The second season of Fallout begins with a bang: Mr. Robert House has joined the fold, with Justin Theroux taking on the role. For longtime fans of the Fallout video game franchise, it’s a move that many anticipated. The end of the first season introduces the location of New Vegas, which House has a key stake in. For those unfamiliar with the video games, here’s everything you need to know about Mr. House and what his arrival on the scene might mean for Season 2 of Fallout.

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Who is Mr. House?

Robert House is a major character in the 2010 game Fallout: New Vegas. At the young age of 22, he founded RobCo Industries, which quickly emerged as one of the world’s most profitable companies. After eight years, House claimed to have a net worth of $30 billion by age 30. Using his vast fortune, he began to take stakes in businesses across Vegas, including H&H Tools, his family's business which his brother initially cheated him out of. (Their parents died when Robert was just two years old). A prodigious talent, House used his business savvy and passion for technology to become the wealthiest man in the Wasteland.

A natural enemy of the working class as his automatons took away their jobs and livelihoods (sound familiar?). House’s dealings led him to be beloved by the world’s most influential people, gaining him key relationships with Vault-Tec, which developed and runs the vast vault system that kept Americans alive after the nuclear war. In the game New Vegas, House could predict when the bombs would drop, allowing him enough time to prepare Vegas to survive the nuclear apocalypse.

After the war, House became the effective leader of New Vegas, employing a technocratic control through which he and his robots ruled the city. He’s not just obscenely wealthy, he’s the single most powerful man in the Wasteland.

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Have we seen Mr. House before?

Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins in a first look at Season 2 of Fallout Courtesy of Prime Video

Those who’ve played Fallout: New Vegas may have noticed that Mr. House actually appears in the first season of the Fallout series. He shows up in the season’s most consequential flashback, where the leaders of America’s most powerful corporations come together to decide what to do with humanity and the vast vault system in order to maximize profit. Various ideas are bandied around, from using vaults to experiment on illegal immigrants to try and turn them into supersoldiers, to separating parents from children and seeing which kids survive (?).