Just finished the first season of Fallout. As someone who’s a fan of the video games and who has written about those games on this blog, I have to say that I am enjoying the show. However, there is one plot twist that I can’t really get behind: the decision to make Vault-Tec the main bad guy. Why? Well, it comes down to motivation.

Some recap: the Fallout world takes place in the United States, 200 years after nuclear war. Part of humanity has taken refuge in a series of vaults underground. These vaults are constructed by Vault-Tec, a private corporation, that sells spots in the vault. In the game, it becomes clear that many of these vaults were designed to conduct experiments on their human inhabitants. The show has Vault-Tec go beyond experiments, and actually makes Vault-Tec the cause of the nuclear war to begin with. Then, a Vault-Tec executive, kept alive for centuries in a pod and awakened 200 years later, destroys a city. We see executives splitting the vaults amongst themselves and planning human experiments.

Question: why? In South Park, we get an episode where underwear gnomes are stealing Tweak’s underwear while his dad tries to get a big corporate coffee shop run out of town. Our protagonists find the underwear gnomes who explain their plan. It goes like this: underwear. question mark. profit. The joke here is that corporations exist to make money, and the underwear gnomes’ actions of stealing underwear make no sense in light of that goal.

Big corporations make good villains because they have a clear motive: making money. The problem comes when you have big corporations literally cause the end of the world. Vault-Tec executives propose dropping a bomb in order to conduct their vault experiments…Why? How can they make money if the world dies in a nuclear holocaust? Same thing with the other companies in the world. They exist to make money. How does conducting experiments in isolated vaults help them make money when the world has been wiped out by nuclear weapons?

Indeed, in the Fallout world, the billions of dollars these corporations already have become worthless overnight. People start using bottlecaps for currency. This isn’t just a problem in the show. It’s been hinted in the games that Vault-Tec was a big player in the war. The problem, once again, is that Vault-Tec stops making money if the war they are scaring people about actually happens. It’s actually what makes Vault-Tec really evil: they sell people spaces in vaults in the event of a war they clearly don’t expect to happen. If they did, the money they took would be worthless. If they actually thought the war was happening, they would demand to be paid in gold.

That problem disappears if they create these experimental vaults at the behest of a government agencies. Government contractors do any number of odd things if the price is right. Nor is there any general problem with making a big corporation a villain, so long as you aren’t literally ending the world. If all the big corporation is doing is dumping toxic waste near schools or forcing workers to survive in an acid mine, then that works because the world is still around to make money in. The problem comes when you have a profit driven company intentionally create a post-apocalyptic world where making a profit is impossible.

Fallout is not the only franchise to have this problem. Resident Evil has the Umbrella Corporation create a zombie apocalypse for seemingly no reason. Greed’s a good motivation for a villain, but most greedy people know that robbing a bank is pointless if you have to obliterate the city it’s in to do it.