Fallout Recap With Spoilers: Episodes 5 and 6

WARNING: This article contains FULL SPOILERS for Fallout Episodes 5 and 6… Maximus and Thaddeus are celebrating the retrieval of Wilzig’s head and Thaddeus insists that he get branded as the official Squire to Titus. Maximus obliges, branding the “T” on his back, before revealing his true identity. Thaddeus immediately questions everything and makes a run for it. Maximus stops him by stepping on his foot, crushing it with his armor. Thaddeus takes the fusion core out of the back of the power armor suit, leaving Maximus trapped inside, stationary with a limited supply of air. The dog follows Thaddeus and the head, leaving Max all alone.

Radroaches start to pick apart pieces of the armor but Lucy shows up just in time so shoot them off. She helps get him out of the armor in exchange for some Radaway to heal her severe radiation poisoning. Even though no one on the surface world has been trustworthy, she decides to trust Max and it pays off — but not before she passes out.

Norm and Chet make their way back through Vault 32, trying to work out why Rose’s Pip-Boy would’ve been the one to open the gate. For all they know, the device went out of commission when she died years prior. They find more dead bodies at the gate to Vault 31, looking as though they were trying to get into there. A message in blood on the wall reads, “We know what’s in there.” Betty is suspicious of them when they return but doesn’t say anything.

When Lucy wakes up with Radaway hooked to her arm, Max is hiding his armor beneath metal and blankets. The two of them decide to work together to retrieve Wilzig’s head. She has a tracker to find it, and in exchange she wants help from the Brotherhood in getting her father back.

The election takes place in Vault 33, with Betty, Woody, and Reg all on the ballot. Everyone seems to be voting for Betty — even Reg.

Lucy and Max walk along some railroad tracks and she asks about the history of the surface world over the last 200 years. He mentions something about bombs being dropped when he was a kid, alluding to there being more bombs after 2077. Lucy seems to remember a time with her mom in the actual sunlight, but believes it’s just the nostalgia because she’s been told she never left the Vault.

Norm continues looking through the Vault 33 archives and looks at all of the people who have come over from Vault 31 in trades. Nearly every member who came from Vault 31 was elected Overseer of 33, including Hank and now Betty. The election results reveal Betty won with 98% of the votes.

Lucy and Max encounter to dangerous looking strangers on a bridge. Both parties say they’re unarmed (which is a lie) and agree to let one another pass. The strangers attempt to ambush them and Max takes them out. They were fiends who planned on killing and eating Max and Lucy. Upon learning what a fiend is, Lucy says, “I hate it up here.”

Woody, disappointed about the election, is told the old adage, “When things are glum, vote for someone from Vault 31.” It lines up with what Norm found on the terminal, and he learned that the same thing happened in Vault 32. Chet thinks it’s just a clever slogan but Norm knows there’s no way for 200 years of coincidence to not mean something. Chet is still living with Stephanie and helping with the newborn baby. When Norm asks about the differences in Vault 31, all she can recall is that the mashed potatoes back home were “a little better.” His dad used to say the same thing.

Max and Lucy show up to the location where a town called Shady Sands used to be. He tells her about the New California Republic and the cities that once existed after the war. She believed Reclamation Day was being put off in order to restart civilization, but civilization had already started long before the Vault dwellers came to the surface. Shady Sands was a bustling town with more than 30,000 residents but, as Max says, things didn’t work out. Shady Sands was bombed several years ago, and an enormous crater now sits where the heart of the city used to be. Lucy asks what happened.

“The same thing that always happens,” Max tells her. “Everyone wants to save the world, they just disagree on how.”

Max reveals that he survived the blast. He was just a kid when it arrived and he hid out inside an old refrigerator. He emerged and was found by a Knight from the Brotherhood. This older Maximus was shot in the exchange with the fiends and he’s losing more blood than he let on. They start searching an old medical lab for supplies when they are dropped through a trap door.

In Vault 33, Betty announces that they will be renovating Vault 32. When the entire community of Vault 33 heads over to 32, they see a completely normal living space, having been cleaned up and repainted after Norm and Chet’s recent exploration. Betty’s “resettling campaign” will see half of the residents from 33 move over to 32 in order to build it back up. Norm walks through 32 seeing a fresh living space where he saw death and decay just 24 hours prior. The terminal in the overseers office he used to find out about his mother’s Pip-Boy has been destroyed.

“Great job cleaning up,” he tells Betty, knowing something bigger is going on. He asks what happened to his mother’s Pip-Boy and Betty assures him that she was buried with it. She says she buried Rose alongside Hank, so she would know. That’s all the confirmation Norm needs to know there’s a big lie surrounding the Vault.

Lucy and Max wake up on cots in a small intake room underground. They’ve found themselves in another Vault, which fills Lucy with hope.

Fallout Episode 6

A Pre-War commercial begins with Cooper Howard introducing the idea of the Vaults on behalf of Vault-Tec. He walks through Vault 4 to tell people that they’ll be protected from both radiation and communists. He shows off an underground neighborhood, complete with modern technology in every home. Cooper introduces the audience to the Hawthorne family, where both parents are scientists. Vault 4 is intended to be a Vault inhabited and governed entirely by scientists, setting it apart from other Vaults. After shooting the commercial, Cooper meets a man named Bud Askins, who oversees Southern California operations for Vault-Tec. He’s wary of the man, who oversaw the rollout of the faulty power armor that cost a lot of lives his fellow soldiers in Alaska. Bud says that he’s focused more on R&D now because he believes the key to beating your opponents isn’t outselling them or outsmarting them; it’s about outliving them.

“Time is the ultimate weapon,” Bud says. “The future of all humanity comes down to one word: Management.”

Barb informs Cooper that they’ll be hosting a wrap party for the Vault-Tec folks at their house, which he isn’t at all excited about. He sees an ad of himself in the paper and shakes his head. His beloved dog, Roosevelt, has to stay upstairs during the party. Cooper clearly shares more in common with the dog than the partygoers downstairs. Outside by the pool he runs into his acting friend Sebastian. Sebastian voices the robot cartoon character Bartholomew Cogsworth, who is inspired by the real life Mr. Handy robots. The rights to his voice were purchased to be used in the actual robots as well as the cartoon, so all of the Mr. Handy bots sound just like him.

Sebastian is the only friend of Cooper’s at the party, which they believe is because no one wants to be associated with “the spokesperson for the end of the world.” Cooper admits that he’s even lost movie jobs because of the Vault-Tec ads, which he’s only doing because his wife asked him. Their friend Charlie Whiteknife has apparently signed up as Communist and is attending regular meetings about it. Sebastian thinks that Cooper is moving in the right direction with the Vault-Tec ads because the future is more about product than art.

“Hollywood is the past. Forget Hollywood,” Sebastian says. “The future is products. You’re a product, I’m a product. The end of the world is a product. And for those of us who can successfully embrace that, I’d say the future is golden.”

In that future, more than 200 years later, the the Ghoul version of Cooper is approached by several sheriff’s deputies in the old Super Duper Mart. He’s arrested for supposedly destroying the medical business that was being run out of the store.

A medic in Vault 4 patches up Max, who had been shot with a human tooth instead of a bullet. They are informed they’ll have to stay for a short time as he recovers. The Vault foragers actually found Max’s armor and are bringing it back for him. One of the prominent leaders of the Vault, Birdie, tells Lucy that she was actually born on the surface and lived in Shady Sands as a kid. After the blast, she was accepted into Vault 4. As they wait in a holding area, Lucy asks Max if he wants to have sex, and it’s clear he doesn’t have much of a clue how any of that works. She encourages him that he’s not as clueless as he thinks, but he still doesn’t think he should because he’s part of the Brotherhood and they aren’t supposed to. The response doesn’t seem to bother her too much.

At breakfast, they are introduced to Overseer Benjamin, who has a single, cyclops style eye and appears to be pretty clueless about things. He tells them one of the only major rules is to stay out of Level 12. Lucy looks around to see other people with strange deformities or extra body parts, like a man with a second nose on his forehead or someone with fins for hands. Another woman has glowing blue eyes.

The Ghoul walks through the desert with the deputies and is reminded of a conversation with his wife before the bombs. He asks her about doing work somewhere other than Vault-Tec. He dreams of both of them quitting and moving out into the mountains, purchasing a farm where the family can survive together and be disconnected from it all. The news lately has had him second-guessing “city life.” Barb checks on her new Pip-Boy device and she informs Cooper that Bud Askins licensed them from RobCo to integrate them with the technology in the Vaults. She doesn’t love all of the men like Bud Askins that she works with but knows that the job is her way to guarantee safety and longevity for their family — specifically their daughter — in one of the Vaults. She admits that all the money in the world won’t get them a spot in one of the “good Vaults,” and only a high level job within Vault-Tec can guarantee that.

Still in the past, Cooper runs into Charlie Whitekife at a bar. He ribs Charlie about his work with Communism and Charlie tells him that a company like Vault-Tec is the real danger to humanity. They have a responsibility to their shareholders, which means selling Vaults above everything else. If peace negotiations with rival countries succeed, they won’t be able to sell Vaults to anyone, so nuclear war is ultimately in the best interest of the company. Vault-Tec is currently more powerful than the US Government, which means danger “unless the people can do something about it.” He gives Cooper a card and tells him to come to just one meeting and learn the truth about Barb’s employer.

At home, Cooper gets a call from Henry, Barb’s new assistant at work. He hangs up the phone because they don’t take work calls in the evenings. Barb informs him that they’ll need to leave Roosevelt behind if the bombs fall because a policy has been put into place about not allowing dogs in the Vaults. They are an “avoidable inefficiency.” Cooper wants to know who made the decision to introduce that policy and he pushes about more information regarding who is making all the rules regarding the Vaults.

“I want to know about my freedom. I didn’t go to war defending that freedom so I could live in a cellar under the boot heel of chairman Bud Askins.”

She persists that everything she’s doing is for their family. She will sacrifice her freedom to have a dog if it means Janey surviving a nuclear apocalypse. She has worked it out for them to live in a Vault set aside for upper management, where they will have a hand in overseeing all of the other Vaults.

In the “Present Day,” Lucy chats with Overseer Ben about life in the Vaults. Vault 4 takes in a lot of refugees from the surface world, it’s part of their assignment. Ben doesn’t necessarily want to take in people from the surface but it’s a policy that was adopted long before he was in charge. She asks about what’s on Level 12 and he immediately shuts down, asking her to leave the office. Max gets his armor back and knows he needs a fusion core to power it. He looks into the power supply of Vault 4 and realizes that the entire building also runs on the same type of core. Birdie talks with him and encourages him to give life in the Vault a chance. She gives him a Pip-Boy so he can unlock a private room, have a hot shower and get a good night’s sleep on an actual bed. The comfort and kindness makes Max feel uncomfortable. When he gets to his room, however, he is fascinated by things like the record player, running clean water, and television set. The TV is playing nothing but footage of a waterfall on a loop but he’s fascinated by it. He puts on a robe and eats caviar from a gift basket that was left for him. Lucy explores a classroom in Vault 4 that acts as a tribute to Shady Sands. She learns about the founding of the New California Republic and how there has been a lot of life on the surface since the bombs. All of the people from the surface are heading to take part in some kind of “tradition” that their people have and Lucy is invited to tag along.

On the surface, the Ghoul is lead into a building labeled “The Govermint.” He meets with some self-appointed president of the area, who actually happens to know him from a time in the past. President Booker says that the Ghoul was the best bounty hunter in the wasteland for a time. He sows his finger back in on Booker talks to him about his search for Muldaver. Booker says that she’s dangerous, and that people refer to her as the Flame Mother. He saw an opportunity for power and has attempted to seize it. He needs to punish the Ghoul because the Super Duper Mart was under his protection, and handing down a sentence will keep some semblance of order. The Ghoul kills the deputies and notices a wanted poster on the wall with Muldaver’s picture. When Booker tells him that the woman depicted is Muldaver, the Ghoul says, “That’s not how I remember her.”

In the past, Cooper pulls up to the Hollywood Cemetery for the secret meeting that Charlie invited him to. His time exploring the meeting cuts between Lucy exploring the surface gathering in Vault 4.

The surface folks in the meeting circle up around a table of candles, waving their arms slowly up and down as the chant with a “ssh” sound. They all begin unzipping their Vault uniforms on the top, revealing their bare chests as they continue. Birdie approaches the circle wearing plain, surface clothes. She lights two bowls on fire and recites a message to the Flame Mother. “Bring back the past as we remember.” They all dip a finger into the bowls and wipe it on their foreheads. The substance is ashes from those who died in Shady Sands. “To bring back Shady Sands, blood must spill.” Another bowl is passed around, this one filled with blood that people drink from. A bright red banner is raised, depicting Muldaver as the Flame Mother, the savior of the surface world.

Cooper finds Charlie and says he may not stick around, but Charlie is confident that he will. As They wait to join the meeting. Cooper is introduced to the leader of the meetings, who we recognize instantly as Muldaver.

Lucy tries to convince Max that they need to leave immediately, but he has had the opposite experience. He’s enjoying the comforts of the Vault. She tells him she’s going to find proof that Vault 4 isn’t actually safe and that they’re hiding something big. She heads down to Level 12, where she’s confident she’ll find what she’s looking for. She discovers all sorts of remnants of experiments that were done on people down below. A video shows footage of a woman in a tank giving birth to a bunch of fish, and the fish immediately turning back on her and attempting to eat her. In another room, she finds more pregnant women in cryogenic tubes, all being kept alive. A scientist comes in to check on the subjects and hears Lucy crawling around. An alarm is sounded and comes after her with a harpoon gun. She almost gets away, throwing acid on the face of the scientist, until she’s apprehended by Birdie and a slew of other members of the Vault. Meanwhile, Max continues to sit around in his robe, watching the video of the waterfall and eating popcorn without a care in the world.