Fallout Has a Phone Number You Can Call That’s Either a Wild Easter Egg or a Critique of Capitalism

Have you finished binging Fallout on Prime Video yet? You need not have played the massively popular games that inspired the series to enjoy its blend of bonkers action, oddball humor, post-apocalyptic retro-futurism, and outrageous violence—but there are plenty of Easter eggs sprinkled throughout for fans of the source material.

One example, and this actually may or may not be a game reference: the phone number that flashes on-screen in at the start of episode six, when Walton Goggins’ character Cooper Howard, “star of stage and screen” (also known elsewhere in the show as the Ghoul), pops up in a Vault-Tec infomercial. Touting “a veritable Camelot of the atomic age,” he tours us around the sprawling underground vaults aimed at recreating mid-century civilization in the event of a “nuclear incident.” Call now, Cooper encourages the viewer, and snag your place in one of these idyllic and totally safe residences!

The scene is a flashback to pre-apocalyptic times—but the Los Angeles phone number he shares actually works: 213-25-VAULT. Dialing the number gets you a series of agonized screams that go on for a few seconds (it could be a Goggins performance—sounds like him, anyway). Texting gets a reply that reads: “Thank you for texting Vault-Tec. The next available appointment is 33 weeks from now, please stand by!” This is followed by an option to receive “recurring marketing and other texts” to promote Fallout, and “msg & data rates apply,” of course.

As IGN points out, fans who’ve tested the Vault-Tec gimmick are now wildly speculating what the “33 weeks” is a reference to: Vault 33 perhaps, home to Ella Purnell’s character Lucy in the Prime Video series? Or a literal 33 weeks, meaning a Fallout-centric announcement coming in November-ish? With Fallout catching on with streaming audiences, a season two announcement wouldn’t be out of order, though it’d be an odd choice to set a specific timeframe so far in the future to break the news. If you have any theories, share ‘em in the comments!

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