Fallout Season 2 Just Introduced A Strange Part Of Canon
The Great White North is the setting to Fallout Season 2 Episode 7's cold open.
Both Fallout the TV show and Fallout the video game series are quintessentially American, building off themes like independence, westerns, and the American dream. But America isn’t the only country in this world, even though that can be easy to forget while navigating the many factions and vaults of the Wasteland.
Fallout Season 2 Episode 7 begins with a scene that takes place in another country altogether, and it reveals both a huge betrayal and a hidden chapter of Fallout history.
Spoilers ahead for Fallout Season 2’s “The Handoff.”
The Battle of Anchorage that Cooper Howard fought in led to a big move in geopolitics.
This episode opens with a sequence of two women running through a snowy forest while being chased. When one of them is shot, we learn just who they are: Steph, the now-eyepatched future Overseer of Vault 33, and a woman we learn to be her mother. Her mother is shot, and she tells Steph to do whatever it takes to make it to America no matter who stands in her way. “They’re not humans,” she says. “They’re Americans.”
This explains one of the biggest reveals in a previous episode: Chet finds a secret compartment in a drawer that contains Steph’s pre-apocalypse wallet and ID, a temporary status ID that labels her as a Canadian. But what’s more shocking than the Canadian identity is how Canada is referred to on the card: “United States Annexed Territory Canada.”
Steph’s ID revealing her true birthdate and nationality as seen in Fallout Season 2.
In Fallout canon, there’s one foreign country that is constantly poised as the enemy: China. It’s something we’ve seen echoed in Cooper Howard’s flashbacks during the Battle of Anchorage. After China invaded Alaska in 2066, the United States pressured the Canadian powers that be to increase military presence more and more until the U.S. complete took over, annexing the country entirely. This had many benefits: no only could the U.S. reach the front lines in Alaska much easier, and the Americans could take advantage of Canada’s vast natural resources.
Of course, after the apocalypse, as the U.S. ceased to be, so did its latest annex. But, as this episode revealed, anti-Canadian sentiment is still rampant through centuries of the Vault Dwellers passing on propaganda from generation to generation. So Steph isn’t just one of Bud’s Buds from the pre-apocalypse era, she’s not even technically American in the first place. With one episode left, how Vault 33 deals with this could define the future of the show itself.
