The second season of Amazon’s Fallout TV show is ploughing ahead, and the first thing I want to see in it is more of my beloved Norm. But the second thing I most want to see is a specific easter egg: the Mysterious Stranger.
There were plenty of callbacks to the videogames in the first season, including brand names like YumYum Deviled Eggs, Abraxo Cleaner, and Radiation King (that one’s a double easter egg, since Radiation King in the games was itself a reference to The Simpsons—it’s the brand of TV that burns young Homer’s shadow into the wall of his childhood home in Grampa Vs. Sexual Inadequacy). Even mechanics from the games scored some cute references, with the Ghoul going into slow-mo during a shootout like he was using VATS and clearly having bought the Bloody Mess perk.
As the cast levels up into season two, I’m hoping one of them buys Mysterious Stranger. A perk that’s been in the games from the start, this is the one that adds a random chance of a man in a fedora and trenchcoat appearing to take your side in a fight. New Vegas added Miss Fortune, a distaff version of the same character who wears a showgirl outfit, and given that’s where season 2 of the show is headed, maybe she’ll show up in the background of a scene as well?
You could argue the Mysterious Stranger is purely systemic and not an actual person, and therefore it wouldn’t make sense to add them to the TV show. And while the show hasn’t shied away from referencing everything from SPECIAL stats to Bloody Mess, according to Fallout 4 the Mysterious Stranger is a real person. You meet his son, The Lonesome Drifter, in New Vegas, and in Fallout 4 you can find a note in Nick Valentine’s office explaining the synthetic detective has been tracking decades’ worth of sightings of this “psychopath”.
Given how many years the Mysterious Stranger has been showing up for, Nick entertains a couple of theories about his identity. Maybe it’s actually been multiple men in hats over the years, or maybe the Mysterious Stranger is “A Ghoul with minimal scarring”. That sounds familiar. Coop is a ghoul with less in the way of radiation burns than the average ghoul, he shows up to save Lucy out of the blue, and he’s been alive for long enough to have saved my bacon in every Fallout game. Maybe in season 2 he’ll mention that he swung by Mariposa Military Base to rescue some hapless Vault dweller from super mutants, then a guitar sting will play, and I’ll have to thank him for having my back since 1997.
