One Season 2 Premiere Detail Has Fallout Fans Convinced They’ve Cracked Cooper Howard’s Ghoul Origin
Compelling on paper, the proposal still faces a wall of doubt—even among those expected to back it.
Fallout season 2 kicks off with a name-drop that has the fandom spiraling in the best way: Bakersfield. If you know the old games, that is not a casual choice. And yes, it might be the breadcrumb that explains what happened to Cooper Howard and his family.
Spoilers for Fallout season 2, episode 1 below.
"Cooper references Bakersfield in episode 1, season 2. Is this how he became a ghoul? Are his ex and daughter also ghoulified? The vault door was intentionally faulty in Vault 12, which is located in Bakersfield."
The Bakersfield thing, explained
Bakersfield sits in the part of the map that eventually becomes New California in Fallout canon. In the original Fallout game, Bakersfield is home to Vault 12 — a vault Vault-Tec sold as a luxury bunker with every bell and whistle. The fine print no one knew about: the door was deliberately designed to fail. That meant prolonged radiation exposure for anyone inside, and the survivors turned into Ghouls. It is one of those deep-cut lore beats that changes how you read a single line of dialogue.
How the show ties into that
In season 2, episode 1, Cooper and his daughter Janey head toward Bakersfield after he realizes his wife, Barb, might be directly connected to how the world ends. So the timeline lines up neatly with the Vault 12 nightmare scenario. On paper, you can absolutely connect those dots and land on: Cooper goes to Bakersfield, gets blasted by radiation, becomes The Ghoul. The universe of this show has room for that kind of twist.
Why it might not be that simple
Barb is not just anyone — she is a high-ranking Vault-Tec executive, and she mentions having access to the so-called management vaults. Those are the premium, top-of-the-line shelters meant to protect the company brass and their families. If Barb had that access, the most logical outcome is that she and Janey would have been ushered into one of those management vaults, not Vault 12. Translation: if they made it inside in time, they would not be 'ghoulified.'
That still leaves Cooper. If Barb and Janey went for safety the second the bombs fell and he was not with them, that neatly explains how he ends up outside, eating radiation, and becoming The Ghoul. It also tracks with how he carries himself in the present — he seems to believe Barb and Janey are still alive, and he acts like they avoided the worst of it, likely because he assumes they made it into a real management vault.
Where this leaves the theory
The Bakersfield reference is not random, and Vault 12 is the exact kind of lore pull the show likes to weaponize. But the management-vault angle is a big, sensible wrinkle. My read: Cooper in Bakersfield equals Ghoul origin is totally plausible; Barb and Janey turning into Ghouls is a lot less likely. We will see how much of this the show confirms as season 2 keeps rolling.