What Happened to Mr. House in the Fallout Show?

In the Fallout TV show, Mr. House survives as a voice and a face on a screen. Before the war he tries to buy a cold fusion diode from Vault-Tec so he can live forever, and never gets it. In 2296 the Ghoul plugs that same diode into the Lucky 38, House wakes up on his monitor, guides the Ghoul into a secret vault under the Strip, and is left behind when the Ghoul walks out on him. The show never says whether House's body is still alive. (Fallout, "The Handoff"; Fallout, "The Strip")

Season 1: one meeting#

House appears once in season 1, in the finale's flashback to a pre-war meeting where Bud Askins and Barb Howard pitch Vault-Tec's vaults to other company heads. A man the show calls Robert says the vaults will fail because rats confined in a nest end up eating each other. When Barb invites the companies to claim vaults for their own experiments, he calls it a fun idea with a lot of earning potential, then asks how Vault-Tec can guarantee results on a hypothetical. The answer that comes back is to drop the bomb themselves. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Elsewhere RobCo is only background (it bought the studio that owned Cooper Howard's screen character). The season ends with Hank MacLean stopping on a hill above New Vegas, the Lucky 38 on the skyline. (Fallout, "The Trap"; Fallout, "The Beginning")

Season 2 before the war#

The first episode opens in a bar in 2077. A stranger, really Robert House, needles a construction worker about being replaced by machines, then forces a mind-control chip on him. The chip makes the man kill his friends. Later, a pre-war Lee Moldaver tells Cooper that House is building a private missile system in Las Vegas and that Barb is about to sell him cold fusion. (Fallout, "The Innovator")

House, still unnamed, approaches Cooper at a veterans' event, then meets him in Vegas. The man everyone thinks is Robert House turns out to be a double who has played him for about ten years. The real House talks to Cooper at the Lucky 38. His forecasts locked onto the end of the world at 5:17 a.m. on 14 April 2065, which Cooper recognises as his daughter's birthday. He insists the bombs won't be dropped by him or Vault-Tec, because there is "another player at the table". (Fallout, "The Profligate"; Fallout, "The Wrangler")

What he wants from Vault-Tec is the cold fusion diode. He tells Cooper it will let him "stay alive indefinitely in roboticized, nonbiological form" and protect Las Vegas from the war. At a Vault-Tec meeting his double shows off a chip that turns people into "the automated man", and in 2296 Hank says he was trying to add a little personality to House's product. (Fallout, "The Wrangler"; Fallout, "The Other Player"; Fallout, "The Strip")

He never gets the diode. Cooper gives it to the president instead, after a congresswoman tells him it could end 25 years of Resource Wars. (Fallout, "The Handoff")

Season 2 in 2296#

The Ghoul tells Lucy that one man, Robert House, shot down the bombs over Vegas, and that nowhere near him is safe. Later, the Securitron Victor tells the Ghoul that House is "gone", that all he really wanted was to live forever, and that he needed the cold fusion "doodad" from before the war. (Fallout, "The Innovator"; Fallout, "The Profligate")

The Ghoul gets the diode from Maximus, crosses the deathclaw-infested Strip and uses it to power the Lucky 38. House appears on the monitor: "Well, hello, old chum." He says it's good to be alive again and that, over the years, his body was poisoned, shot and bludgeoned with a crowbar by wanderers with something to prove. (Fallout, "The Handoff"; Fallout, "The Strip")

He makes the Ghoul wear a Pip-Boy so he can guide him into the Vault for management under the city, which House says he rigged before the war. He admits he was outclassed by an invisible adversary, the Enclave, who he says set the deathclaws on Vegas. When the Ghoul's family's cryo pods turn out to be empty, House tells him: "You bet on hope, Mr. Howard. And you lost." The Ghoul decides his family is alive and leaves. House protests that the Enclave is still out there and they have business. "Not with me, you don't," the Ghoul replies. (Fallout, "The Strip")

So what is House now?#

The show stops there. House talks from his screen and runs the vault's systems, but the show never shows his body. Interpretation: the crowbar line sounds like the Courier in Fallout: New Vegas, where you can kill House in his life-support pod, and his 2077 plan was to live on in "nonbiological form". Put together, it reads as if the diode let a digital House carry on after his body died. The show hasn't confirmed that, and Bethesda hasn't named a canon New Vegas ending. (Fallout, "The Strip"; Fallout: New Vegas)

Read more#

Mr. House covers his game history and the TV version side by side. For the diode and the Enclave plot, see the Fallout TV series explained and the Ghoul. The chip House wanted in the game has its own page: why Mr. House wanted the platinum chip.