Diksha Sundriyal
When the world is destroyed by nuclear weapons in Prime Video’s ‘Fallout,’ people are forced to live in underground vaults, hoping to keep humanity alive while the world above ground recovers from radiation. Two centuries pass before the audience is introduced to the events of the show, and by then, the Vaults have turned into a fledgling civilization with democracy as its core. However, as several questions arise about the true nature of the Vaults, a disturbing detail emerges. It turns out that the Vaults aren’t exactly democratic. The elections are rigged in favor of the people from a specific vault. Why is that? SPOILERS AHEAD
Vault 31 Reveals the True Purpose of Vault-Tec
At first glance, it looks like the world of ‘Fallout’ is the way it is because of the war between America and the Reds. Expanding the enmity developed during the Cold War, the show makes it look like the war never ended but escalated so that America was inundated by nuclear weapons, destroying society as we know it. It is later that we discover that the war had been going on for a while, and it was during this time that companies like Vault-Tec came out and profited from the situation, no matter how dire it might have seemed for the people otherwise.
As Vault-Tec started to make more and more money from war, it soon realized that war was the only way it could keep itself in business. Chaos was the ladder they wanted to climb to reach the top, and they didn’t just want to stop there. Rather, they wanted to make sure that no one else got there, and for that, they came up with the idea of the Vaults. At first, the Vaults seemed like the only way to make sure that humanity survived the impending nuclear fallout. The war with the Reds had been going on for so long that the fear-mongering around the release of nuclear weapons got to the point where the government outsourced the construction of the Vaults to companies like Vault-Tec. The problem was that as the governments tried to reach a peace settlement, the companies realized that it would destroy them, so they did everything in their power to keep the war, even if it meant dropping the bombs themselves.
Whatever the initial intentions of Vault-Tec may have been, by the end, all of its upper brass had made up their mind about wanting to rule the world, but they knew it would be impossible to predict what civilization and humanity looked like a century or two later, so, they came up with a plan to control even that. Their agenda contained two important points. The first was to make sure that no other faction emerged while they were building their own world in the Vaults. Any and all factions that could prove to be dangerous to the Vaults would have to be eliminated, and that’s what happened in Shady Sands. When the Vaulties found out that the world had not only moved on but flourished in their absence, they decided to destroy the place.
To make sure that the first agenda would be taken care of, they needed to make sure that the second agenda worked as intended. They had to ensure that the Vaulties of the future were exactly what Vault-Tec wanted them to be. They had to be raised in a way that made them docile and opposed to creating conflicts within themselves. They had to be bred like they were born to live in a utopia, which meant that they had to be closely managed. Vault-Tec couldn’t risk leaving this responsibility to future generations, never knowing how they might turn out, and this is where Vault 31 came into the picture.
Unlike Vault 32 and 33, which had people living in them under a democracy, Vault 31 only had cryogenic pods that housed Vault-Tec employees who had been chosen to manage Vaults 32 and 33 as Vault-Tec intended. Due to the limited to no interaction between the Vaults, the secret of Vault 31 was easily kept, and over time, people were let out of cryo pods and sent to the other Vaults in what was camouflaged as an exchange. The Vault 31 people were trained in and tasked with managerial responsibilities, which is why, no matter how many elections happened in the Vaults, the person chosen to be the Overseer would always be someone from Vault 31. This way, they made it seem like the elections were democratic, but really, it was part of Vault-Tec’s plan, which had been laid out more than 200 years ago.
Read More: Fallout: What Happens to CX404? Does the Dog Die?
