Headscratchers / Fallout (2024)

Why not attack immediately?

• Maclean is right there when the door opens, so why not grab him right then and there? It would be tactically smart, attacking when Maclean has almost no back-up, and would be completely surprised. And it would be more merciful, since you'd only need to kill a handful of people in the process of kidnapping him.
  • Given the amount of havoc that Moldaver wreaked on the Vault, she likely wanted an opportunity to take revenge.

The Ghoul’s knowledge of T- 60 power armor

• It is revealed that before the bombs dropped, the Ghoul served in the military, and thanks to having experience of using the T-60 power armor was aware they had a fatal weak spot. He uses this knowledge to take down several Brotherhood knights in the final episode. Why didn’t he use this knowledge against Maximus when they faced off in Filly? Plot Armor?
  • It's probably a combination of the Ghoul realizing that Maximus wasn't a serious threat and just being baffled by the situation. It should be noted that the Ghoul doesn't go out of his way to slaughter people unless it furthers his goals or unless he feels threatened. When he murdered those who rescued him he was simultaneously silencing them (since they at least knew about the man who buried him) and stealing their supplies. With the people of Filly he was being shot at from multiple directions which is enough to kill almost anyone even with his skill level. With the NCR ranger's son he essentially identified him as a future threat which is something he's probably had to deal with over the centuries. With Maximus the Ghoul was facing an opponent that clearly didn't know how to use the power armor and wasn't even seriously trying to kill him. He probably thought Maximus was just a young boy who had scavenged some power armor and was trying to defend the town. So he humiliated Maximus to show him he was out of his depth and then left him alive because there was no threat.
  • Plus, Maximus fumbles his gun early in the fight, so he spends most of the duel being pretty mobille and attacking the Ghoul at close range, meaning that cutting a hose was the most effective option. By contrast, in the final battle, the Brotherhood Knights are at range, not likely to drop their guns, and holding still - ideal for exploiting that particular weakness.

The bombs dropping on LA later in the day?

• The timetable of the Great War has the first bombs dropping on the US at 9:42am EST October 23 (6:42am PST) with the West Coast and East Coast (specifically New York and Pennsylvania) getting hit first, with DC and Boston following five minutes later at 9:47am. So how is it possible for a kid's birthday party to be going on in LA when it's supposed to be the early hours (the sun wouldn't even be out until around 7am) and not to mention most of the city would be asleep at that time? It looks to be midday/early afternoon judging by the amount of sunlight.
  • The hour the bombs fell isn't consistent. In Fallout 3 for instance it's said to have happened in the afternoon when the elementary school kids on visit to the Lamplight Caverns were packing to go home. In New Vegas the bombs were said to have fallen on the night of the Gala Event in the Sierra Madre, so probably very early in the morning in Nevada. So take the nuclear bomb scene in the show as Artistic License.

How can a nuked out city have a perfect maintained electrical grid?

• I understand it might be TV magic to show the effect of the fusion, but how can a nuked city have all its infrastructure intact, if all that was needed was a power supply it would not be an abandoned city.
  • The power grids of America were all underground and the bombs are mostly radiation (neutron) rather than explosive. Shady Sands is mostly intact, it's just radioactive.
  • This should be on the main fallout page, it's been a thing since Fallout 3. America's infrastructure is extremely durable apparently.
  • According to the games, household fusion power plants made power companies obsolete.
  • It's built by GECK.
  • The G.E.C.K. is just used to create a habitable environment for vault dwellers that leave for the surface. It does come with a fusion reactor, but the vault dwellers would still have to build their settlements power grid by themselves. Also, the G.E.C.K. was just used on Shady Sands, not Los Angeles as a whole.

Why did Moldaver do that to Vault 33?

• I understand that they're there for Hank (as well as revenge for Shady Sands), but... almost all of those people were innocent of his crimes. If anything, they were his victims as well. How could a supposed Big Good justify such a brutal massacre?>
  • She probably assumed the Vault Dwellers would protect their Overseer. But The Power of Hate seems to have overcome her senses.
  • Also, calling Moldaver a Big Good is a stretch here. The world of Fallout usually works under Grey-and-Gray Morality and Moldaver is merely A Lighter Shade of Grey in this context. No matter how just her cause, she made the conscious choice to work with a ravenous gang of raiders to achieve her objective.
  • Plus, she keeps a feral ghoul of someone she once cared for. The Flame Bringer is not all there anymore, if she ever was.

How is Moldaver...

• How is Moldaver here in the present day if she was in the past? Vault Tec were the only people (that we know) who had access and resources to cryogenic stasis, and I doubt they were save a spot for a woman who despised them for stealing her cold fusion research and shelfing it and was actively trying to expose their monstrous plans.
  • It's mentioned in passing that there was research being made into immortality.
  • She could have been a Fake Defector, "changing" her tune to secure special treatment before enacting her revenge scheme at a time when it would hurt Vault-Tec's plans more directly.
  • She does mention specifically that "Hypocrisy is like violence, you lose if only your enemies use it" or something to that effect.
  • Or the beneficiary of something akin to Lorenzo Cabot's artifact or blood. Or human memories uploaded into a Synth. Honestly the range of possibilities in the Fallout Universe are pretty wide. Honestly given House's interest in immortality (he mentions exploring several angles) he might well have had access to a few that he deemed unsuitable for his purposes. Interestingly her rather psychotic nature is very similar to the mental degradation suffered by the 'brains in a jar' method, which is why House rejected that option.

What was Monty's plan with Lucy?

• Was he trying to impregnate her? If he kills her within, say, an hour of impregnating her, then all he has of their offspring is an embryo at best?
  • His plan was to get laid and then kill her with the rest of the Vault.
  • Perhaps the plan was get Lucy to secluded location, keep her distracted and out of harm's way. But Lucy fought back and Monty ended up going off script.
  • This is quite likely. Moldaver was very close with Lucy and Norm's mother, and would have known the kids - she might have told Monty to keep Lucy out of harm's way, and he decided to get lucky while he was at it since he was already playing the role of her new husband.

Lucy and the Ghoul

• Why did Lucy leave pills for the Ghoul? I understand the Batman-like mentality of "I'm not going to kill you" but she should have known at this point that he's completely amoral, and that by helping him stay alive, she's actively endangering every other person who comes across his path.
  • Moral high ground; Lucy makes it clear in her speech to the Ghoul that while she might have to break her old moral standards to survive the Wasteland, she'll never stoop as low as him and will still retain some of her compassion and forgiveness, even towards an enemy.
  • Lucy just got a pair of people killed accidentally and might have felt a twinge of guilt.
  • She's Lawful Good basically.

When Lucy breaks free of Snip-Snip

• I know hindsight is 20-20 and the idiot ball could always be a good excuse. However, the sequence where she demands the prisoners be freed didn't make sense to me. For one, if a bunch of people just got freed through your act of bravery, couldn't they have all been potential allies in running through an apocalyptic wasteland? Couldn't she have stopped to corall them? Additionally, if you're one of the two guys that she is threatening with a gun if you don't release the dangerous prisoners: Wouldn't it be less risky and a less brutal death to try and explain it to her that these prisoners are zombies who will tear your apart limb to limb? The worse that can happen is you get shot with a bullet rather than getting eaten by Zombies.
  • For the first point, Lucy would have no interest or benefit in trying to corral a bunch of malnourished, imprisoned proto-zombies. She wanted them free because it's the right thing to do. For the second point, they did try to explain that the rest of the ghouls were feral, but she shot them with bleach as a warning, so they complied with her.
  • Also, they're pretty clearly stoned. The fact that they were able to raise any objection at all is probably a sign of how worried they were.

Hank and Betty didn't know about the raiders?

• We learn at the end of season 1 that Bud is secretly in charge of Vaults 32 and 33 by putting puppet Overseers like Hank and Betty in charge. If Vault 32 died out long before the first episode, then how come Bud didn't get suspicious and warn Hank when Vault 33 was meeting with "Vault 32"?
  • Bud was very easily tricked by Norman pretending to be Betty through the terminal (which seems to be how they communicate), so it's easily to assume Moldaver did the same thing.

Nuking the world as a get-rich scheme

• How exactly do you profit from a plan that would destroy the economy along with civilization and the entire industrialized world?
  • Control is everything when you have GECK and the Sierra Madre tokens.
  • While a lot of this can be chalked up to "Unchecked capitalism is evil" symbolism, its more of a case of "Vault Tec became so powerful and influential they decided they wanted to rebuild society with them as the central power effectively. And in that sense, you needed to end the world and start over."
  • Just listen to Mr House or Valery Barstow, they're both very enthusiastic about creating a new world.
  • Really, such short-sightedness is pretty on-brand for the Fallout megacorps. The same megacorps which programmed worker robots to kill people for not wearing hard-hats and trying to sneak onto subway trains to reduce lawsuits. The same megacorps who put the disembodied brains of psychopaths into combat droids because they wanted them to think for themselves in order to increase combat efficiency. The same megacorps who fed children mutagenic nutrient goo and outlawed bag-lunches.

How many people live in Vault 33?

• 50? 100? Several hundred? Or is it like the games where 'trust me everyone else is behind these doors you can't open' is in effect?
  • The commercial for Vault 4 says that it will host two hundred people; it's likely that Vault 33's population is somewhere in this ballpark.

The Vials

• What exactly is in the vials that The Ghoul is trading Lucy for? I thought it was Radaway because his grave had two bags of the stuff above it. There's a theory it's a substance taken out of ghouls which is why there are freezers full of them. It is some kind of vaccination taken from younger ghouls to prevent older ones from going feral?
  • It is clearly a new invention for the show. It does something to prevent ghouls from going feral.
  • My theory is it's some sort of targeted radaway, specifically preventing brain damage.

Why did Howard not tell anyone about the Vault Tec plans?

• The finale has Howard overhearing the board, especially his own wife, openly discussing setting off World War III and killing the world just to make money. So why the hell did he not tell anyone? Instead, they just get divorced and he's seen making money on party appearances while the apocalypse is nigh. Sure, the story sounds crazy but even just an attempt to tell the press about this seems better than letting Armageddon happen.
  • It's mentioned that people who draw attention to Vault-Tec's plans are discredited as being communists. One of the fathers refers to Howard as a "pinko." He probably did try to reveal the information but had no real proof, so they could say he was either a jealous ex or a communist spreading lies.
  • The chips are heavily stacked against Howard in managing to get this revealed. In episode one, we already see that he's been reduced to doing birthday parties to get by, has alimony payments, and is deemed a pinko. Which means between his last scene in episode 8 and then, he's been blacklisted, deemed a communist, and divorced. In the political climate of the setting, the fact he was going to communist meetings is already going to be a mark against him since they could easily find that out. But he's going against Vault-Tec, a trillion dollar company with absolutely no morals. They definitely have the resources to deny everything he says about them, get him blacklisted by the industry, marked as a communist so nobody will want him or believe him, and probably punish his wife if they find out it was her Pip Boy he bugged. This is a business that's got no issue killing people, too, so 'just' bringing him down to that state is easily in their ability. Especially since all he has to go on is hearing the meeting, no recording or physical proof of it.
  • Even if we ignore just how powerful and insidious Vault-Tec is, you gotta put yourself in the shoes of an average person in their world. The war's going on, nuclear armageddon is hovering in the horizon but may, or may not be inevitable, and now suddenly you got this former star, now blacklisted Commie, running around screaming that his wife and Vault Tec are totally gonna destroy the world. Howard would've been in an insane asylum.

Lack of Super Mutants and FEV

• It's weird that this is a Fallout show on the West Coast, where the Super Mutants and Nightkin were created from the FEV vats, we don't see any. I know the show 15 years after New Vegas and likely most of the Mutants have been eradicated by now. The only mention of them is by the Med-Tek guy in "The Beginning" talking about having a Vault specifically for engineering "super soldiers" (reference to Vault 87 In Fallout 3). I guess they're saving all that for subsequent seasons. There's also the briefest, blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment where Dr. Wilzig sees a disfigured body under a sheet being rolled away, but that could be any kind of horrible Enclave experiment.
  • Honestly it's more bizarre how Super Mutants and FEV are absolutely everywhere in the games. It's a wonder how it ever remained a secret given every single slice of America hosted some poorly run biotech lab with very lax security churning out abominations of science by the dozen. Especially in California they should be extremely rare by now, it's been 135 years since the last Super Mutant was created.
  • As per Fallout 2, most of the first generation Super Mutants that didn't commit suicide after the death of the Master deliberately fled New California. Most of the Broken Hills mutants that stayed behind eventually wandered west to places like Jacobstown or Utobitha.
  • There's also a wanted poster depicting a super mutant in the "President's" office when the sheriffs bring Ghoul Cooper in.
  • They're already a Dying Race as far back as Fallout 2 with some of the mutants in Broken Hills already going senile. While there's no way of knowing what a Super Mutant's natural lifespan is, it is possible that they're starting to die out at this point, especially seeing as how they can't reproduce.

Shady Sands geographical location

• A common point of contention is it's located way too close to LA and the Boneyard when in previous Fallout, it's much father.
  • It changed locations between Fallout 1 and 2 as well. Shady Sands's geographical flexibility is nothing new.
  • Vault 13 is said to be in Mt. Whitney, which places the most likely location of Shady Sands at Lone Pine. This is about 200 miles away from Los Angeles.

Nuking Shady Sands

• How did Hank access, aim, and launch a nuke at Shady Sands? And why not nuke other competing civilizations like the Brotherhood or Enclave, if Vault-Tec's reclamation plan relies on a blank slate on the surface?
  • The final episode all but implies that Vault-Tec and its allies have the capacity to arm and fire at least one nuclear warhead, but doesn't outright reveal that they were the ones responsible for kicking off the Great War-it's entirely possible that events spiraled out of control without their interference, and the nuke they launched at Shady Sands was the same one they intended to drop on the US or China.
  • The Brotherhood and Enclave aren't really "civilizations" as much as they are comparatively small groups of like-minded individuals with access to advanced technology-the Enclave is a highly secretive group that operates mostly from the shadows, and the Brotherhood is so widely dispersed that a single nuke wouldn't do much beyond wiping out a single chapter. The NCR was a nation, a self-sufficient democracy with agriculture, industry, reasonable standards of living, and a standing military... in other words, exactly the kind of society that Vault-Tec couldn't abide.
  • They themselves are not nations but practically own entire states at their peaks. Terminal entries in Fallout 4 explicitly state the amount of influence the Brotherhood have the Capital Wasteland for example. This distinction makes little difference, almost like saying that the leading political party of an one-party nation aren't themselves a nation even if they are the governing body.
  • At the time of Fallout 2, the NCR's population sits somewhere around 700,000. By the time of New Vegas and the television show, the population of Shady Sands is apparently 30,000-it's likely the overall population of the NCR at the time is now somewhere in the millions. The New Vegas-era NCR controls multiple major cities spread across five states, and has worked to re-establish pre-war infrastructure like roadways, railroads, and telegraph lines; they're so strong and well-developed that they can take on the Brotherhood and win. The East Coast, by contrast, is a small, barely-developed region; "cities" like Megaton or Diamond City are little more than shantytowns made up of a few hundred people squatting in old buildings. The Brotherhood might control areas like the Commonwealth or the Capitol Wasteland, but they don't care about anything other than seizing old technology, and there's no real indication that they've worked to develop the area anywhere close to the extent that the NCR did with its territory. And, of course, all of this is also contingent on just how much Hank, and by extension whatever branch of Vault-Tec he controls, knows what's going on on the other side of the country. Shady Sands was right next door to Vault 33, and its destruction was as much of an act of spite as it was a calculated decision.
  • This misses a few details. For starters, Space Compression is in play for all the games. Rivet City, for example, is on an old ship. A Nimitz class carrier has a crew of 5000, but that's with external support and supplies. But it gives an idea of how many people there is room for. The USS Enterprise aircraft carrier can support a crew of a little under 6,000. Much of it might not be livable, due to flooding, wreck, lack of food, etc, but there is living space at least enough. Not remotely close to Shady Sands but still a lot, especially given the Capital Wasteland's clean water shortage is fixed due to Project Purity and Lyons giving free water. That alone would see a rise in population or at least a decrease in death rate in the short run. By Fallout 4, they export materials and clean water. According to Wasteland Warfare, Megaton is one of the largest cities in the Capital Wasteland and only surpassed by Rivet City in population, which either means it's big or indirectly damns it by faint praise. Next, the Brotherhood of Steel's population is another uncertainty due to Space Compression, recruitment of wastelanders, and Outcasts defecting. Then we have inevitable new recruits from after Fallout 3. A few terminal entries mention members with family in the Capital Wasteland implying they either settled there, are stationed there, or the Lyons outside recruitment policy continues. Additionally, in Fallout 4, rebuilding the Commonwealth is one of the themes with settlements being a core feature. We don't know how successful the Sole Survivor is, if they are at all, but at minimum we still have Space Compression. The player has the choice of saying "I just killed hundreds of people. I don't find it very funny" to fellow Brotherhood members if that ending was chosen regarding destroying the Institute. The Institute Facility in-game clearly lacks that capacity, but in lore they do. The real life Fenway Park can accommodate many thousands of spectators at least and Diamond City was founded in 2130 and seems to lack the overwhelming clean water shortage the majority of the Capital Wasteland has. Paranoid about Synths but that's not a population cap problem. In any event, we are not given enough to estimate populations besides "More than the game is showing".
  • Remote detonation of Vault 15's reactor or GECK?

No Poseidon Energy?

• Why wasn't there an executive of Poseidon Energy at the evil corporate meeting in Episode 8? It was a very powerful corporation pre-war with ties to the Enclave.
  • Could be that they actively refused to participate in Vault Tec's mad scheme because they're not as Stupid Evil as every other megacorp. Someone has to be.
  • It's possible that their exclusion is foreshadowing that Vault-Tec wasn't as open with the Enclave as previously believed. Poseidon Energy was the company closest to the US and Enclave before the war, so its possible they were excluded because Vault-Tec thought they would spoil the plan.

Wrong Scapegoat?

• When Betty has the imprisoned raiders poisoned, she clearly needs to pin the blame on someone. She chooses the current woman who was in charge of the prison cell, who can be seen getting dragged offscreen when Norm finds out. But at this point, she's well-aware that Norm has been snooping around and is learning something isn't right, and his job was also directly related to feeding the prisoners. So why didn't she put the blame on him, and get a nuisance out of her way?
  • Norm is the last known survivor of the MacLean family; Betty might be complicit in a lot of bad things, but even she might balk at harming the son of one of her lifelong friends, and if Hank came back and found out Betty did something to his son, even justified by their actions and backgrounds, he would most definitely be pissed.

Vault-Tec's plan and Barb

• If Barb had reached the top levels of Vault-Tec, as suggested by the fact that she is the one proposing they end the world to a meeting of other CEOs, why would she let Janey be with Cooper on the day it was meant to happen?
  • A very good question. Mr House was also taken off guard, and many other Vault Tec personnel failed to reach the Vaults in time.
  • Given the show's satirical tone, it's quite likely Barb was under the impression Janey was being taken to safety and someone in the company missed the note to do it.
  • Vault-Tec might've been on board with the idea of launching the nukes, but there's no indication that they actually went through with it; it's entirely possible that someone else pushed the button first and completely wrongfooted them. As per 4, Vault-Tec representatives are still signing people up for Vaults literal minutes before the bombs fall, while several of the vaults are still under construction-why wouldn't Vault-Tec make sure that all their vaults are fully staffed and operational before kicking off the war?
  • Put simply, we never get a precise answer to this question and that's probably the point. Like all the other possible culprits they were clearly awful people perfectly willing to destroy the world, but the evidence is circumstantial and honestly, possibly lost forever in the chaos of that last day.
  • Throughout the series flashbacks, it becomes painfully clear that Barb and Cooper loves each other. Even if Barb was forced to divorce him, if she knew that day X was the day the bomb(s) would drop, she might have let their daughter spend a last few hours with her dad before going into cryosleep.

Who cleaned up Vault 32?

• In between the time that Norm and Chet explore the destroyed Vault 32 and Betty's re-opening it up to colonists from 33, someone did a major renovation on the whole thing. Clearly it couldn't have been anyone from 33, as they had to keep the secret of what really happened there from them. My assumption at the time was that Vault 31 people had come in and done it in secret. But on retrospect, the reveal of Vault 31's actual inhabitants means that's not really an option. So how did 32 get magically rebuilt to pristine shape?
  • The only people it could have reasonably been were Betty and Stephanie, both from Vault 31, but that's a huge amount of work for just them to clean up. With the overseer of Vault 31 saying that Chet could go back into his father's cryo-pod, maybe a large amount of people were thawed solely for the purpose of cleaning up, then went back in to sleep.
  • That might explain Bud being trapped under a mop! Was it a mop or a broom? It wasn't put away properly after the renovation.
  • We don't know how many from Vault 31 are actually in Vault 33, but there must be some, even if they aren't overseers. Stephanie and Betty have both been there long enough to be established characters in the vault (Stephanie must have been there for at least 9 months, assuming she got pregnant right after marrying Chet). Presumably Stephanie was awoken from cryosleep as part of a plan to become overseer of Vault 32 once it had been cleaned up, but that doesn't explain why Betty was awakened and introduced while Hank was still overseer.
  • Other way around. Betty used to be overseer, until she retired for a job on the advisory council, and Hank got the job. That's why no one was surprised she got elected again; she had already proven her competence. Steph was probably unfrozen as Hank's eventual replacement, but they switched things up after the whole mess with Vault 32.
  • It's the future, we have robots for this kind of job. Just send a few Mr. Handies in.

How come the Master never found Vault 33?

• If Vault 4, and Vaults 31-33 were all within spitting distance of where the Master's Cathedral used to be, and all had easily identifiable exits that led directly to the surface, then how did the Master never find these places? It's a huge plot point in the first game that the Master is seeking prime normals (i.e. people with little to no radiation exposure) to dip into the vats. This is why both he and the Lieutenant are eager to learn the location of Vault 13.
  • One possibility: geography/local architecture may have changed significantly in the years since the Master and his faction was destroyed - which it demonstrably has, in no small part due to a nuclear weapon being detonated worryingly close to Vault 4 - and the Vault exits weren't always so visible. Also, the only reason why Moldaver got in was because she knew someone who knew about the Vault triad (we still don't know if she was preserved in 31 or elsewhere) and because she had said person's Pip-Boy. So, getting in or finding said way in may not be as easy as it seems. As always, I have no concrete proof that this is the case, but the fact that Vault 4's unconcealed exit is a lone building with an incredibly obvious Vault door standing in the middle of nowhere seems to imply that there may have been greater concealment at some point in the dim and distant past - otherwise, people would have been trying to kick the door down decades ago.
  • The NCR, being an ascendant faction, probably pulled down many of the old buildings for material. Several Vaults were probably exposed then.

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