Where is Vault 24 in Fallout Season 2? The 15-year New Vegas mystery finally solved

Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 was released a day earlier than planned on December 16, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. PT (9:00 p.m. ET) on Prime Video. The second season of the post-apocalyptic drama picks up right where the fiery Season 1 climax left off, with Lucy MacLean and The Ghoul crossing the Mojave Wasteland to get to Las Vegas, as their adventure unfolds.

Fallout Season 2 will not be released in bulk like the previous season but will roll out one episode per week through February 4, 2026. Fans will discover wasteland’s secrets in 8 weeks, along with their favorite characters.

Episode 1, The Innovator, jumps straight into the action and finally tackles one of the biggest Fallout: New Vegas mysteries: Vault 24. The vault no one ever actually saw in the game, except for some sneaky folks poking around in the game files. There was a Vault 24 jumpsuit, but zero explanation.

For 15 years, fans have been obsessed, putting out theories about what was inside. Now the show drops the truth bomb: turns out there’s a seriously messed-up experiment at the heart of Vault 24, and it ties right into the season’s big villains.

Vault 24 location revealed in Fallout Season 2: Inside the Starlight Drive-In discovery

Vault 24 is situated underneath a Starlight Drive-In cinema in the Mojave Wasteland, where it is effectively camouflaged by a huge movie screen. It is during the pursuit of Lucy's father, Hank MacLean, who is literally leaving bloody footprints and dead bodies in the desert from California to Nevada, that Lucy and The Ghoul come across the vault.

The duo find themselves at the deserted cinema after executing a bounty scheme in Novac. She pretends she is handing him over to the Great Khans for some caps, then tries to free him once she is in the clear. When the situation turns unfavourable, they decide to follow Hank’s steps, which eventually lead them to the ruins of the drive-in.

They find the entrance jammed behind the theater’s giant screen. As they investigate, they are met with a vault door that has been violently opened and invaded. Inside, it’s obvious Hank has been through, leaving his signature chaos behind. But what’s inside is way more messed up than anything they could have imagined.

When Lucy and The Ghoul get into Vault 24, they see countless skeletons decayed for a long time in old Soviet-style commie uniforms, all strapped to chairs facing dust-covered projectors that are still showing Russian propaganda and trippy hypnotic videos.

While doing the body search, Lucy understands that these people weren’t even Russians. They were Americans, and Vault-Tec brainwashed them into faux-commies as part of a twisted psychological warfare experiment.

The very first scene of Fallout Season 2 offers essential insights into Vault 24's research and development. The pre-war flashback shows a secretive character, portrayed by Justin Theroux (who is later identified as having ties to Robert House), exhibiting a prototype of a mind-control apparatus to furious construction workers at a bar's entrance. He jams this chip into the back of some poor guy’s neck, and he is suddenly a puppet, forced to go full maniac with a baseball bat on his friends until his head explosively malfunctions because he tries to fight the conditioning.

Later, Lucy and The Ghoul are exploring deep inside Vault 24 when they stumble upon a skeleton that has a mind-control chip at the same place where the other one was. That’s how they confirm that the vault was really serving as the test place for Mr. House's neural interface technology.

But it gets worse. The brainwashing machine paired this chip with constant exposure to propaganda to really cook people’s brains. The goal was to rewire people so completely that Americans would start waving red flags, all thanks to some tech and psychological voodoo. Vault-Tec and House wanted full-on mass mind control, turning patriots into communist sympathizers with the flip of a switch.

Hank MacLean had gone to Vault 24 for the sole purpose of taking away test data and samples of the mind-controlling devices of House, especially the tiny square chip that could be inserted in the human body. This technology of his interest is a hint of his bigger plan for Fallout Season 2.

Before vault exit, Hank prepared a deadly message for his daughter. Lucy, along with The Ghoul, who has one of those creepy chips jammed into his skull. The helpless man delivers Hank's scary message to Lucy in a flat tone, echoing the words of his dad:

“I fix everything. Go home, Sugar Bomb.”

Right after giving this message, the head of the Great Khan bursts violently, and blood and guts shower Lucy. This unbelievable moment makes Lucy firmly determined to eliminate her father, no matter what, showing that Hank is ready to treat the innocent people as if they were non-living test subjects and messengers.

The nasty murder reinforces that the mind-control technology is still precarious as it was during the pre-war test in Fallout.

So, in the last chunk of Fallout Season 2 Episode 1, we have Hank rolling up to this gigantic Vault-Tec bunker under New Vegas. He ditches his janky, stolen power armor and suits up before dialing up Robert House himself. Apparently, they are both super jazzed about tweaking the mind-control tech.

They are intensively cooperating in the development of the neural control chips that met with such a disastrous fate in Vault 24. Their alliance raises the possibility that there is a greater conspiracy aimed at the population of the wasteland controlled through technical means instead of military ones.

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Also Read: Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 recap: Lucy's moral test, The Ghoul's past and Hank's mission

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