The following story contains major spoilers for the finale of Fallout Season 1.
FALLOUT DROPPED ALL eight of its Season 1 episodes at once, making Prime Video’s live-action TV entry in the world of Bethesda Game Studios’s beloved franchise the biggest all-at-once binge of 2024 so far (with all due respect to Netflix’s 3 Body Problem). But with the way the season of post-apocalyptic adventure, gunslinging, gore, and mystery plays out, we can’t help but wonder a bit about a slightly alternate world, where Fallout rolls out week-by-week, building its audience to be bigger by the week, using positive reviews from fans and critics alike as a word-of-mouth weapon. By the time the Episode 8 finale hit, who knows, we may have had a Game of Thrones-esque behemoth on our hands.
But that’s not the world we live in. Prime Video made its choice with Fallout (likely due to rules with the eligibility for the 2024 Emmys), and so viewers had the opportunity to make their way through the world of vaults and The Wasteland at their own pace. And whether someone binged their way through the show in a couple sittings, or savored each episode like a delicious desert at a fancy restaurant, we know there are lots of questions, lots of thoughts, and lots to chew on once you reach the end of Fallout‘s debut season.
The show has already been officially renewed for Season 2, so we can be certain that the story will continue—and that’s a wonderful thing. Because while Season 1 certainly has a fantastic arc that reaches its crescendo in a series of fantastic scenes near the end of the Episode 8 finale, it also clearly leads the door open for the future of a story that clearly has lots and lots of ambition.
“We’ve just scratched the surface, to be quite honest with you,” Walton Goggins, who plays The Ghoul, told Men’s Health in a recent interview. “According to the writers, they thought they would be much further along in the story by the end of season 1. But it was just too much to unpack. This story could go on for a long time—without staying too long at the party, mind you.”
Good news for everyone whose first thought after Season 1 of Fallout came to an end was “I need more.”—which is just about all of us.
But in the meantime, while we wait for that, we know you’re still unwinding after that finale too. So we’re going to look at where things for Season 1 leave off with some of our most important characters and happenings. Here’s our breakdown of the Fallout Season 1 ending.
Watch Fallout Here
Lucy
While Fallout is an ensemble piece, Lucy (Ella Purnell) is the closest the story has to a purely heroic protagonist. Season 1 spends seven episodes following Lucy as she exits Vault 33 and enters the surface—also known as The Wasteland—in search of her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan). Of course, she gets into all sorts of trouble along the way, including cutting off a scientist’s (Michael Emerson) head, finding romance with Maximus (Aaron Moten), making it down to the odd world of Vault 4, and, of course, intertwining with The Ghoul/Cooper Howard (and maybe, just maybe, softening him up just a little bit).
By the final episode, she finally completes her mission to find Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) to trade the head for her father… only to learn the real truth. Hank, like the Ghoul (more on him in a bit), like Betty (Leslie Uggams), and like Moldaver, is from before the nuclear war changed the world 200 years ago. Vault-Tec’s goal, which by proxy included Hank as the overseer, was to keep everyone underground; when Lucy’s mom found Shady Sands and wanted to keep young Lucy there, Hank had the entire town nuked—which we saw earlier in the season from a different vantage point, through a brief flashback of Maximus’s childhood. When Lucy has an epiphany and her memories start to become clearer, we also realize that she remembers a younger Moldaver with her mom in Shady Sands.
Her mother, as a result of Hank’s actions, has turned into a ghoul—and is sitting right in their presence, fully zombified (clearly she didn’t have access to whatever yellow liquid Cooper Howard still has).
Lucy is frozen following the revelation of who her father really is (a genocidal corporate nut job—a real ghoul) and what’s happened to her mother. She’s so frozen that she can’t even react as violent chaos breaks out around her, a sequence that ultimately results in Moldaver being critically wounded, and Maximus arriving in time to free Hank—who immediately gets out of his cage and into Maximus’s suit of armor (bad!). Lucy disowns her father, and who knows what he was about to do (probably more murder), but that’s when The Ghould comes in and saves the day, remembering Hank from centuries ago.
After the chaos, The Ghoul and Lucy are left wondering what’s next, and, seeing that her eyes have been opened, he invites her to join him as they together seek whoever’s calling the shots these days for Vault-Tec—Lucy loads her gun, and while Fallout may have wanted us to think she was taking a shot at Cooper, she was really giving her mother the mercy-killing she’s long-deserved. It’s a perfect callback to when we saw Cooper do exactly the same thing to his doomed Ghoul buddy way back in Episode 4, and a wonderful way to show us that these two damaged people are now very much on the same page as we approach Season 2.
The Ghoul
In the extremely capable hands of Walton Goggins, Cooper Howard/The Ghoul is the most fleshed-out and complex character we meet throughout the course of Fallout, and in the finale we finally get to see how the past of Cooper Howard really motivates the present of The Ghoul.
In short: his flashback storyline reaches a complex climax after he’s been convinced by Moldaver to spy on his wife, Barb (Frances Turner), who’s been working on a secret project with Vault-Tec. While waiting for his wife (and running into young versions of Hank and Betty), Cooper gets the most damning piece of information possible: Vault-Tec is behind the nuclear explosions, creating war on the surface for their own corporate gain. And it sounds like it may have been, in part, Barb’s idea from the start.
So in the present—with Cooper a fully conscious and capable ghoul—we now understand his motivation throughout the whole season, and why he recognized Lucy; he remembered her father for the scoundrel he is.
One of the absolute coolest TV moments of 2024 comes when Hank, in his robot armor, is about to attack Lucy—and Cooper, now fully-realized as an anti-hero looking for his family rather than an antagonist, emerges from the shadows and shoots Hank, temporarily disabling his suit.
When an actor is as engaging, and, frankly, as cool as Walton Goggins is, people are going to be on his side whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy (something viewers of Justified, The Righteous Gemstones, The Shield, etc have all experience through the years). But with the revelations in Fallout‘s Season 1 finale, fans of the show can rally behind this badass gunslinger and feel good about it.
Maximus
After the truth came out about Maximus’s actions throughout the season—and how he let Knight Titus die before taking his place inside the armor—he was accepted back as part of the Brotherhood of Steel, and included as part of their raid on Moldaver’s headquarters at the place formerly known as L.A.’s Griffith Observatory. While he wanted to help Lucy and ultimately wound up freeing Hank (and having his armor taken by him), he ended up alone when Lucy and The Ghoul left to find Hank—alone next to Moldaver’s body.
Arriving without any additional context (the fact that Moldaver was actually, you know, good), the Brotherhood of Steel believe her death came by Maximus’s hand, and declare him Knight Maximus, their hero, and, assumedly, de facto leader. Presumably as we move toward Season 2, Maximus’s alliances and status within the Brotherhood will really be put to the test.
Norm
The season also spent a lot of time following an engaging storyline taking place in the vaults, where Lucy’s brother Norm (Moisés Arias) uncovers a conspiracy that centers on every Overseer in Vault 33 (and 32) history coming from the mysterious Vault 31. As Betty wins the election for Overseer in a landslide, Norm becomes more and more suspicious, ultimately leading him to head off on his own in Episode 8, where he makes his way to Vault 31. There, he’s met by Brain-on-a-Roomba (Michael Esper), who we previously met in the Cooper Howard flashback scenes as Bad Askins, the face of slimy, chummy, corporate bureaucracy; he wanted everyone in “Bud’s Buds” to be a middle manager for eternity, and with the cryo-freezing that Norm uncovered in Vault 31, he got it. That’s why every overseer came from Vault 31—the system was rigged, a new Vault-Tec manager was just unfrozen whenever they were needed.
Except there’s one minor problem: Brain-on-a-Roomba became savvy to Norm’s sleuthing, and locked the door to Vault 31. As the season, and Norm’s storyline, came to a close for now, Norm was faced with no choice but to get into the cryo-tank himself in order to save his life. When, and how, will he get out? We may find out in Season 2—but we also may not find out for a long, long time.
Was Hank going toward… New Vegas?
In the season’s closing moments, we see Hank, in his Brotherhood of Steel armor, struggling and moving toward a gated-off cityscape. This comes after The Ghoul and Lucy agreed they would track Hank down and get some real answers about Vault-Tec and what, exactly, is going on.
Hank is going toward a city that should sound familiar for Fallout gamers: New Vegas. We don’t know too much else—outside of seeing a brief cameo earlier in the episode from its leader, Mr. House—but that ending moment gave us at least a minor hint (centered on the classic game) about at least one setting for what should be a massive and expansive Season 2.
