Our Biggest Unanswered Questions After the ‘Fallout’ Finale

Editor’s Note: The following contains full spoilers for Fallout.

The Big Picture

• Power returns to the Wasteland with cold fusion technology, changing life for survivors permanently.
• Moldaver’s survival secrets remain a mystery, potentially linked to Vault-Tec’s cryo-pods or advanced technology.
• Norm uncovers Vault-Tec’s sinister plans in Vault 31, setting the stage for future conflicts in the fallout world.

Prime Video’s Fallout is a treat for both experienced gamers and newcomers alike. It has been a pleasure following the adventures of Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), Maximus (Aaron Moten), and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) around the Wasteland, as they brave this weird post-apocalyptic world. Many exciting things happen in this first season, but there’s plenty left open, too, to be answered in future seasons. As Season 1 ends, new reveals are made, and new questions arise, about which we hope to get answers in the future.

Power Is Back to the Wasteland, so What Now?

Ever since the bombs dropped in 2077, every centimeter in what used to be the USA has been in the dark. Even in the vaults, where electricity is never off, they rely on fusion cores to provide power for the communities that live beneath the surface. In the Wasteland, the darkness at night has become such a defining aspect of life that building fires is actually dangerous, as Dr. Siggi Wilzig (Michael Emerson) explains to Lucy in Episode 2, “The Target.” It can attract every sort of danger.

In the finale, however, Lucy finally delivers Wilzig’s head to Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) at the New California Republic’s (NCR) headquarters, and it turns out that Wilzig inserted a cold fusion core in his own head. Different from the power generated by a regular fusion core, cold fusion can power as much as the old city of Los Angeles for a long time. Moldaver turns the cold fusion reactor on during the battle against the Brotherhood of Steel, and lights up the city. This is probably going to change how people live, at least in that corner of the Wasteland, since power is back and no one has to endure the darkness anymore. It’s not clear the range a cold fusion core has, but if this technology exists, there is hope for everyone in the Wasteland.

At the end of the finale, however, the Brotherhood takes the control room at the observatory and Moldaver dies, leaving the cold fusion reactor on as the lights turn on everywhere. Maximus is hailed as a knight, and the Brotherhood achieves victory right beside the reactor. The problem is that the Brotherhood’s mission is to preserve technology, and they don’t trust regular people with it, so this “enlightenment” of the city may be short-lived. It’s not known how the reactor works if it can be turned off or the core can be taken back to the Brotherhood headquarters, but the technology is effectively in their hands from now on.

How Did Moldaver Survive the Apocalypse?

We meet Moldaver right in Fallout‘s premiere, “The End.” She invades Vault 33, coming from Vault 32 with a group of raiders, wreaks havoc and kidnaps Overseer Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan). At first, it seems like she is just a marauder from the surface who found her way into a vault, but it’s slowly revealed that she actually planned everything for two centuries. Later, flashbacks from Cooper Howard’s past show that, in fact, Moldaver has been around for a long time, and advocated against Vault-Tec’s Vault program.

So how has she been able to survive the apocalypse? Towards the end of the season, Norm MacLean (Moises Arias), Lucy’s brother, discovers the secret of Vault 31, and how it houses cryogenic pods that keep the original Vault-Tec workers to oversee the progress in the Vaults and guarantee the company’s role as leaders in the future. On the surface, Lucy learns that Moldaver once led the NCR and the city of Shady Sands, which Hank MacLean destroyed with a nuke.

Moldaver’s antagonistic relationship with Vault-Tec makes it unlikely that she was in one of the company’s cryo-pods, but she could have been an executive who defected years later. She might also have had access to the cryogenic technology used by Vault-Tec and replicated it. Some theories suggest she might have been a synth, (as androids are called in the world of Fallout). It’s a less likely possibility, and this answer may be one of the key points of Season 2, as she got Cooper Howard to spy on Vault-Tec in 2077, and his storyline in the past is far from over.

What Happened to Cooper Howard and His Family?

One of the saddest plots in Fallout is Cooper Howard’s. We meet Walton Goggins’ characters in very different contexts — Howard as a Hollywood icon, the Ghoul as a long-lived gunslinger who has become dependent on radiation medicine not to become feral — until the pieces come together, and they are revealed to be one and the same. Howard’s story is likely to continue developing in two different timelines, the “present” one when he goes after Vault-Tec with Lucy, and the past one set in 2077, when the nukes drop.

In the past, Howard wasn’t very fond of his wife Barb’s (Frances Turner) work at Vault-Tec, and it caused some friction between the couple whenever she brought it up. Barb would often talk about how she did her work. It was meant to secure her family a place in “one of the good Vaults,” which always made Cooper suspicious. From the flashback in Episode 1, it’s implied that Cooper somehow fell from grace sometime after that, working at children’s parties with his daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith), and the two were together when the bombs dropped. We know that Cooper and Barb were divorced by then, but did Barb and Janey survive the blast?

Another important point regarding The Ghoul is how he was kept alive after the apocalypse. In Episode 1, a band of bounty hunters reanimates him, and their leader talks about how someone named Dom Pedro reanimates Howard once a year to torture him and then buries him again. The Ghoul’s grave even has some antiradiation medicine attached to it, to prevent him from going feral for more than 200 years. Dom Pedro is sure to get angry when he finds out his prized Ghoul is now wandering the Wasteland, and may even become a villain in future seasons.

Will Norm Ever Leave Vault 31?

After Lucy ventures into the Wasteland in the Fallout premiere, her brother, Norm, starts to pay attention to what’s happening in Vault 33. He starts investigating the fact that every Overseer Vault 33 has ever had came from Vault 31, including Hank MacLean and Betty Pearson (Leslie Uggams), until he eventually gets into Vault 31 and discovers the secret of Vault-Tec.

In Vault 31, Norm meets the brain of Bud Askins (Michael Esper), who was a Vault-Tec executive in the past and created the “Bud’s Buds” program to perpetuate the company’s leadership in the future through cryo-pods. Bud locks Norm in Vault 31 with him and offers Hank’s cryo-pod for Norm to hibernate, but it isn’t likely that Norm will accept. He could easily kill Bud, too, but it doesn’t seem like it’s in his best interest to do it.

What Will Happen to the Pioneers of Vault 32?

Moldaver and her raiders almost destroy Vault 32 at the beginning of Fallout, but Vault-Tec mysteriously restores it to pristine condition almost immediately after. Having an empty vault is bad for business, so Overseer Betty, in league with Vault 31, decides to repopulate it by sending people from Vault 33 to be “pioneers” in Vault 32. Among the people chosen are Chet (Dave Register) and his new wife, Stephanie Harper, who becomes Overseer. And, of course, she comes from Vault 31.

Stephanie being designated the new Overseer in Vault 32 implies that the conspiracy around the connection between Vaults 31, 32, and 33 will continue to be a major plot point in future seasons. In Vault 33, Betty continues as Overseer, and something bigger is happening that only the executives who hibernated in Vault 31 know about. Stephanie will likely work with them and probably even go against Chet eventually, but it’s unlikely that these three vaults will simply continue to exist normally.

Fallout is streaming exclusively on Prime Video in the US.

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