By Phil Owen on
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The Fallout TV show is a spot-on recreation of Fallout's aesthetic, which is very cool, but it's also got a story that is more full of holes than a raider who tries to fight The Ghoul. Season 1 of Fallout works really well in a moment-to-moment way, but the big picture is incomprehensibly messy--almost nothing that happens in the season premiere makes sense once we get to the season finale's parade of plot hole-filled infodumps.
With so many plot holes to sort through, it's only natural that we've got a lot of questions. Many of these could be addressed in Season 2--let's hope the powers that be care enough to make the effort. But in the meantime, let's try to break down everything important that we don't understand in Fallout Season 1.
Warning: From here on out, we will be discussing full spoilers of Fallout Season 1. Continue at your own risk.
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What's the real situation with Vaults 31, 32 and 33?
The later episodes of the season present this trio of vaults as being essentially Vault-Tec's corporate HQ in the future. Vault 31 is full of cryopods with pre-war Vault-Tec employees who are put in charge of Vaults 32 and 33 after they're awoken. 32 and 33 then work together, trading people and equipment as needed while still mostly staying apart to prevent inbreeding, with the eventual goal of returning to the surface and taking over by wiping the surface clean. But there are plenty of details about these vaults that simply don't track with that story. The details we have are, at best, completely incoherent.
First: everybody in Vault 32 died two years before the premiere episode, and no one, including the pre-war Vault-Tec people, have any idea that anything happened at all. Then, in a completely unrelated incident, a group of raiders led by a woman called Moldaver break into 32 and take it over, and then manage to convincingly pull off an inter-vault marriage ceremony despite not cleaning up the prior carnage in 32 even a little bit--Hank and Moldaver discuss the death of the previous overseer like they'd been texting for a while, implying that she'd been running a long-term con and had killed the overseer herself, which isn't the case at all based on the finale.
And just to make things make less sense--when Norm explores 32 later on, all those dead people are still exactly where they were for the past two years, with no indication that anybody else had stepped foot in 32 in that time. And despite the Vault-Tec folks appointing the overseers themselves, Hank manages to be duped by the surface dweller--one he's met before!--who uses her real name while pretending to be 32's overseer. Given Vault-Tec's long-term conspiracy that we learn about later, nothing about this really follows.
What is Moldaver's whole deal?
That raider leader is herself a pile of conundrums. Moldaver was around before the bombs fell, and she's also alive in the present-day post-apocalypse narrative without any explanation. She opens the series by taking over Vault 32 and then invading Vault 33 with a band of bloodthirsty and murderous raiders with the apparent intent of kidnapping Overseer Hank MacLean and slaughtering everyone else who lived there.
By the finale, we're told that Moldaver was an engineer who invented cold fusion, but whose company was bought by Vault-Tec before the war in order to bury that tech. And then in the more recent past she worked for the New California Republic, and she recruited Rose MacLean to leave the vault and move to Shady Sands, bringing young Lucy and Norm with her. And we're told that Hank didn't like that, and he somehow retrieved the kids and nuked Shady Sands with Rose in it.
We can buy that Moldaver would want some measure of revenge for what Hank did, but murdering her good friend Rose's kids in the process, which she definitely tried to do by bringing a band of violent, near-feral raiders for this operation, is a huge oversight. If she's in charge of the remains of the NCR, for example, why wouldn't she have normal NCR folks along for that mission, like the folks she has at Griffith Observatory in the season finale? How did a surface dweller trick the Vault-Tec folks into thinking she was the legitimate overseer of 32 when that shouldn't have been possible? And how was Hank tricked by her in the series premiere when he already knew her? She even used her real name!
And how is she even still alive in the present? The show makes no attempt to explain even that, and so it's difficult to infer much from the very small amount of real info we do have.
Finally, all the surface folks know who Moldaver is, but we're never told why. What has she done to deserve that sort of reputation in the wasteland? We know nothing. She's important because she's important.
How did Hank nuke Shady Sands?
The season finale features many big reveals, the most shocking being that Lucy's dad Hank nuked Shady Sands. But this is a claim that's made with no details to back it up, like where Hank got a nuke from and how he detonated it. Hank basically admits he did it, so I don't think this is a lie, but the complete lack of details is strange and obnoxious.
How did they plan to take over the surface?
Likewise, how did these vaults full of Vault-Tec managers expect to reclaim the surface like they'd planned? The people in those vaults are way too nice to want to murder everybody, and there's no indication that they have the sorts of weapons they'd need to do it. Even if Hank's Shady Sands nuke was part of that plan somehow, more nuclear detonations only makes the surface less safe and hospitable. What's the idea here?
Did Wilzig really come from the Enclave?
In the premiere episode, the Brotherhood of Steel's head cleric says Wilzig escaped from the Enclave, and the man who frees Cooper Howard from his cemetery captivity says the same thing. And those are the only two references to the Enclave in the entirety of Season 1 of Fallout.
My suspicion is that Wilzig wasn't actually from the Enclave at all. The faction was mostly wiped out on the West Coast 50 years before during the events of Fallout 2, for starters. In the brief scene we see that takes place at Wilzig's base, we see the hand of a super mutant corpse, indicating experiments with the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV)--this is not really an Enclave thing--and also they have Vault-Tec's cold fusion tech, which Wilzig steals. Why would the Enclave have that? Especially since they need a Vault-Tec code to make it work.
So, given those details and the fact that the Enclave has no presence in the story aside from potentially that one scene, it's much more likely that this base Wilzig runs from is related to Vault-Tec. The finale episode revealed that Vault-Tec was at the head of an apocalyptic conspiracy with several other companies--including West Tek, which created the FEV by accident before the war and was the original source of super mutants. And this base, if it were associated with Vault-Tec, would be the only thing on this show that could enable the Vault-Tec jerks in Vault 31 to actually enact their plan for post-apocalyptic genocide.
But if Wilzig actually is from the Enclave, what's their deal?
As mentioned above, the Enclave is thought to be pretty much dealt with by 2296, when the show takes place. So if Wilzig actually did work for them, the Enclave having a base like the one we see at the beginning of Episode 2 would be a big development for the overall franchise plot, and would likely mean the Enclave is going to matter later. But since they never try to chase down Wilzig or otherwise do anything in Season 1, there's nothing to infer any details from.
Where did the rest of the NCR go?
NCR capital Shady Sands was nuked 20 years ago, and there is no NCR presence whatsoever in Fallout Season 1, with Moldaver using unhinged raiders to invade the vaults instead of NCR troops--and the only NCR uniforms we see being worn by random scavengers. So where'd they go?
Why was Cooper actually after Wilzig?
In the series premiere, Cooper is in a sort of cemetery prison, and he's freed by a trio of criminals who want him to help them go after Wilzig, who's got a big bounty on his head. The main member of this trio suggests that Cooper will care about Wilzig because of where he's going: to Moldaver. But no reason is ever given for why he'd want to find Moldaver, and he never acts in a way that indicates he cares about her. He just chases down Wilzig, and later Wilzig's head, like it's a normal bounty--if he wanted to find Moldaver, he'd have let Lucy go so she could lead him to her, just as he does with her father in the finale. If finding his family is the priority, it's unlikely Moldaver would be able to help with that--and it's a moot issue since he never caught up with her anyway.
As it is, Cooper's motivations are impossible to parse right now. He's just doing stuff. That would probably be a lot more annoying if he weren't played by Walton Goggins.
What's up with the Vault 33 water chip?
In Episode 3, the residents of Vault 33 learn that their water chip broke, meaning they can't purify new water and will run out in a couple months. This is an Easter egg for the original Fallout game, but it's also a major plot development for Vault 33--one that is mentioned only one other time in Season 1, and is not resolved.
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