Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Fallout Season 2 Episode 5.

Fallout Season 2 has finally shown the wizard behind the curtain. Or the screen, rather. The presence of Robert House (Justin Theroux) has been felt throughout Lucy (Ella Purnell) and the Ghoul’s (Walton Goggins) journey to New Vegas, but Episode 5 properly introduced the ruthless RobCo CEO in a face-to-face meeting with Cooper Howard at the pre-war Lucky 38, where he revealed how he can seemingly be so ever-present. House is a dogmatic collector of information and technology, using the knowledge he gained of the world through both to predict the coming end of the world down to the minute and fortify Las Vegas into what would become his own enduring post-war city. However, his most chilling revelation is not what he could predict, but rather what he couldn’t — who was actually behind the bombs?

The Season 1 finale, where Bud Askins (Michael Esper) and Barb Howard (Frances Turner) revealed Vault-Tec was willing to drop the atoms themselves to reap the benefits of their experimental Vaults, seemingly confirms they’re to blame for the spark that began The Great War. Yet, when predicting when the world would end, House wasn’t convinced that the “collection of bureaucrats” would actually push the button, though he wasn’t sure about Cooper’s wife after hearing her proposal. Rather, he suspects that there’s “another player at the table” that even he can’t figure out, the same one behind Cooper’s Deathclaw encounter in Alaska. Ahead of the episode, Collider’s Therese Lacson sat down with co-creator and co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet to discuss the series, including what House’s warnings mean for the future of Fallout.

Although Robertson-Dworet was tight-lipped about when and where the series might reveal this other player, she emphasized how it drives the mystery of the end of the world in a new direction. It creates a ton of new questions about how responsible Vault-Tec, Barb, and House are for the current state of the world. More importantly, though, while the Ghoul may have a good lead on where his wife and daughter are now, the show’s trio of wasteland dwellers is still far from actually knowing who’s behind the wheel of the chaos, whether it’s a relatively unexplored faction from the games, like the Enclave, or someone else entirely. That search for answers may take time to unfold, as she explained:

“I don’t want to say exactly where we learn more about that other player at the table, but that is a moment where Robert House is dangling that there are still adversaries out there that are just as powerful as him, if not more so, and who may be even affecting his prediction algorithms and calculations for when the world might end and who may be responsible for a lot of what we find in the Wasteland. So I’m really excited to dive into those questions more and to watch our characters unpack that mystery and find out the whys behind so much of what they see in the Wasteland, and that are just sort of problems and obstacles that they have to overcome. But ultimately, what they’re going to be unpacking is who created this and why.”

‘Fallout’ Season 2’s Survivors Are Facing Their Greatest Challenges Yet

Beyond the revelatory meeting with House, Episode 5 ended with Fallout‘s main characters all in precarious situations. After encounters with more mutated monstrosities, Caesar’s Legion, Deathclaws, and more, Lucy and the Ghoul finally reached New Vegas, but their seemingly growing bond finally hits a fatal snag. Lucy’s father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), has found them before they could find him, and he uses the lives of Cooper’s family to get him to turn the vault dweller over.

The episode ends with an enraged Lucy punching the irradiated bounty hunter out of the window, leaving him impaled on a pole outside as Hank walks in to collect his little “Sugar Bomb.” Elsewhere, Norm (Moises Arias) is finally discovered not to be Bud Askin’s successor and is knocked out while digging for information on the vaults, and Maximus (Aaron Moten) is still on the run from the Brotherhood of Steel with Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton) and the key to cold fusion after his fateful shootout with Elder Quintus (Michael Cristofer).

Season 2 appears to be entering the home stretch now as each of those main storylines starts kicking into high gear. With only three episodes remaining, Robertson-Dworet and co-creator Graham Wagner still have a lot of threads to pull in their trip to New Vegas before turning their focus to Season 3 and beyond, though. So far, their adaptation of Bethesda’s mega-hit post-apocalyptic RPG series has only found more success than ever as it explores the settings and characters of the franchise’s most beloved game, Fallout: New Vegas, earning an improved 97% from critics and 96% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.

Fallout Season 2, Episode 5 is now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes air every Wednesday. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on the hit video game adaptation as the back half of the season gets underway.