WARNING: This article contains FULL SPOILERS for Fallout Episodes 7 and 8… A father and son in old NCR Ranger suits use metal detectors to search for any ammo they can find in the desert. They return home to find the Ghoul at their house, eating at their table and being served by the family’s young daughter. The man’s oldest son, the Ghoul explains, has taken up with Muldaver and her group. He has a letter from the older son, who apparently hasn’t spoken to the family in two years. That letter is much newer than that, and it was sent to the middle son, Tommy. Like Rufus, Tommy did some work with Muldaver. He acted as a go-between to pay a courier to deliver Wilzig to Muldaver. Ghoul threatens them for the information about Muldaver’s location and Tommy tells him she’s holed up at the Observatory. The Ghoul spares the father and young daughter but kills Tommy, who made a move to kill him first.
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At the meeting before the fallout, Cooper listens to what Muldaver (then called Williams) has to say. She explains that the atom bomb was not the end of the war, as they’d all been told. She says the “better future” they were promised isn’t coming to be and that they have more in common with the families of foreign soldiers than the decision makers in America. Cooper gets up to leave and Muldaver calls him out for his work for Vault-Tec. She wants him to stay and continue debating because she knows Barb well. She suggests she knows a side of Barb that Cooper doesn’t. She had been working on a form of cold fusion that could provide sustainable, infinite energy, but her work was shut down when Vault-Tec bought the companies she worked for. They purchased and hid the answer to a decades-long resource war because it didn’t fit into their business plans. She gives Cooper a listening device to spy on his wife and learn the truth of what she’s doing, if he chooses to.
In Vault 4, Lucy is in a holding cell being questioned by Birdie and Ben. They play her a holotape or a scientist (the original scientist from the Vault 4 commercial Cooper starred in). They were experimenting on people and combining their DNA with radioactive resistant species. This resulted in the creation of monstrous creatures (including the gulpers) and the death of many. They explain that the original Vault Dwellers in Vault 4 were running the experiments and they have tried to right those wrongs years later. They have been caring for the women on Level 12 that were once experiments, not experimenting on them now. Ben asks Lucy what experiment was at the heart of Vault 33, alluding to the fact that every single Vault had an ulterior motive. They start to take her to be punished and she passes Max’s new Vault home. He sees them taking her and opts to help her rather than stay living in comfort.
Thaddeus, with the dog in tow, finally gets to a place where he can stop and examine the foot that Max broke. It’s bloody in his shoe, with the big toe hanging on by a thread and all sorts of flesh exposed. He can’t get too much further on it. At an abandoned gas station, Thaddeus hides the dog inside a Nuka-Cola freezer and stashes his bags so he can move faster. He needs to get a radio signal to reach out to the Brotherhood.
In front of the entire community of Vault 4, it looks like Lucy is about to harmed or killed by Overseer Ben as punishment. It turns out, however, that her punishment is “death by banishment to the surface.” He cuts the ropes binding her hands and offers her two weeks of supplies to give her a fair shake up top. It’s much more kindness than she expected. Max thinks she’s in danger, though, and steals the Vault’s fusion core to power his armor. She is pleading for Max to keep his opportunity to stay in Vault 4, despite her banishment. As if on cue, he charges into the atrium in his power armor, tossing dwellers here and there to try and save Lucy, who he believes is in real danger. She stops him before too much harm is done and they are both sent up to the surface. She convinces him to do the right thing and return the fusion core, even if it means not having access to his armor. Lucy invites him to come back to Vault 33 with her after they deliver the head and find her dad. Max tells her the truth about Knight Titus, thinking it keeps him from being worthy of good things. She tells him no one is innocent on the surface world, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. He agrees to go live with her in Vault 33.
Thaddeus continues limping through the desert and stumbles upon the lying salesman from Episode 2. He convinces Thaddeus he’s a doctor and says he can give him a concoction of chems that will fix his foot. Thaddeus trades the fusion core for the potion and his foot immediately cures itself. There will likely be more consequences for that serum later. The salesman tells him he won’t have to worry about radiation anymore, hinting that the serum could be turning him into a ghoul.
Norm continues his job taking food to the raiders in the Vault 33 prison. When he shows up for his latest round, he finds all of the prisoners dead, having been killed with rat poison. The friendly guard at the door is being taken away for questioning. Betty believes Norm’s words about killing the raiders led someone to take their lives. She sends out new Vault assignments to everyone, letting them know whether they’ll be in 32 or 33. Chet and Steph are among those being sent to 32, while Norm is remaining in 33. Chet was assigned to a starter home unit with Steph and the baby, and he believe it’s his chance at a fresh start. Norm feels like forgetting about what they saw makes Chet a coward.
“We all are. Norm. That’s why we live in a Vault.”
The Ghoul arrives at the Red Rocket gas station where Thaddeus had previously stopped. He hears the dog and frees her from the freezer, and being with the dog reminds him of his time with Roosevelt before the bombs. In that previous life, Cooper pairs the listening device to Barb’s Pip-Boy but decides he can’t live with the decision, so he throws the device in the trash. Later that night, after seeing his Vault-Tec commercial and feeling worse about it, he goes outside to dig the device out of the garbage. A shot of him and Roosevelt cuts to the Ghoul and Dogmeat in the wasteland.
“I’m sorry, Dogmeat. But you ain’t him.”
Thaddeus finds himself at a remote radio station that plays almost exclusively old fiddle recordings. He calls to the Brotherhood to come pick him up. As he waits, Lucy and Max follow the tracker to his location. There are bodies in boobytraps all around the station, from people who tried to get in in the past. One trap goes off and puts an arrow through Thaddeus’ neck, but he doesn’t die from the injury. That’s when he realizes the serum turned him into a ghoul. A brotherhood chopper approaches and Thaddeus has to run, because he’ll be killed by the group now that he’s a ghoul. Maximus tells him to run for it, that he’ll slow them down so he can run away. Once Thaddeus is gone, he gives Lcuy the head and takes another one off one of the dead bodies around the station. He breaks the face so it’s not recognizable and plans to give the Brotherhood a decoy. This gives Lucy a chance to make it to Muldaver and use the real head as a bargaining chip for her father. Max says he’ll find her and they share a kiss goodbye.
When the move to Vault 32 begins, Betty announces that Steph has been named Interim Overseer of 32. For those keeping track, that’s another former Vault 31 citizen becoming an Overseer elsewhere. Norm leaves the ceremony to sneak into Betty’s office and use the terminal. He has a conversation with the Overseer from Vault 31, posing as Betty and saying that her mission isn’t going as expected. The 31 Overseer asks if she’s “compromised” and tells her to return to her original Vault as soon as possible. Norm heads to Vault 31 and the gate is opened for him. He turns a corner and finds something making a ton of noise and it shocks him, but we don’t see what it is.
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Max rides in a Brotherhood chopper back to their base, which is now in Filly. The Brotherhood fought the locals for the town and stole it, making it some sort of new headquarters for their operations. The Elder Cleric questions Maximus about Titus and learns the truth about the Knight’s fate. He thinks there’s a pattern, alluding to Dane’s injury also being Max’s fault.
“I fear you lied then, just as you lie now.”
There’s no artifact in the head that Max brings, and the Cleric prepares to have Max executed. Dane puts a stop to it by admitting that they injured themselves with the razors, that it really wasn’t Max’s fault. Max says he can take the Brotherhood to the real artifact. The Cleric tells him that the Brotherhood used to be a lot more powerful, but they’ve been fading. He wants to break off and start a new Brotherhood, one more concerned with keeping power in the wasteland, and he wants Max to join him. He says this is Max’s chance to finally have a home where he belongs.
Lucy makes it to the Observatory where Muldaver and her people live behind metal walls. Inside, she finds an actual community, people farming and trading. It’s not what she expects. The Ghoul and Dogmeat are making their way to the very same location.
He’s reminded of the world before the bombs and the show flashes back to Cooper dropping Barb off at Vault-Tec for work. He’s ambushed in the parking lot by Bud Askins, who tells him all about this new introductory management program he’s creating for the company. He calls it “Bud’s Buds.” His plan is to create management opportunities centuries or millennia ahead of time, building for the distant future. When Bud and Barb go inside, Cooper heads up to his wife’s office so he can be close enough to her Pip-Boy for the listening device to work.
Lucy arrives in Muldaver’s Observatory office, overlooking what was once Los Angeles. Her father is in a cage, guarded by rangers. Muldaver welcomes her, seated at a table next to a decaying feral ghoul tied down to a chair. Lucy gives her Wilzig’s head. She extracts the small object from the head and tells Lucy she’s going to explain who her father really is. She says he wasn’t born in a Vault like he says.
In Vault 31, the object that shocked Norm is a brain in a tank, attached to the top of a roaming vacuum. It’s stuck thanks to a fallen broom and Norm helps free it. The brain tries to stab Norm with a needle because he shouldn’t see what he’s seeing, but it’s too small and slow to actually do anything. Norm simply walks away into the next room.
Cooper enters Barb’s office and one of her assistants, a young woman, says she wants to bring Henry by to meet Cooper because he’s such a big fan. When the woman leaves, he starts listening to the big meeting Barb is a part of. It involves the heads of all of the major American corporations. Bud offers them an opportunity to collaborate on the Vaults, work together to outlast all of their enemies. When the rest of the world is dead on the surface, the people they choose will be surviving underground, and will eventually return to take power from a desolate wasteland.
“Time is the apex predator,” he says. “And in the event of an incident, time is the weapon with which we will defeat all of our enemies. That is how we will win the great game of capitalism, not by outfighting everyone, but by outliving them.”
The plan is for all of the executives to choose the rules for various Vaults around the country. They will each get a say in how some of them operate. As Barb begins pitching the idea, we see Norm exploring the only room in Vault 31. It’s filled with tubes of people frozen in cryogenic pods. The brain reveals itself to belong to Bud Askins, and the people in the tubes are the Bud’s Buds he told Cooper about. He kept Junior Executives from his training program alive hundreds of years into the future so that he could manage the world when it was time for reclamation. Barb tosses the idea of these Vaults as a competition between the companies to see whose Vaults are most successful. The true purpose of Vaults 32 and 33 are a “breeding pool” for the Bud’s Buds of Vault 31, and people are chosen specifically to pair with those frozen in the pods to breed together to form “super managers.”
In order to guarantee results for the Vault project, it’s Barb who tells the executives that they will drop the first bomb themselves. She implies that Vault-Tec will be the one to initiate the nuclear war that kills 90% of life on Earth, solely with the purpose of selling the Vaults and taking control of the world hundreds of years into the future.
“A nuclear event would be a tragedy, but also an opportunity. Perhaps the greatest opportunity in history. Because when we are the only ones left, there will be no one left to fight. A true monopoly.”
This obviously shocks Cooper, who’s still listening in. Barb’s assistant returns and he calls her by her name for the first time: Betty. And he is introduced to the eager young Henry, though he is quick to say his friends call him Hank. The people running Vaults 32 and 33 were all born more than 200 years prior. They worked for Vault-Tec and were frozen as part of Bud’s grand plan for the end of the world.
Muldaver has been telling this entire story to Lucy as well, and she learns the truth about father. In the past, Barb hits the end of her pitch with the executives, delivering the line of dialogue that is most closely associated with the Fallout franchise.
“This is our chance to make war obsolete. Because in our current societal configuration, which took shape without intentional guidance, we have friction. We have conflict. We have war. And war? War never changes.”
Muldaver explains that Lucy’s mother never knew the truth about Hank either. She tells Lucy that Rose was a wonderful person and that she left Vault 33 to live on the surface. To live in Shady Sands. Something was siphoning water away from Vault 33, which clued Rose in to the fact that civilization was starting again on the surface. She ran from Hank because she knew was hiding things about their purpose, and she took Lucy and Norm with her. Hank tracked them down, took the kids from her and dropped the bomb on Shady Sands himself. Like the original bombs in 2077, the Vault-Tec employees deal with their competition by completely annihilating it. Life was restarting in Shady Sands and Hank killed it to keep Bud’s dream alive. Muldaver reveals that the object in Wilzig’s head was the cold fusion power she developed. It can bring unlimited, sustainable power to a city in the wasteland. She just needs the activation code from Hank to power the machine on. Lucy then learns that her mother is still technically alive. She’s the ghoul seated at Muldaver’s table.
Lucy forces her dad to give up the code to turn on the cold fusion and allow the New California Republic to actually have a chance at starting something new. Hank types in the code to power up the cold fusion reactor and it starts running, but doesn’t go fully operational until it charges up and receives one final command. Back in Vault 31, Norm tries to return home but Bud’s brain locks him inside the Vault. He suggests Norm climb into his dad’s old tube in order to stay alive.
Hank tells Lucy he did was necessary to save his people, and that Muldaver is just as bad as he is. As Muldaver prepares to launch the cold fusion reactor, the sirens sound and the Brotherhood of Steel choppers approach for war. Hank says Rose stopped being Lucy’s mother when she took her and Norm into “danger” on the surface. He believes he had to choose between the surface and Vault 31 and he believes he made the correct choice. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood launches a full scale attack on the Observatory. Those on both sides of the conflict are mercilessly killed. Hank goes on about wanting their people to shape the world for everyone else, ridding it of other factions or ideals.
The Ghoul arrives and informs a handful of Brotherhood Knights about a flaw in the welding of the power armor he learned about during his time in the war. That flaw wasn’t ever fixed and he’s able to shoot them all down while he moves through the darkness. Hank begs for Lucy to let him out of the cage but she doesn’t budge. A Knight missing his head walks in and falls down, followed by Max. He doesn’t know the truth about Hank and unlocks his cage for Lucy. She then explains that Hank was behind Shady Sands. Max doesn’t have enough time to react, as Hank puts on the dead Knight’s headless armor and knocks Max out. Lucy holds Hank at gunpoint but can’t bring herself to shoot him. The Ghoul walks in from the darkness and fires a shot that grazes Hank’s cheek. Hank is now face-to-face with the man he was such a fan of over 200 years ago. The Ghoul asks about the location of his family but Hank escapes in the armor, leaping off the balcony down into the destruction below. Lucy can’t wake Max up but the Ghoul tells her they need to leave him behind if they want to survive. The Observatory has fallen to the Brotherhood.
“You look out at this wasteland, it looks like chaos,” the Ghoul says. “But there’s always somebody behind the wheel, and that’s who I want to talk to. That’s where your daddy is headed.”
He tells Lucy they’re going to track Hank down to find out the truth. If she stays behind, the Brotherhood will probably kill her. She takes him up on his offer to join him in finding those responsible for the wasteland. Before she leaves, Lucy shoots her feral mother, ending her misery once and for all.
Max wakes up after Lucy and the Ghoul have already left. The Brotherhood has won the battle and Muldaver returns, bleeding, to turn on the cold fusion reactor. The city below them begins to power up, lights flickering on in many of the buildings. With the mission complete, Muldaver sits at the table and takes Rose by the hand, waiting for death to take her. Dane believes that Max killed Muldaver and he is hailed as a hero to the Brotherhood. The Ghoul, Lucy, and Dogmeat emerge from a tunnel and walk through a dark part of Hollywood, continuing their journey.
As day breaks, Hank walks through the desert in his stolen power armor. He approaches a cliff that looks out over a canyon, the skull of a deathclaw on the ground beside him. He’s looking down over a big city in the distance, filled with several tall buildings, including an immediately recognizable tower that sits high above the rest.
He’s looking at New Vegas.
