Note: Major spoilers for Fallout Season 2 Episode 7!
Back before Fallout Season 2 began, I plugged my brain into a bunch of computers—Mr. House-style—so I could calculate the odds of certain characters from the Fallout universe appearing in the show.
Unlike Mr. House, I'm not particularly good at predicting the future, though I'm still holding out hope Mysterious Stranger shows up in the middle of a gunfight in the final episode of the season. In the meantime, Fallout Season 2 Episode 7 let us finally meet a character who's been part of the story for a long, long time, even though we've never seen them before.
In the Fallout games this person has been mentioned since Fallout 2, meaning they've been part of Fallout lore for more than 25 years. In the history of the series this character has been critical to world events, yet we've never seen their face, not even in a picture.
The show had every chance to continue the tradition by, say, just showing them in silhouette or by obscuring their face, but nope! There they were, on the screen at long last, putting to rest a long-standing mystery about their appearance.
Last chance to avoid spoilers!
With so much detailed lore about Fallout history, it's a bit weird that we don't actually know who "The Last President of the United States" was when the bombs went off, isn't it? The President is mentioned in multiple Fallout games but the closest we've ever gotten to an actual name is in Fallout 76, where a faded communique can be found barely showing the first two letters of his first name, which appear to be: "Di." President Dick? Dillion? Dino? Dimitrus?
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And we've never even seen the President. No old photographs. No portraits. No billboards. Nothing whatsoever bearing his image. Fallout 3 takes place in Washington D.C. and yet we never see a picture of the President who was running the country when the world ended? Weird. Even considering that he joined the Enclave and went into hiding months before everything went kablooey, you'd think something would have survived to show us who he actually was.
But great news, because the Fallout TV series was more than happy to unveil him when Cooper Howard got to meet the President in person in Las Vegas in a pre-war flashback. Just like that, after 25 years of mystery, The Last President of the United States was revealed, and I was happy to see he's quite a familiar face because he's played by actor Clancy Brown!
(Image credit: Prime Video)
It's always a delight when Clancy Brown shows up in a movie or show, but this is a triple delight: Not only does Brown do a ton of videogame voice work—Spyro the Dragon, Detroit: Become Human, God of War 3, Call of Duty: Blacks Ops 2, just to name a mere handful—one of his first videogame acting roles was in the original Fallout, where he played Brotherhood of Steel member Rhombus. Welcome home.
Despite finally appearing in person on the Fallout series, The Last President of the United States still doesn't have a name, oddly enough. He's not referred to by anything but his title in the episode, and the credits only list Clancy Brown as "US President."
There's still one episode left in the season, though! Maybe Brown will make another appearance, and maybe the writers will finally give him a name so we can fill in that missing detail from the Fallout history books.
Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.
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