Fallout Quietly Exposes What Happened In Vault 32 - And It's Worse Than You Think

Most of Amazon Prime Video's "Fallout" takes place in the Wasteland, just like the games it's inspired by. However, the series also devotes much time to the franchise's iconic Vaults. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), the main protagonist, is a Vault Dweller, and the culture shock she goes through after leaving her sheltered life is an important plot line. The action also returns periodically to her home, Vault 33, as Norm MacLean (Moisés Arias) attempts to uncover the secrets it and the connected Vaults 31 and 32 hide. The Season 1 finale reveals that the whole Vault trifecta is a manager breeding program orchestrated by the surviving brain of pre-war Vault-Tec executive Bud Askins (Michael Esper), but the show also hints at a much darker purpose for Vault 32.

When the various business executives discuss potential uses for Vaults in the meeting hosted by Bud and Barb Howard (Frances Turner), one thing that's mentioned is John Calhoun's research on rat utopia, a series of increasingly elaborate experiments performed for the National Institute of Mental Health. A television broadcast of a rat utopia experiment is shown when the grim fates of Vault 32's residents are revealed.

By providing a closed and safe environment with adequate supplies, several levels, and individual nests to rest away from the communal spaces, Calhoun created small paradises for rodents ... only to discover time and time again that this soon led to overcrowding and strange, hostile behavior for the majority of the population. Meanwhile, a small, secluded group of elites did their own thing, safe from harm but completely disconnected from reality. Replace "rodents" with "Vault Dwellers," and that description pretty accurately describes the mayhem Norm finds in Vault 32 before it's cleaned up. Surely, all this can't be a coincidence?

The manager program might be the ultimate purpose of Vaults 31, 32, and 33, but that doesn't explain why the residents of Vault 32 started killing each other ... unless that part of the Vault trio is a deliberate rat utopia designed to prevent overcrowding in the Vaults. As such, the dark secret behind the Vaults may be that by controlling the population exchange system between Vaults 32 and 33, Vault 31 can ensure that the sharpest minds end up in Vault 33 and the deadly effects of overcrowding will fall solely on Vault 32. Presumably, the overseer will flee back to Bud's detached elites once things become violent, which would also explain why many of the dead people Norm sees in 32 had attempted to reach Vault 31 — they might have seen their overseer escaping, and perhaps even caught a glimpse of 31 before the door closed. 

Supporting this theory is also the fact that when Vault 32 is repopulated, the Vault 33 residents chosen for the task are almost exclusively weak-willed individuals, such as Chet (Dave Register), Woody (Zach Cherry) and Davey (Leer Leary). This is a pretty strong hint that 32 is ultimately nothing more than an elaborate system designed to control the population and dispose of unwanted, non-managerial genetic material. 

The National Institute of Mental Health's rat experiments have appeared in pop culture before, including one of the best fantasy movies of the 1980s, "The Secret of NIMH," which also drew inspiration from such tests. However, now that "Fallout" Season 2 got the confirmation fans hoped for, there's a chance that the show's Vault 32 arc is building toward one of the most horrifying versions of John Calhoun's rat utopia in fiction.