We’ve already seen a full season of Amazon Prime Video’s hit Fallout series, and while so much of the post-apocalyptic video game is accurately depicted without directly adapting, there’s one element that hasn’t popped up yet: deathclaws, the ultra-powerful monsters that appear over and over in Fallout games, much to players’ chagrin.
Not much is known about these mutated lizard monsters, but Fallout Season 2 finally revealed a key part of their backstories — and it goes back even further than fans first thought.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Fallout Season 2 Episode 5.
Fallout Season 2 Episode 4 shows a flashback to the Alaskan warfront, back in the Battle of Anchorage that spanned the years before the nuclear apocalypse. Cooper Howard is shown wearing faulty power armor, but his commanding officer refuses to let him retreat. He finds himself face to face with an enemy — a Chinese soldier — but just before she’s about to strike, there’s a monstrous attack from behind. Lo and behold, there’s a deathclaw.
But what are these mutants doing around before the bomb dropped? The answer lies deep in Fallout lore. In the official strategy guide for Fallout 2, it’s revealed these monsters were actually created by the U.S. to use in high-risk combat situations as a cheap replacement for human labor. But this is hardly referenced in the games aside from some references that they were engineered in part from Jackson’s chameleons.
So why include this information if this isn’t relevant to the games? Because centuries later, when Lucy finds a deathclaw egg in New Vegas, Cooper, aka the Ghoul, has a very personal reaction. His beef with deathclaws dates back to before the apocalypse. In fact, a deathclaw saved his life in the Battle of Anchorage, but that doesn’t make them any less deadly when they meet in the wild.
Fallout Season 2 is all about how the systems we thought we could trust were actually full of evil intent, and that includes the most fearsome creatures in the wasteland. To the Ghoul, this creature means more than just a symbol of irradiated animals like the radscorpions. Instead, it’s a symbol of how everything he fought for back when he was in the military was a complete lie.
