the future.
Which begs the question – how many other true control vaults are out there, and how many have already carried out their own Reclamation Day? For now, we’ll have to wait for additional installments in the franchise before we can say for certain.
