Fallout Season 1 recap: what you need to know before watching season 2

Fallout Season 2 begins on December 17, which'll be 20 months after we saw Season 1 back in April of 2024. You're forgiven for forgetting details of a show that came out so long ago Joe Biden was still president and Abiotic Factor didn't exist. If you need a refresher, here's a rundown of all eight episodes.

Episode 1: The End

In the year 2077, cowboy actor Cooper Howard performs with his daughter Janey at a birthday party. When Cooper refuses to do a thumbs-up his daughter asks why, and he explains that in the Marines they were taught to measure mushroom clouds with their thumbs—if it was bigger than their thumb it wasn't worth running away. Moments later, while Cooper is inside getting a slice of birthday cake, his daughter holds up her thumb to the smoke on the horizon.

219 years later, Lucy Maclean is convincing the council of Vault 33 to let her be the bride in an upcoming trade with their neighbors Vault 32. At the wedding her father Hank, who is the Overseer and a trade from Vault 31 himself, gives a speech explaining radiation levels on the surface are dropping to the point that Lucy and her new husband Monty's children will be able to recolonize the surface.

"I must admit I'm sometimes afraid that mean old world will change us instead," he says. "But then I look at my daughter." Hank has heard of subtlety and Hank believes it's for cowards.

Lucy's brother Norm discovers the real inhabitants of Vault 32 are dead, but before he can warn anyone the wedding guests are actually raiders, they attack. Lucy fights back, cutting her new husband's throat, and Hank coldly drowns him in a pickle barrel. The leader of the raiders, a woman named Moldaver who seems familiar with Hank and Lucy's late mother, kidnaps Hank and leaves.

We meet our final protagonist, Maximus, being beaten up by fellow aspirants in a Brotherhood of Steel training camp. Only Aspirant Dane is friendly to him. When a squad of knights in T-60 power armor arrive, Dane is chosen to be a squire for Knight Titus, but is injured by a razorblade hidden in their boot. Maximus is suspected of sabotaging his comrade, but denies it under interrogation and is granted the honor of being squired to Titus instead. They set off on a mission to hunt a member of the Enclave who has a dog companion.

Back in Vault 33, the survivors are rebuilding. The new council aren't in favor of sending a search party after Hank, so with help from Norm and her cousin Chet, Lucy gears up and leaves Vault 33 to find her dad alone.

Elsewhere a trio of bounty hunters dig up a potential fourth amigo for a job. The ghoul they're after is a legend, but one who crossed the wrong guy and was buried in a graveyard. They unearth The Ghoul and propose he joins them, revealing their bounty is the same man the Brotherhood is after. The Ghoul isn't interested in joining a posse, so he kills the three banditos before quoting something Cooper Howard said to his daughter in case you didn't clock they're the same man: "Us cowpokes, we take it as it comes."

Okey-dokey count: Two. Lucy says it on seeing her new husband naked, and when she sets off into the wasteland.

Episode 2: The Target

This is Dr. Wilzig's episode, and we meet him saving a puppy—a surefire way to earn our sympathy even though he works for the Enclave. Wilzig keeps two secrets from his bosses, the first being the dog, designated CX404, and the second a project he keeps safe by injecting it into the back of his head.

Shortly after escaping from the Enclave (it's been a long enough time that the Brotherhood and six bounty agencies are after him, but recent enough he's still wearing his lab coat), Wilzig encounters Lucy and spooks her with a warning that being on the surface will change her just as it changed the radroaches: "Will you still want the same things when you have become a different animal altogether?"

Knight Titus gets bored and wants to shoot something, because he really is in a videogame. With Maximus in tow he stumbles into a yao-guai den and gets mauled, then is such a jerk to his squire that Max lets him bleed to death and steals the armor, reasoning the Brotherhood will forgive him if he succeeds in the mission to retrieve Wilzig.

Lucy searches for her father in a town built on landfill called Filly (no relation to Philadelphia), meeting a trader named Ma June who knows Moldaver but refuses to help, mocking Lucy for being a Vault Dweller. "The vaults were nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in," she says.

Wilzig then arrives at Ma June's, having cut a deal with her—turns out he's also looking for Moldaver. Unfortunately, The Ghoul's been staking the place out to collect the bounty. He shoots Wilzig's foot off to prevent his escape, then stabs CX404. Lucy stands up to him and is saved by Maximus' sudden arrival. While the knight and cowboy go at it, Ma June gorily slaps a prosthetic Jim's Limb onto Wilzig and decides Lucy's her only hope to get him to Moldaver, adding the co-ordinates to Lucy's Pip-Boy like she's handing out a quest.

Maximus, who doesn't understand how to steer power armor, clumsily jets out of Filly. The Ghoul uses a stimpak to save the dog's life, which seems like a way of making the character slightly more likeable, until it becomes clear he's doing this so CX404 can lead him to Wilzig.

Wilzig's leg doesn't stop bleeding, and he realizes he won't survive the walk to Moldaver. After popping a cyanide pill he instructs Lucy to cut off his head once he dies since it contains the thing Moldaver needs.

Okey-dokey count: One, as Lucy commits to the plan and starts up the ripper to sever Wilzig's head.

Episode 3: The Head

We flash further back into Cooper's past than we previously did to see him as a movie star being told why his character needs to be a bit darker. It's pure uncut foreshadowing: "The audience, Coop, they already know you're a good man. They want to see that even a good man as yourself can be driven too far sometimes."

This is a marked contrast from the drug-huffing Ghoul we see tracking Lucy across the Wasteland as she jams a tracker up the nose of Wilzig's severed head, just in case. Maximus is struggling too, having to sell a tooth to pay for a spare part for his power armor, then fighting off scavengers to keep it.

When he responds to a radio call from the Brotherhood by impersonating Titus and pretending his squire has died, they respond by flying a new squire in. It's Thaddeus, one of the bullies who picked on him at the barracks, who proves useful when he suggests following The Ghoul's radiation trail to find the head.

By now Lucy has lost the head to a gulper living in a radioactive lake. Learning this, The Ghoul captures her to use as bait to draw the gulper out, though she fends it off by grabbing his pack and using it as a weapon. This smashes the vials of a drug The Ghoul's been taking, and he postpones the head quest to resupply, explaining the golden rule of the Wasteland: "Thou shall get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time."

Maximus and Thaddeus arrive at the lake soon after, and the gulper tries to eat the squire. Maximus, having grown fond of Thaddeus because the squire feels guilty about picking on Max and only did it to take the heat off himself, wrenches Thaddeus out of the creature's mouth, which makes it regurgitate the head.

The Ghoul leads a roped-up Lucy through the desert, angrily shooting the face of a Vault Boy billboard as they pass. We learn why he hates the thing so much when we return to the flashback that opened the episode to see Cooper, egged on by his wife who is a Vault-Tec executive, being photographed for a Vault-Tec commercial and giving the iconic thumbs up. That face was his.

Episode 4: The Ghouls

The Ghoul's on a sidequest to replenish the vials of the drug he needs. We learn what will happen if he doesn't get it when he stops in on a fellow ghoul named Roger. Roger's also run out of vials and is turning feral. The Ghoul puts him down, then forces Lucy to cut some prime slices off him for later: "Ass jerky don't make itself."

In Vault 33, Chet and Norm are punished by the council for helping Lucy escape. Chet loses his job as Gatekeeper and is reduced to impersonating Steph's dead husband Burt to give her solace. Yes, this is the episode where her water breaks during foreplay. Norm, meanwhile, is forced to feed the raiders being kept prisoner, and when one of them drops a hint about Vault 32, Norm begins investigating.

Lucy tries to escape The Ghoul, biting off one of his fingers in the struggle. He cuts off one of hers with a knife. Between that and the water breaking it's a real scream-at-the-screen episode. The Ghoul then takes Lucy to a Super Duper Mart to trade her for more vials. It's run by two druggos with a Mr. Handy they call Snip-Snip who handles the organ-harvesting side of their business, while they keep ghouls locked in refrigerator units—perhaps they refine feral suppressor out of them?

Norm and Chet sneak into Vault 32, discovering its inhabitants died two years ago, having turned on each other and themselves. Norm learns the Vault door was opened from the outside by a Pip-Boy—the one belonging to his mother, Rose MacLean.

After Snip-Snip provides Lucy with a new finger he tries to take her internals, which she objects to, electrocuting him with defrib pads before filling his tranq-gun with abraxo cleaner and turning him on the drug chemists. She forces them to free the imprisoned ghouls, even the feral ones, who kill their captors. Passing The Ghoul, who has collapsed outside, she gives him a handful of vials to prove she'll never sink to his level.

Episode 5: The Past

Around a campfire, Maximus confesses to Thaddeus he's not really Titus. Thaddeus reacts badly, and Maximus tries to kill him to keep him silent, but succeeds only in crushing his foot before the squire deactivates Max's power armor, takes the head, and limps away.

Hours later, Lucy rescues Maximus from radroaches, but he's learned his lesson and doesn't give her his real name. They team up to go in search of the head.

Back in the vault, Norm and Chet find out some of the inhabitants of Vault 32 were trying to get into Vault 31 when they died. Norm also realizes every overseer of both Vaults 32 and 33 has been a trade from Vault 31, just as Betty Pearson—another trade from 31—is elected overseer of Vault 33.

Betty announces a plan to resettle Vault 32, which has been cleaned with unnerving speed, and responds to Norm's question about his mother's Pip-Boy by claiming it was buried with her.

Lucy and Maximus get in a shootout with a couple of fiends, one of whom has the same fashion sense as Cricket from Fallout 4, and Maximus is shot. He tries to downplay it, leading Lucy to the ruins of his hometown of Shady Sands.

Lucy's shocked to learn it had a population of more than 34,000 at its peak, that civilization—in the form of the New California Republic—restarted without her vault's help. Maximus points out it didn't last. "Everyone wants to save the world. They just… they disagree on how."

His injury won't stop bleeding, and Lucy leads him to a medical centre. It turns out to be a trap, but Lucy isn't concerned when they wake up in "the best place in the world. A vault."

Episode 6: The Trap

In the pre-war timeline, Coop films an ad for Vault-Tec where he meets volunteer scientists who are already living in Vault 4 as part of a trial. At the wrap party he sees a friendly face in his old friend Sebastian "Seabass" Leslie, the actor who provided the voice for the Mr. Handy robots. "The future is products," he tells Coop. I'm a product, you're a product. The end of the world is a product."

In the future, Coop's not in such a great place—waking from a bender, The Ghoul is arrested by sheriffs who claim to be part of the government.

Meanwhile, we see the Vault that Maximus and Lucy find themselves in is the aforementioned Vault 4. We also learn that Maximus doesn't know what sex is. (If it ruins your view of the Brotherhood of Steel to have them be idiots like this, then you have missed the point of the Brotherhood of Steel, which is that they are idiots.) After Max's injury is treated, the two are let out into the general population of the Vault—some of whom are mutants.

Back in the past, Coop's actor friend Charlie Whiteknife tries to tell him Vault-Tec is dangerous by explaining fiduciary responsibility and inviting him to a meeting of a group he's part of. At home, Coop's wife Barb explains she's getting the whole family into a special vault for management.

Lucy tries to figure out what's going on in Vault 4 by talking to the Overseer, a one-eyed mutant who is kind of racist about the non-mutated surface dwellers who have moved in. He warns her not to visit level 12, but doesn't explain why. Maximus considers stealing Vault 4's fusion core to power his armor, but then is given a Pip-Boy and room of his own and settles into comfort.

As he becomes less suspicious, Lucy becomes more so, joining a surface-dweller meeting where refugees from Shady Sands worship the "Flame Mother". As she sees a banner revealing the Flame Mother is Moldaver, we cut to the pre-war timeline where Coop attends a meeting of Vault-Tec's critics, and meets their leader—who is also Moldaver, somehow looking the same age 200 years in the past.

Episode 7: The Radio

A farmer who wears scavenged NCR ranger armor while digging bullets out of the ground returns home with his son to find The Ghoul at their table with a letter from his other son, who ran away from home. Given that the letter has a bullet hole in it and is smeared with blood, it's clear he's not coming back.

The absent son was apparently one of the people The Ghoul shot in Filly, and had been working with Wilzig to get him safely to Moldaver. The Ghoul wants to know where Moldaver is, and after the younger son says she's at the observatory, The Ghoul goads him into reaching for a weapon before shooting him as well.

Pre-war, Moldaver is going by the name Miss Williams and tells Coop she was a researcher on the verge of discovering cold fusion when Vault-Tec bought out every company she'd worked for to get the tech for itself. She wants her invention back, and gives Coop a listening device to spy on his wife with. He is, of course, conflicted about this.

Lucy investigates level 12, learning that people were experimented on there. She's caught snooping and gets in a fight with the Vault dwellers. After she's restrained they explain the scientists who initially ran Vault 4 used it to create mutant hybrids who could survive extreme radiation, like the gulper. Those mutants rebelled and took over, and now their descendents care for some of the remaining test subjects on level 12, while welcoming refugees into their Vault.

Lucy is horrified to learn an experiment was being performed on Vault dwellers, and is even more shook when asked what experiment was being done in Vault 33.

Maximus sees Lucy being dragged away for punishment and decides to give up his new life of caviar and Radiation King TV to rescue her. Lucy's punishment turns out to just be banishment, since life on the surface will no doubt kill her. Maximus doesn't know this when he arrives, stolen fusion core in his power armor, and wallops several Vault guards before realizing his mistake. Now they're both banished.

After they leave, Lucy convinces Max to give back the fusion core and invites him to stay in her vault when all this is done. He finally admits he's not Knight Titus and, looking back at everything that's led them here, they come to the conclusion that "The Wasteland sucks." It's difficult to argue with.

On the subject of fusion cores, Thaddeus trades his to a snakeoil salesman in return for an elixir that proves mysteriously effective in healing his foot. Thaddeus sets off for a radio station, where he hopes to contact the Brotherhood.

In Vault 33 the imprisoned raiders have all dropped dead, according to Overseer Betty, because they've been poisoned. This conveniently puts to rest the idea of rehabilitating them, and means that to repopulate Vault 32 half the inhabitants of Vault 33 will need to be sent over. The completely random lottery to choose who goes happens to separate the troublemakers, with Chet sent to 32 with Steph (who will be its overseer) while Norm stays in 33.

The Ghoul finds CX404 in a nuka-cola cooler at a Red Rocket where Thaddeus had ditched her, rescuing the dog to use as a tracker once again. Back in the pre-war times, Coop caves in and hooks up the listening device to his wife's Pip-Boy.

The radio station, which is playing nothing but fiddle music like Agatha's Station from Fallout 3, plays host to a confrontation between Thaddeus, Maximus, and Lucy. After Thaddeus misses every shot he takes, he trips one of the radio DJ's traps and gets an arrow through the neck. He survives, though the wound immediately necrotizes and Maximus realizes he's become a ghoul. This is a problem because the Brotherhood of Steel hates ghouls, and that's them coming over the horizon in a murder of vertibirds right now in response to Thaddeus' call.

Maximus tells Thaddeus he'll stall the Brotherhood in return for the head, then lets him escape. He immediately hands the head over to Lucy, taking a spare from a nearby corpse that fell to one of the DJ's traps, smashing its face in to render it unrecognizable. After this romantic gesture, he and Lucy kiss before she leaves to find her father.

Back in the Vault, Norm uses the departure of the new 32ers to sneak into the Overseer's office and play the hacking minigame so he can make contact with Vault 31 while impersonating Betty, demanding they open the door.

Episode 8: The Beginning

The Brotherhood has taken Filly by force to use as a forward base. Maximus is brought before the Elder, who quickly realizes the head is a fake. As Maximus is about to be executed, he promises to lead them to the real relic. The Elder doesn't believe him, because Max is wearing Titus' outfit and this is the second time a brother has been injured in his company. Dane begs for Maximus' life, admitting they were the one who injured themselves with the razor because they were afraid of becoming a squire.

Lucy finally meets Moldaver, who has been leading the remnants of the New California Republic who survived Shady Sands all this time. She has Hank in a cage and is sitting down to dinner with a chained-up ghoul, which is odd, but that doesn't slow Lucy down. She wants her dad back and is here to trade the relic in Wilzig's head for him. Moldaver accepts the deal, but first wants to tell Lucy who her father is. For starters, he didn't come from a vault.

Speaking of vaults, Norm explores Vault 31, which seems empty apart from an inept brainbot that tries to kill him after realizing he isn't Betty or Hank.

Pre-war, Coop realizes his listening device has a short range; he needs to follow his wife into the office to spy on her. He's sitting in a waiting room while Barb and her annoying co-worker Bud meet the CEOs of Rob-Co, Big MT, West-Tek, and Repconn to collaborate on an opportunity. Peace negotiations have set Vault-Tec back, but they have a plan.

Norm learns why Vault 31 seems empty. It's full of cryopods where young executives from pre-war Vault-Tec are kept in stasis, waiting to be thawed and take their turn as Overseer. The people of Vaults 32 and 33 were genetically selected to be breeding stock, crossed with executives to create supermanagers. Diabolical.

Barb offers the CEOs a vault of their own to run an experiment in, each competing to make the best colonists for the post-apocalyptic future. How will Vault-Tec ensure this future comes about? "By dropping the bombs ourselves," Barb explains while Coop listens in shock. At the same time, he's being introduced to Henry, a big fan among the Vault-Tec staff. Barb's secretary Betty brings in Henry, and it's a young version of Hank.

Moldaver tells Lucy that her mother, Rose MacLean, figured out Hank was lying about the state of the surface. She took the young kids and escaped to Shady Sands where she met Moldaver.

There's a hint the two women were more than friends, but their happy life didn't last long. Hank followed and took the kids back then destroyed Shady Sands. Rose's mother became a feral ghoul, and that's her chained up at the table. Hank tries to convince Lucy not to listen, reminding her Moldaver is a murderer.

The relic turns out to contain the secret to cold fusion, based on research Vault-Tec stole from Moldaver. It needs a Vault-Tec executive to unlock, which is why Moldaver kidnapped Hank. He capitulates, and gives her the code.

Back at Vault 31 the brainbot, who is Barb's coworker Bud, locks Norm in, suggesting he use his father's empty pod to wait out however long it takes for someone to find him.

The Brotherhood attacks Shady Sands and Moldaver leads the NCR defense. The Ghoul's here as well, and Maximus survives the gauntlet to reach Lucy, freeing Hank before she has time to tell him Hank's responsible for bombing his home town. Hank's climbed into a dead knight's power armor by the time she does, and he knocks Max unconscious.

The Ghoul arrives on the scene, recognizes Hank, and demands to know where Barb and his daughter are—turns out he's been looking for them this whole time. Hank escapes in the power armor, and The Ghoul asks Lucy if she'd like to join him in hunting Hank down since her alternative is to stay here until the Brotherhood take over. She has one bit of business to finish first: shooting her mother dead.

Moldaver, bleeding from a gunshot, returns as Maximus regains consciousness. She uses Hank's code to turn on the power source, lighting up the remains of Shady Sands before she dies. When the Brotherhood arrive they find Max and the relic, and declare him a hero.

Lucy and The Ghoul stop to pick up the dog, then follow Hank, who has made it all the way to the desert. He walks past a deathclaw skull and on to his destination: New Vegas, and Season 2.

Okey-dokey count: One. It's the last thing Lucy says before setting off.