Series / Fallout (2024)

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"You are a vault dweller, but if you're going to survive, you need to start acting like a surface dweller. Question is, will you still want the same things when you have become a different animal altogether?"

— Dr. Wilzig, "The Target"

Fallout is a post-apocalyptic Science Fiction series based on the popular video game series of the same name owned and published by Bethesda. It is executive produced by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan of Westworld fame, along with Todd Howard (game director of Fallout 3 and Fallout 4). Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia, Silicon Valley) serve as series creators and showrunners. The series will not be a direct adaptation of any prior game in the series, but instead an original story set within the universe of the games and, according to Howard, part of the official Fallout canon.

It's 2296, and Vault 33 is an okay place to live. Built near the coast just outside Los Angeles, its inhabitants have lived in relative comfort since their ancestors entered the Vault-Tec bomb shelter 219 years ago to escape a global thermonuclear war between the USA and China, while the less fortunate were — and still are — forced to survive in the desolate wasteland outside.

However, all that is about to change. A sudden crisis forces Lucy (Ella Purnell), the daughter of the vault's overseer, to leave her safe and sheltered community for the wasteland. In the course of her journey, she crosses paths with many of the wasteland's hardened inhabitants, including Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire in the knightly order known as the Brotherhood of Steel, and a mysterious bounty hunter known only as "The Ghoul" (Walton Goggins), an ageless mutant who witnessed the nuclear war with his own eyes.

The show also stars Kyle MacLachlan, Johnny Pemberton, Sarita Choudhury, Leslie Uggams, Zach Cherry, Moises Arias, Chris Parnell, Michael Emerson and Matt Berry, among others.

The series was originally set for release on April 11, 2024 on Amazon Prime Video, but was instead released a day earlier on April 10. Unlike previous high-profile Prime Video shows that had a weekly episode release, the entire season was released in one go. A second season was ordered the following week.

Previews: Teaser Trailer, Official Trailer

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Fallout contains examples of the following:

Tropes A-C

• Aborted Arc: Vault 33's water chip is revealed to be broken in a nod to the first game's plot but, aside from a short background mention of a water crisis, it plays no further role in the story. Possibly invoked: engineering an easily solvable crisis is the go-to strategy for Vault 31 transfers when it's time to get elected as Overseers.
• Adaptational Attractiveness:
  • Continuing the trend set in Fallout 4, "The Ghoul" is easily the best looking of his kind in any Fallout media. Other than his baldness and lack of nose, he barely has any signs of the radiation-induced decay that most other ghouls have had in the games, with perfectly normal teeth and eyes and skin that looks merely aged and leathery, not outright rotted. According to Nolan, they "hired the actor for a reason", and as such the typical ghoul characteristics are dialed back so the actor can emote properly through the makeup. Other ghouls look similar, if slightly worse. Inverted in one case in the final episode: a far more rotted ghoul that is barely more than a skeleton with (some) skin appears but barely moves because Moldaver has restrained it to a chair.
  • A brahmin briefly appears in the second episode, but it looks like a normal cow that just happens to have two heads, losing the pustulated and hairless pink skin, misshaped horns, and grotesquely distended udders they have in the games.
• Adaptational Badass: Ghouls have received a serious power-up in the series when compared to their video game counterparts. In the games, ghouls were simply over-irradiated Long-Lived humans who were healed by radiation rather than being harmed by it, but they had to contend with slowly rotting away and losing their mental faculties. In the series, while they are still Living on Borrowed Time, ghouls now possess an absurdly powerful Healing Factor, seemingly Feel No Pain, and seem to only be killable by Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain.
• Adaptational Explanation: The reasoning behind Vault-Tec's experiments is finally explained. The experiments acted as tests to create new societal templates, as the current one was viewed as a failure. All this with the end goal of re-conquering the surface, eliminating all other factions, and uniting the world under Vault-Tec.
• Adaptational Heroism: The New California Republic aka NCR in contrast to the Brotherhood (who get Adaptational Villainy) are largely treated as unambiguously good and heroic in their efforts to get the Cold Fusion to restore power to the Wastes and ultimately succeed — at the cost of their lives. In Fallout 2 and New Vegas the NCR are portrayed as rather incompetent and very corrupt especially in the latter game, quite unlike their more idealistic portrayal here, where they're easily the most heroic faction between Vault-Tec and the Brotherhood of Steel.
• Adaptational Ugliness: The Gulpers depicted in Far Harbor and Fallout 76 basically resemble giant salamanders that walk on two legs. They're radically redesigned in the show, now resembling grotesquely massive axolotls with frog-like proportions, giving them spindly back legs and oversized heads, and have a maw filled with human fingers. The sixth episode shows that they're actually human/creature hybrid mutants created through experimentation in Vault 4. Given the notable differences, they may be created from a different breed of salamander indigenous to the West Coast that just so happen to share the same name as the East Coast variant.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Downplayed concerning the Brotherhood of Steel. They are morally grey and self-serving in the first two games with only White Sheep Elder Lyons and Nolan McNamara's brotherhoods from Fallout 3 and New Vegas being more overtly heroic, especially the former. However, even in the earlier games, the Brotherhood avoided killing civilians when they could help it, whilst in this series they have no qualms about slaughtering the locals of the Super Duper Mart. It's noted in-universe, however, that they've lost their way and Maximus becoming a knight officially by the end hints that they might improve.
  • Frederick Sinclair and Robert House were certainly morally dubious in Fallout New Vegas, and though their efforts to protect the Sierra Madre and Las Vegas, respectively, were largely self-serving, there was potential that their innovations could protect people during and after the Great War. This series reveals that Frederick Sinclair and Robert House were in on Vault-Tec's plot to cause the Great War as part of a scheme to Take Over the World, so their seeming foresight is actually foreknowledge of the coming apocalypse. House's complicity, however, is left vague as he never expresses agreement with Vault-Tec's methods or proposes any ideas for Vault experiments.
  • Vault-Tec themselves are subject to this. While they were certainly evil in the games they were ultimately just government contractors in it for the money and the experiments were set up at the behest of the government, with President Richardson stating the experiments helped the Enclave survive on their oil rig in some unspecified fashion. Here it's revealed that they started the entire nuclear war themselves (or were at least planning to do so) in order to remake the world in their image, which is remarkably similar to what happened to the Umbrella Corporation in that series' movie adaptation.
• Advertised Extra:
  • Xelia Mendes-Jones is credited as a main character; despite this, their character, Squire Dane, has very limited screen time and is overall less plot-crucial than others, such as Chet, Betty, Stephanie, Barb, or Thaddeus.
  • Kyle MacLachlan also features heavily in marketing and participated in multiple press interviews before the show's release; in the series proper he only appears in the first and last episodes of the first season.
• Advertising by Association: Parodied. The teaser mentions the series is from the studio behind The Boys and Free 2-Day Shipping.^note The gag is "Fast Delivery*" on the British and Irish version of the trailer, as two days would be slow for Amazon there. Hilariously, the show actually arrived early!
• After the End: Naturally. The teaser presents several shots of the ruined world and even has a long shot of the moment the bombs destroyed Los Angeles and wiped out civilization. It turns out to be a double case of this, with Shady Sands, one of New California's major settlements, being nuked, though it remains unclear if the other four known states comprising the NCR were also destroyed or they just abandoned southern California.
• Agony of the Feet:
  • When Aspirant Dane is chosen to be a squire, a razor blade hidden in a boot leads to them being medically disqualified and replaced, with the elder suspecting Maximus though he's ultimately absolved and given Dane's position. In the finale, it's revealed that Dane hid the blade personally to deliberately get maimed and disqualified due to a fear of dying in the wasteland while on duty.
  • Upon catching up with Lucy and Wilzig in Filly, the Ghoul shoots one of the scientist's feet off to slow him down. Wilzig ends up having to get a prosthetic through Meatgrinder Surgery to regain some of his mobility (though it ends up contributing to his death later).
  • Maximus accidentally steps on Thaddeus's foot while wearing power armor, with an audible crunch sound. Thaddeus is shown in a later episode removing a bloody, sticky sock to reveal bones perforating his skin and his big toe hanging loosely. In another later episode, Thaddeus consumes a "healing elixir" he bought from the Snake Oil Salesman that actually causes his foot to heal itself; Maximus believes that whatever he took turned Thaddeus into a ghoul, leading to him gaining a Healing Factor.
• All for Nothing:
  • Lucy becomes deeply suspicious of Vault 4's intentions in taking in surface dwellers and investigates Level 12, throwing a vial of acid on a doctor who's seemingly trapping women in test tubes and impregnating them with mutated horrors. It's then immediately revealed that the doctor was trying to administer genuine aid to the women and the price for attacking him is... Being exiled to the surface with two weeks of supplies, which she simply could have asked for without burning a bridge with the Vault.
  • Lucy's entire quest to save her dad becomes this when she learns the truth: her father was not a good man captured by cruel raiders, but a Corrupt Corporate Executive who murdered thousands of innocents out of spite and whose captors are the vengeful victims of his greed. He expresses no remorse for what he did, even saying that Lucy's mother (who is now a horrifically mutated ghoul) deserved everything that she got because she defied Vault-Tec's plans for a "perfect" society. Lucy is left teetering on the Despair Event Horizon as she realizes all the things she did to survive the Wasteland, all the times she was forced to be pragmatic or paranoid about (such as the aforementioned incident with Vault 4, were done on false pretenses.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • The Enclave is shown to still exist despite all of the setbacks done to them from Fallout 2 and Fallout 3, and is clearly far more than a vestige of its former self like they were in Fallout: New Vegas (which also briefly mentions an outpost in Chicago) by having a fully dedicated research facility and clearly up to something with fusion technology, but their actual capacity to be a major factor and their overall role in the current timeline beyond Wilzig defecting from them is glossed over in the first season.
  • While Vault-Tec is revealed to be a Greater-Scope Villain by not only conspiring to engineer the Great War but even planning on firing the first nukes, it's left vague whether they actually did or if someone else jumped the gun ahead of them.
• Ambiguous Time Period: It's left vague when exactly the Vault-Tec meeting took place in one pivotal flashback scene, among the only main hints being that Cooper Howard was still at the top of his game and married to Barb. By the time the Great War happened, it's clear on later viewings that enough time had passed for Cooper to have both separated from his wife and seen his career prospects go down the drain as a result of his falling-out with Vault-Tec. Eagle-eyed fans have pointed out a newspaper in a flashback in Episode 6, but it's too blurry to tell if it's from January 2075 or 2077.
• Arc Words: The Fallout franchise's arc words "war... war never changes" are said by Vault-Tec employee Barb Howard while discussing Vault-Tec's Corporate Conspiracy to Take Over the World, and given a Meaningful Echo over 200 years later by her husband, The Ghoul.
• Ascended Extra: Series Mascot Vault Boy is given a name and a backstory from before the bombs fell and made the Wasteland. The Ghoul was his body model and the inspiration for his "thumbs-up" pose back when he was a normal human actor named Cooper Howard.
• Awful Truth: Not one, but multiple awful truths revealed over the course of the first season:
  • As far at the denizens know, Vaults 31, 32, and 33 all work together to thrive. What the dwellers of the latter two Vaults don't realize is that Vault 31's sole purpose is to serve as a repository for Vault-Tec's hand-picked Overseers for Vaults 32 and 33, all comprised of pre-war Vault-Tec upper brass kept in cryogenic stasis until needed. Vaults 32 and 33 serve as a breeding pool for the former, selected to create a new generation of super-managers for Vault-Tec's new world. When the denizens of Vault 32 discovered the truth, they descended into chaos, murdering their Overseer before turning on each other and themselves. Lucy MacLean's father, Hank, is one of them.
  • To crush their competition, Vault-Tec acquired the rights to cold fusion, a form of limitless energy that would've solved the resource shortages plaguing the world overnight. They also made certain that if anyone took the cold fusion catalyst prototype they kept in storage, it could not be activated unless given an employee ID and password from a Vault-Tec executive.
  • Perhaps worst of all, as Cooper learned after placing a bug on his wife's Pip-Boy and listening in on an executive meeting, Vault-Tec encouraged the inhumane experiments conducted within their Vaults by divvying up control over the Vaults among their subsidiaries as a competition to see who can create the best post-Great War civilization. To further incentivize investment in their Vaults, Vault-Tec also conspired to drop the nukes that kickstarted the Great War, themselves.
• Authority Sounds Deep: Harkening back to the games that used the same effect, Brotherhood T-60c power armor has a vocal modulator that produces a deep, booming voice that sounds little like they do when out of it.
• Back from the Brink: In Fallout: New Vegas, the West Coast Brotherhood of Steel was in bad shape, having just lost a war with the NCR and, in most endings, wiped out by whichever faction The Courier chooses, or becoming petty raiders. The only good ending they get is if they ally with the NCR in their ending. Here, thanks to backup from the Commonwealth chapter and the former NCR capital Shady Sands having been decimated in the interim, the Brotherhood is at the very least the largest military force in the region.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Radroaches (cockroaches that have mutated to the size of a small dog) feature prominently in the series. Dr. Wilzig uses them to emphasize that Lucy isn't in a Vault anymore and will have to adapt just as they did.
• Black Comedy: In grand Fallout tradition:
  • Dr. Wilzig's dog happily brings his master a severed human hand like a bone or chew toy.
  • An Enclave turret firing at Dr. Wilzig and CX404 while flashing a bright display that reads "PLEASE REMAIN CALM" on it.
  • After commandeering Knight Titus's armor, Maximus comes across a tough-looking man threatening someone who appears weaker, and intercedes, forcing the tough guy to let his victim go. Once the victim has left, the tough guy informs Maximus that he was going after him because he caught him fucking his chickens.
  • When Doctor Wilzig commits suicide by Vault-Tec branded Cyanide Pill, he describes them as the most humane product Vault-Tec ever produced. He is not exaggerating.
  • A Mr. Handy medical robot calmly informs Lucy that she's not going to be a sex slave, instead he's going to harvest her organs before shooting her with a tranquilizer and letting her fall back onto a gurney.
  • At one point, Lucy is tried for breaking Vault 4's rules and is sentenced to death... by banishment to the surface. She's even given a two-week care package of supplies... which then gets wrecked when Maximus, thinking she's in danger, charges to the "rescue." He has to awkwardly apologize for knocking a guard out once the situation has calmed down enough for Lucy to explain things.
  • An ad for Vault-Tec features a real California phone number. Dial it and you're treated to the sound of a man screaming for a quarter of a minute before the phone hangs up.
  • The "remembrance ceremony" for the refugee surface dwellers gets progressively more unhinged and culty as it goes on. This is played for laughs as Lucy gets increasingly more uncomfortable with it all. Up until it suddenly isn't with The Reveal.
  • The MacGuffin for most of the first season being Wilzig's severed head. Which Wilzig himself proposed as an idea. The head bounces between multiple characters, gets eaten by a giant salamander at one point, and when finally brought to Moldaver, Lucy unceremoniously drops it directly on Moldaver's plate while she's eating.
• Blown Across the Room: Relatively common for people who get shot with the Ghoul's pistol. The fact that it appears to shoot tiny fin-stabilized grenades goes a long way in explaining this.
• Blue Is Heroic: Played With. Cooper's heroic cowboy character wears a blue suit with yellow fringe, and when he is selected to be the Vault Pitchman, Vault-Tec models the iconic suits on his color scheme to solidify the connection.
• Bombproof Appliance: The flashbacks to Maximus as a kid surviving the nuclear bombing of Shady Sands in a fridge.
• Brand X: Most notably Nuka-Cola, the setting's version of Coca-Cola.
• Break the Cutie: Lucy. She's chipper and hopelessly naive when she starts exploring the surface, and just goes through one horrible thing after another.
• Brick Joke: After the Ghoul shoots off Dr. Wilzig's leg in Filly, a Snake Oil Salesman offers him a miracle cure for missing limbs, which he and Lucy naturally ignore. Several episodes later, that same salesman encounters the wounded Thaddeus and sells him the same cure which, as it turns out, actually works - albeit with a slight side effect of ghoulification.
• Call-Back: When the Ghoul is pursuing Moldover to the Griffith Observatory, he and Dogmeat camp outside the same Hollywood Forever mausoleum where he met her prior to the war.
• Call-Forward: Cooper's actor friend Sebastian reveals that the character he played and the one RobCo based the Mr Handy robots off of was named "Bartholomew Codsworth".
• The Cameo: The show is chock-a-block with them.
  • Mykelti Williamson turns up in the first episode as a bounty hunter who tries to recruit the Ghoul to track down Dr. Wilzig. This cameo was engineered by Walton Goggins, who wanted to work with his Justified co-star again.
  • Erik Estrada appears as an ex-NCR Ranger who now farms lead (i.e., spent bullets).
  • Matt Berry briefly appears in a pre-war flashback as one of Cooper's Hollywood friends, commenting on how he's sold the rights to his distinctive voice to RobCo and musing on the nature of corporate sponsorships.
  • Fred Armisen pops up as a slightly offbeat DJ who lets Maximus borrow his radio to call the Brotherhood.
• Casting Gag:
  • As Dr. Wilzig, Michael Emerson plays a mysteriously knowledgeable glasses-wearing character who delivers exposition; walks with a limp; and has a very protective big dog. All of those are traits shared with his character of Harold Finch in Person of Interest (which Jonathan Nolan also produced).
  • In the Japanese dub, Miyuki Sawashiro, as Lucy, previously voiced Xsana in Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, a videogame based in the post-apocalyptic manga of similar name, who, just like Lucy, is the daughter of a very powerful man in charge of the organization responsible for the state of things in their respective settings (Vault-Tec and Eden respectively). The sole difference, however is that while Xsana is the current leader of Eden and a Universally Beloved Leader to boot, Lucy, on the other hand, is the daughter of the man responsible for basically destroying civilization, and she starts to hate him when she finds out the truth.
• Capitalism Is Bad: It's revealed that the main villains of the series, and by extension the Fallout franchise as a whole, are Vault-Tec and similarly aligned conglomerates who engineered the Great War and systemically stamp out any attempts to rebuild civilization outside their control so that they can rule the world according to their own whims, without pesky regulations or governments getting in their way.
• Central Theme: The Wasteland is a harsh, horrific place where naivety is snuffed out and altruism is punished. Additionally, actions that seemed good at the time may have complicated and unforeseen consequences.
• Cliffhanger: Lots of story points are still not solved after the end of the season. The Ghoul, Lucy, and Dogmeat start traveling looking for the admin Vault. Maximus is in charge of the ruins of Los Angeles that have gotten endless energy. Norm is left contemplating whether to enter cryogenic sleep indefinitely in Vault 31. Hank is going to New Vegas for reasons unknown, but likely for reasons connected to Robert House.
• Cluster F-Bomb: A contrasting juxtaposition, between two characters wearing the same suit of Brotherhood power armor.
  • Knight Titus is dropping cluster F-bombs as he runs away from a Yao Guai that is thrashing him, leaving his squire Maximus behind, signifying his cowardice.
  • Maximus (while impersonating Titus in the armor) starts dropping them as he starts running towards the gulper trying to eat Thaddeus, indicating far more stalwart courage, and instead exclaiming it due to the emergency of the situation.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: In episode 2, the Ghoul goes through a lot of effort and is knocked around with relative ease until he figures out a weakness when up against Maximus in his Powered Armor. In episode 8, when he encounters a group of multiple Brotherhood Knights wearing armor too, he barely breaks a sweat while killing them with single well-placed shots and explosives.
• The Conspiracy: The "Great Game" referenced in previous titles turns out to be this, the so-called "great game of capitalism" winding down to its inevitable end: the largest companies in America divvying up what will remain of humanity after the apocalypse and then kickstarting that apocalypse themselves.
• Continuity Cameo: Robert House and Frederick Sinclair, two major characters from Fallout: New Vegas, appear during the Vault-Tec meeting, revealing them to have at least been aware of Vault-Tec's plan to orchestrate the Great War to cleanse the Old World so they can monopolize the future under corporate rule, if not actively involved.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The countdown livestream repeatedly references an in-universe film called "The Man From Dead Horse". Dead Horse Point, in addition to being a real state park in Utah that housed a horse corral during the Wild West, has previously appeared in the series as the homeland and namesake of the Dead Horses tribe residing in Zion Canyon.
  • The Prydwen makes a dynamic entry at the unknown Brotherhood base, escorted by vertibirds, bringing with it Knights in Powered Armor and a mission based on intel from "the highest clerics in the Commonwealth". The Commonwealth is the main setting of Fallout 4 (known pre-war as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), and the Prydwen was the Brotherhood's headquarters in the game, where it also made a dynamic entry.
  • Like Elliott Tercorien and Nate, the Ghoul is a veteran of the Alaskan campaign; specifically, he was one of the power armor troopers who first deployed in the T-45d.
• Continuity Snarl:
  • The show makes at least one rather significant retcon to established lore by placing Shady Sands within the Los Angeles Boneyard, rather than up near Death Valley as it was in the original games. Not only does this retroactively introduce some puzzling issues to the story of Fallout regarding the settlement's proximity to the Cathedral and the locations of Vaults 13 and 15 possibly being shifted into the city as well, but it raises equally many questions about the NCR's five states as established in Fallout 2 and referenced occasionally in Fallout: New Vegas — namely, the fact that Shady Sands is meant to be the capital of the "state of Shady" as well as the nation overall, with "the state of Los Angeles", comprising the city's ruins, as a separate political entity within the Republic whose capital is New Adytum.
    • In addition to the above snarl, the fact of there being three Vaults constructed around Los Angeles and all seem perfectly intact by the late 2200s raises concerns over how they could have possibly evaded discovery by The Master in Fallout. To note, The Master and his Unity were raiding and collecting Vault Dwellers to make into Super Mutants in California for years. The interconnected Vaults starting with Vault 33 are in a major urban center, with the blast door entrance out in the open for anyone to see, unlike Vaults 13 and 15. One would think that made them easily discoverable by super mutant scouts hunting for repositories of pure human DNA. That they all seem to have survived without incident up to the present day implies either The Master never investigated them, gave up trying when he couldn't break into 33 like he did the demonstration Vault, or just by sheer luck the Unity never discovered them.
  • The show also states that the "Fall of Shady Sands" happened in 2277, the same year as the First Battle for Hoover Dam and four years before the events of New Vegas. This at a glance seems to contradict the game's year 2281 events, as numerous characters in that game directly reference Shady Sands as the current, thriving political core of the nation from which Congress and the President operate. Both Emil Pagliarulo and Todd Howard would later state that New Vegas remains canon, with Shady Sands being destroyed shortly after the events of the game, with "Fall" instead being a separate, as of yet unexplained event. This still creates uncertainties given President Kimball flies from Shady Sands to New Vegas for a speech during 2281. This "Fall" cannot be an extremely loud catastrophe nor even noticeable for the population who has access to radio, word of mouth, and travelers to and from Shady Sands.
  • The Ghoul indicates that he was a former Marine who served on the Alaskan front. All previous references to that campaign have generally indicated that it was purely an Army affair, with no Marines involved.
• Convulsive Seizures: A telltale symptom of a ghoul starting to go feral is repeated seizures combined with frantic snarling. The Ghoul suffers a non-convulsive full body seizure while waiting for his drugs outside the Super Duper Mart, and is left paralyzed on the dirt until Lucy delivers some to him.
• Couch Gag: The Fallout title card in each episode is reflective of the scene just prior: charred from bomb blasts, shot full of holes from a turret, and so forth.
• Cutting Off the Branches: In the first episode, the combination of the Prydwen bringing Knights to the West Coast and the order to find Wilzig stated by Elder Cleric Quintus to have come from "the highest clerics in the Commonwealth" serves as an indication that the East Coast Brotherhood survived the events of Fallout 4, which potentially means that either the Brotherhood or the Minutemen endings to the game are considered canon. This further means that the Institute is in all likelihood destroyed, but, hand-in-hand with the Minutemen ending possibly occurring, there stands a possibility that the Railroad is still around.
• Cyanide Pill: Vault-Tec sold flavored suicide pills for people who couldn't make it into a vault. Lucy stumbles upon the remains of a family who took that option. Wilzig quips it's probably the most humane thing they ever sold. Wilzig kills himself via one of these pills and tasks Lucy with delivering just his head to their destination since it contains the MacGuffin he intends to deliver.

Tropes D-H

• Decomposite Character: The show cleverly splits up the possible branches the Player Character can take into multiple characters:
  • Lucy the Vault Dweller represents a good karma protagonist, who grows tougher over the course of the story.
  • Maximus represents a neutral karma protagonist and is the one who gets Powered Armour and becomes a Knight of the Brotherhood of Steel.
  • The Ghoul represents a bad karma protagonist being cruel and merciless though he used to be a good man and gets the Canine Companion.
  • Norm, Lucy's brother, fulfills the Amateur Sleuth and puzzle-solving aspect of the player character.
• Despair Event Horizon: Lucy gets hit hard with it when she learns, in quick succession, that a) her father wasn't born in a vault, but is actually a Vault-Tec executive who was cryogenically frozen as part of Vault-Tec's ploy to take over post-war, b) he's the one who destroyed Shady Sands and, by extension, the NCR by nuking it, and c) in the process killed her mom, since she ended up becoming a feral ghoul from the radiation. Lucy ends up completely devastated at realizing that that her dad was never worthy of being rescued.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • The various robots common to the wasteland are largely absent. We meet a single Mr. Handy, the RoboBrain-like overseer of Vault 31, and Lucy sees a deactivated Assaultron shortly after leaving Vault 33, and that's it.
  • Despite being some of, if not the most iconic Fallout monsters, Deathclaws and Super Mutants get cameos as corpses—a giant, green-skinned corpse covered in a sheet is seen at the Enclave stronghold at the beginning of Episode 2, as well as a wanted poster in Sorrel Booker's headquarters, and a horned, reptilian skull is seen at the outskirts of New Vegas in the Finale.
• Desert Punk: The plot is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be Los Angeles.
• Dismemberment Is Cheap: Zig-zagged depending on the medical technology available.
  • Dr. Wilzig gets his foot shot off by the Ghoul and gets a prosthetic leg attached that attaches itself with an integral meat grinder. It doesn't work very well, and he keeps bleeding, committing suicide shortly after.
  • Lucy bites off the Ghoul's finger and he simply sews it back on a day later, justified in that he's a ghoul.
  • The Ghoul cuts off one of Lucy's fingers in reprisal but she has a new one surgically attached by a Mr. Handy robot (who keeps a drawer full of detached human fingers).
• The Dog Bites Back: There are two known cases of Vault dwellers violently rebelling against their Overseers for turning them into Unwitting Test Subjects:
  • The residents of Vault 32 all killed each other when they found out that they were being controlled by Vault 31 transfers who manufactured crises to solve so they can stay in power.
  • Vault 4 was run by scientists who conducted horrific genetic experimentation on the lower-ranked residents. They ended up being murdered by the Humanoid Abominations they created, and the former test subjects took over.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: Virtually every moderately well-known Los Angeles landmark makes an appearance. Vault 33's exit is at the base of the Santa Monica pier, Dr. Wilzig dies and is decapitated between the ruins of LAX and Randy's Donuts, the NCR's new headquarters is in the Griffith Observatory, and Lucy and the Ghoul conclude the season in the shadow of the Hollywood Sign.
• Engineered Heroics: In order to make sure someone from Vault 31 ends up leading Vault 33, there's always a crisis around Overseer election time that conveniently appears for them to swoop in and solve, winning the support of the Vault 33 residents. They may or may not also rig the elections, given a 200-year streak is rather improbable, but it ties into the social conditioning that Vault 31 transplants are reliable problem-solvers ("If things look glum, vote 31.").
• Equal-Opportunity Evil:
  • Vault-Tec, the Greater-Scope Villain of the entire franchise, is shown to have several women of color in high positions, like Barb Howard and Overseer Pearson.
  • The Brotherhood is a xenophobic technocratic order that enforces strict hierarchies among its members. That doesn't stop them from seemingly being perfectly accepting of the non-binary Squire Dane, even using their pronouns correctly.
• Fantastic Racism: Just about everyone on the surface has this towards ghouls, considering them liabilities likely to turn feral at any moment. The Brotherhood takes this to another level, considering exterminating ghouls to be one of their duties. The one place we see ghouls being treated like people is with the NCR remnants, serving as another good reminder of just what was lost with Shady Sands.
• Flashback B-Plot: A good chunk of the first season follows Cooper Howard's acting career in the midst of a Red Scare and leading up to the bombs falling, culminating in The Reveal that his wife was a Vault-Tec employee involved in a Corporate Conspiracy to cause The End of the World as We Know It and Take Over the World following the apocalypse.
• Foreshadowing:
  • During the Birthday Party in the intro-scene, one of the party guests asks Cooper Howard if he could give the thumb-pose for a photo since that's what he's famous for, but he refuses. He also describes its meaning to his daughter when she asks. It is revealed in another flashback that Howard was a spokesperson for Vault-Tec, and that his thumb-up pose was the basis for the company's iconic "Vault Boy" mascot, where Vault Boy would hold up his thumb. Also, Howard had a major falling out with Vault-Tec after learning the truth behind their plans, so he refuses to be associated with them.
  • In the first episode Monty doesn't say much at the wedding and evades questions about his sperm count, but also forwardly asks Lucy to show him their new home and is very quick to drop his pants once they're alone. He's not nervous or embarrassed at all. He's actually a surface-dwelling raider who'd have no idea what the right answers would be and probably wanted to both end the questions and sleep with her before the killing started.
  • Ma June points out the ways that it's obvious that Lucy is a Vault Dweller: good hair, nice teeth, all ten fingers... Later in her journey, Lucy's hair becomes messier and the Ghoul chops off one of her fingers. Though a Mister Handy gives her a new one, it is discolored, becoming a permanent reminder of how much the Wasteland has changed her.
  • Vaults 31, 32, and 33 are interconnected with each other, the first example of this happening in any Fallout media. Vaults 32 and 33 swap residents periodically to maintain genetic diversity. Curiously, Vault 31, only ever sends residents to the other two vaults, and no one from those two vaults has ever visited 31, with those that immigrate from 31 remaining rather tight-lipped about life there. Former Vault 31 resident Steph only states that the one thing she misses from that Vault is that the mashed potatoes tasted better than in 33. Vault 31 serves as a cryogenics facility for pre-war residents, but nothing more, so it'd be hard to describe what life was like in the vault since former residents were frozen during their stay. And of course food pre-war would have tasted better.
  • While testing out his newly appropriated power armor, Maximus witnesses a vendor beating up another man and promptly intervenes, shoves the culprit into the ground, letting the victim run away. It is only afterwards that he finds out the "victim" was an animal abuser, and the "culprit" was simply protecting his chickens. Maximus diving into impulsive heroic acts without fully assessing the situation first will come back multiple times this season, including one personally dramatic incident in the finale.
  • The Gulper with what appears to be human fingers in its mouth. It also has several oddly-human features, such as arms reminiscent of human arms and blue eyes with white sclera. It turns out that the gulper is in fact the result of the Vault 4 experiments to study mutations on the human body, including those when crossed with animals and creatures.
  • During the Vault meeting, one of the technicians comes in and says that the Vault's water-chip is broken, just as they are discussing what to do with the Overseer now being gone and kidnapped. After this, the Vault opts to hold elections for Overseer, where Betty, a former Vault 31 resident, wins by a landslide. It's later revealed that Vault-Tec specifically wants former Vault 31 residents to serve as overseers for 32 and 33, so the broken water-chip likely was set up to allow Betty to swoop in and "save" the Vault.
  • There are hints towards Hank's true nature as a villain:
    • When Hank gives his speech at Lucy's wedding, he talks about how the three vaults are the best hope for the world. But when he discusses the survivors on the surface, he only describes them negatively as desperate, violent, and lawless people, and states he sometimes fears the "mean old world" will change the vault-dwellers for the worse.
    • During a Vault 33 meeting regarding the imprisoned raiders, Norm brainstorms that they should Pay Evil unto Evil with the raiders and kill them. Everyone else dismisses this notion in disgust, and even Norm has second-thoughts... but Steph agrees with him (since they killed her husband), and states that his father Hank would "do the right thing".
    • When Lucy finally provides her name to the Ghoul, he's surprised by her last name being "MacLean". This is because back before the war, before Cooper Howard became the Ghoul, he learned about Vault-Tec's true nature shortly after he met Lucy's father Henry "Hank" MacLean, who was then a junior executive with the company. Sure enough, when they meet again during the final episode, they recognize each other.
    • In a pre-war flashback Cooper receives a phone call from "Henry", a Vault-Tec employee.
  • In episode 5, after Lucy asks Maximus about what happened in the last 200 years, he replies that he was a child when the bombs fell which would not make any sense given his age. She later learns he was a survivor of the bombs that destroyed Shady Sands.
  • In episode 6, the flashback to the Vault-Tec advertisement Cooper films has two bits that become significant later on:
    • First, the couple he talks to, Lloyd and Cassandra Hawthorne, mention living in Vault 4 with a community of scientists. The next episode shows them being devoured by one of their experiments, who rebelled against their Mad Scientist creators and ended up turning the vault into a nice place to live.
    • Second, when filming wraps, Bud Askins introduces himself and mentions that in his prior job at West Tek, he oversaw the rollout of T-45d Power Armor for the military. Cooper mentions that the design flaws on the T-45d got a lot of Americans killed during the war. Come episode 8, he confirms that the T-60c models share some of the same weaknesses as the T-45d when he wipes out a whole squad of armored Brotherhood Knights.
• Gaslighting: In hindsight, Cooper was being gaslit by his wife to thwart his suspicions about the vaults. When he brings up valid concerns about what freedoms people will have in the vaults, she guilts him by bringing up how hard it was for her when he was at war and accuses him of being insane for putting "trivial" concerns over survival. With the reveal that she wants the bombs to drop, it's clear that this was all a way to manipulate Cooper.
• The Golden Rule: Lucy name-drops the Golden Rule extensively as part of her aversion to unnecessary violence and it remains a positive part of her character even as it's deconstructed by the harshness of the wasteland and its inhabitants bearing down on her. Most notably, even after having been sold to have her organs harvested by the Ghoul, she still does right by him and saves his life when she finds him face down in the dirt from withdrawal.
• Gorn: Seeing as this is Fallout, there's gore in spades, from mangled flesh, severed limbs and exploding heads. Special mention goes to the terrifying strength of Power Armor on full display, as human heads are squashed like grapes in the palms of the armor's hands.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Most of the Vault Dwellers are as saccharine as to be expected from this franchise, Lucy included. She keeps it up for the first half of the season, but after The Ghoul puts her through hell to get his chem fix, she proves that she's still better than him despite her Innocence Lost by giving him the chems:
  Lucy: Golden rule, motherfucker.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The cabal of corporate representatives, including Vault-Tec, Rob Co, REPCONN, and Big MT, are shown to be the main antagonist of not just the show, but the whole Fallout setting as they are revealed to be the masterminds of the Great War in their gambit to Take Over the World after cleaning the slate of the Old World and their politics. On a more personal level, the series goes through a whole Big Bad Duumvirate before settling on Lucy's father as the Big Bad, Hank MacLean, who is revealed to be a massive Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who is directly responsible for the current state of California by obliterating Shady Sands, effectively signing the NCR's death warrant, as well as pushing Vault-Tec's agenda forward.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The Gulper's new design is this. Instead of being mutant giant salamanders, the Gulper fought on Hollywood Boulevard is the result of horrific genetic experiments conducted on Vault 4's test subjects. Lucy finds recorded footage of a female subject giving live birth to an entire pod of Gulpers, and Overseer Benjamin proudly refers to the escapee that devoured the Vault's original scientists as his great-uncle Peter.
• Hand Cannon:
  • The Ghoul's preferred weapon is a four-shot revolver chambered for tiny fin-stabilized explosive rounds that have more in common with artillery than conventional bullets. It's extremely overpowered for squishier targets, routinely leaving baseball-sized holes in unarmored humans… even without exploding.
  • The standard sidearm for Brotherhood squires is the classic 10mm pistol from the first two games. Maximus is able to put down a Yao Guai with only two rounds from it.
• Happier Home Movie: Played with. The official trailer features a melancholy scene of the Ghoul watching a pre-war movie he filmed back when he was human actor Cooper Howard.
• Happy Ending Override:
  • Shady Sands developed into a borderline pre-war city, with modern buildings, bountiful crops, and running trolleys, but was blasted into a crater by Hank MacLean.
  • Putting aside whatever ending the player might have worked toward in Fallout: New Vegas, Vegas was at least a functioning, safe city that was surrounded by a larger slum. The ending of season 1 shows that Vegas has at least been partially abandoned, and signs of civilization around it are sparse.
• Healing Potion: Stimpacks are a standard means for characters to almost instantly heal up in the video games, but their healing properties aren't really explored as anything more than a game mechanic. The show takes this approach to how Stimpacks work by making it induce hyper regeneration inside the body to heal them enough from mortal wounds.
• Homage
  • Cooper has a large movie poster in his home for one of his previous films, A Man and His Dog. This not only fits with Cooper's status as a dog-lover, it's also a reference to the classic post-apocalyptic film A Boy and His Dog, which provided a lot of inspiration for the Fallout video game series, including Dogmeat's name.
  • The Ghoul is a gunslinger who is never addressed by name in the wasteland, referencing Clint Eastwood's iconic "man with no name."
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: The New California Republic, once a genuine nation-state with fully functioning infrastructure and a thousands strong army strong enough to wipe the California and Mojave Brotherhood of Steel off the map, has been reduced to scattered survivor settlements and a single armed outpost. By the end of the series, the last official vestiges of their government, at least in the NCR heartland, are gone.

Tropes I-O

• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • The Ghoul carves up a fresh, dead, ghoul body so he can make "ass jerky".
  • Cannibalism is a staple of the raider lifestyle due to the scarcity of working farms making crops.
• Inferred Survival: Season 1 ends with large gaps in the Ghoul's backstory, but he seems to think his daughter Janey made it into a control Vault safely. She was last seen with her dad galloping on horseback as Los Angeles is bombed. It's unclear how Cooper was separated from Janey and why he was left out in the cold.
• Instant Sedation: All tranquilizer guns and drug injections instantly knock out their targets, although the drug-addled Ghoul can No-Sell them.
• Interface Spoiler: A non-video game example, funnily enough in a TV series based on a video game. Watching the series on Prime Video brings up a list of all cast members currently on screen whenever one pauses the video. This can be used to learn some characters' names even if they are never stated but it also tends to give away a few important plot points with some characters' identities before they are revealed, such as the fact that the severely rotted ghoul Moldaver keeps in her lair at Griffith Observatory used to be Lucy's mother, as it is identified in the list as "Ghoul Rose MacLean".
• In-Universe Marketing: At one point, a phone number comes up during the ad for Vault-Tec. The number is a real California number, and dialing it connects you to a man screaming for fifteen seconds before the phone hangs up.
• Kissing Cousins: Having sex with your cousin is taboo in Vault 33... after adulthood. Lucy's dialogue with Chet indicates that it's actually pretty typical for cousins to have sex for the sake of both education and fun while they're growing up through adolescence.
• Late to the Tragedy: Much of the appeal of the series comes from the gradual discovery of the things that happened on Earth since the nuclear apocalypse that Lucy (and the audience) is only catching up with 219 years later.
• Live-Action Adaptation: The series serves as the first live-action adaptation of the Fallout franchise which has largely lived in the Video Games medium until then.^note There were previous plans for a film treatment of Fallout but those fell through. It wasn't until the success of The Last of Us that Prime Video decided to greenlight this project.
• Love-Interest Traitor:
  • In Episode 1, Lucy's new Vault 32 "husband" Monty tries to kill her after they consummate their "marriage", revealing that he and the other residents of Vault 32 are actually hostile raiders.
  • Cooper Howard's wife Barb is revealed to be in on the conspiracy of not only Vault-Tec's unethical (and sometimes lethal) experiments, but also proposed dropping the bomb in the first place. It's implied that he divorced her after discovering her plans.
• Ludicrous Gibs: In good old Fallout tradition, the violence settings are turned to maximum.
• Machine Worship: The Brotherhood of Steel has far more fanatical religious overtones in their search for pre-war relics compared to games, featuring robed clerics chanting Latin, rituals with incense and holy water, and the desire to hoard even simple technology like toasters.
• Madness Mantra: Ghouls who are turning feral will spend their final moments of lucidity repeating what their name is in a last ditch effort to hang on.
• Mid-Season Upgrade: At the end of her story segment in the fourth episode, Lucy finally gets ahold of a lethal weapon, a semi-auto 10mm pistol. And she also has her first big Break the Cutie moment, where she has to kill an old lady ghoul desperately clinging to lucidity right as the ghoul finally loses it and goes feral.
• Monumental Damage: Naturally. The pre-war segment of the first episode caps off with the Los Angeles skyline getting lit up by the nuclear devastation of the Great War. When Lucy leaves Vault 33 in the third episode, one of her first sights is the far-off ruins of the Santa Monica pier. The seasonal climax of the eighth episode occurs with a battle between the Brotherhood of Steel and remnants of the New California Republic held at the partially collapsed Griffith Observatory.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Every episode is filled to the brim with a myriad of recognizable sounds from the games, including the Pip-Boy's whirring and Geiger-clicking, guns firing, bullets hitting, the clanking of Power Armor, even punches and hits.
  • Lucy's introduction has her describe some of her skills in a way that mirrors character creation in most of the games, with Repair, Science and Speech clearly being her Tag skills.
  • During the second episode, as the Ghoul is having a shootout with the Filly inhabitants and mercenaries, we're treated to an Arrow Cam view of a bullet scoring a headshot, passing through, and then making the building behind the shooter explode. It's practically a shot-by-shot recreation, complete with slow motion, of V.A.T.S..
  • The Ghoul reunites with CX404/Dogmeat at an old Red Rocket gas station, like how the Sole Survivor met their own Dogmeat in Fallout 4.
  • At one point, Cooper talks with Barb about retiring to a ranch around Bakersfield, an idea that she shoots down. Bakersfield was previously shown in Fallout as the location of Vault 12 which was designed so that its blast door wouldn't shut properly, leading to the ghoulification of its residents and the creation of Necropolis.
  • Vault 33's water chip failing, creating a crisis for the dwellers alludes to the main plot of the original Fallout where the water chip for Vault 13 failed and the Vault Dweller was forced to enter the wasteland to find another one.
  • In the Brotherhood, Squires are assigned to carry massive packs holding guns and supplies for their knights, evoking the meta trope of the average Fallout player using companions as pack mules.
  • All three variants of the 10mm pistol across the franchise appear, with the Colt 6520 version from Fallout 1/2 used as the standard sidearm for Brotherhood squires, the N99 version from Fallout 3/New Vegas appearing on weapon racks in the Brotherhood's HQ, and Lucy acquiring the unspecified Fallout 4 version as a weapon from the Super Duper Mart.
  • In the final episode, the code used to unlock cold fusion, "101097", is the release date of the original Fallout game.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The series shakes up Fallout canon in a big way. The New California Republic, a major power player in the west since Fallout 2, was violently dismantled and its remnants wiped out by a resurgent Brotherhood of Steel. New Vegas has long since been abandoned sometime between its titular game and the series, and Vault-Tec is confirmed to have been pulling the strings on everything since before the Great War, firmly cementing themselves as the true Big Bad of the entire franchise.
• Name Amnesia: A telltale sign that a ghoul is on the verge of fully going feral is when they're desperately trying (and failing) to remind themselves of their own name.
• New Old West: Trailers show that, as in the games (particularly New Vegas), the nuclear apocalypse has turned back the clock for most of the United States, with the wasteland being filled with gunslingers and outlaws and no clear rule of law. Of particular note is "The Ghoul", a mysterious mutated Bounty Hunter who looks like he walked straight out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
• Nice Mean And In Between: Of the three main characters, Lucy, The Ghoul and Maximus respectively.
• No Zombie Cannibals: Just like the rest of the Fallout franchise, feral ghouls do not attack other ghouls, feral or otherwise. When Lucy ignorantly releases an entire pack of them locked up at the clinic, they attack the normal humans and no one else.
• Nostalgia Filter: Lucy notes that she has a case of this regarding her mother, as she had faint memories of playing in Vault 33's projected field and it feeling like it was bathed in genuine sunlight, but she realized after her mother was gone that it only felt like that because she was there. Subverted when she learns that those were genuine memories of the surface city of Shady Sands before her father nuked the city.
• Nuclear Mutant: Given the 200+ years since the nuclear war, its radiation has created a range of monsters like the Sea Monster Gulper or the bear-like Yao Guai who roam the Earth and threaten the protagonists' lives. Ghouls as well are humans that were mutated by extended exposure to radiation and other chemicals, though their morality and danger level is just as varied as any non-mutant Wastelander.
• One Nation Under Copyright: The whole reason for the Great War was in hopes of accomplishing this for Vault-Tec and the various other corporations across the globes, hopeful that they can monopolize without penalization now that the politics of the Old World had been obliterated. Unfortunately for them, outliers like the Enclave, the New California Republic, the Brotherhood of Steel, and so on managed to persevere elements of the Old World they despised so much as they recolonized the remains of the world left behind—they are working on correcting that^note With a headstart already on the obliteration of the New California Republic before the show started.
• Our Doors Are Different: The heavy vault doors are shaped like giant gear cogs that rotate sideways.
• Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: The handguns in the year 2296 are quite boxy.
• Our Zombies Are Different: In keeping with the world of Fallout, ghouls are different from traditional zombies. They are created when a person is exposed to massive amounts of radiation but somehow manages to survive, then become zombie-like and attack non-ghouls on sight if they are unable to stave off going feral.

Tropes P-Z

• Poor Communication Kills:
  • A lot of heartache could've been avoided had she taken a more diplomatic approach to kidnapping Hank (who clearly didn't recognize her) and not gotten vicious Raiders involved. If anything, had she not been so brutal and clouded by revenge, she probably could've gotten the cold fusion device sooner and avoided the Brotherhood destroying her base and killing her.
  • Upon arriving at Vault 4, the Overseer tells Lucy to never visit Level 12, but doesn't bother to explain why. Of course, once she starts being weirded out by the local culture he also didn't bother to describe and now curious, she immediately goes there to understand what's going on, resulting in a huge misunderstanding that could have ended very badly.
• Powered Armor: The Brotherhood of Steel has access to suits of T-60c powered armor that give them a giant and intimidating stature as they march through the wasteland, and in most cases makes them borderline unstoppable as they're essentially walking tanks. As demonstrated when Titus is on the losing end of a fight with a Yao Guai, however, there are threats in the wasteland that can overcome that advantage.
• Previously on…: Each episode opens with a recap of previous events relevant to the episode ahead. Each episode closes with an On the Next teasing events of the upcoming episode.
• Race Lift: Robert House, at least according to the photo on his screen, is a Caucasian man. In the show, he is played by Rafi Silver, who is of Arab descent.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: Nearly every member of the main cast is worse off from where they began at the end of Season 1: Lucy is heartbroken after learning that her father was a genocidal monster who had a direct hand in ending the world, murdered thousands by nuking Shady Sands, and subjected her mother to a Fate Worse than Death, rendering every (sometimes reprehensible) single thing she did to save him pointless; Maximus, after finding something that makes him happier than his pursuit of glory in the Brotherhood of Steel and wanting to live peacefully with Lucy in her Vault, misses his chance to follow her after nearly getting killed by Hank and then unwillingly becomes a Fake Ultimate Hero after he's falsely credited with killing Moldaver; and Norman is caught in a Morton's Fork after being trapped in Vault 31 by Bud, forced to choose between either dying of starvation or going into cryo-sleep with no way of telling his fellow Vault Dwellers about the Awful Truth behind who Vault 31's residents really are and the role they played in the nuclear apocalypse. The only silver linings are that the wasteland now has an infinite source of power due to Moldaver successfully activating her cold fusion reactor before her death, even if it is in the Brotherhood's control, and that Lucy and the Ghoul are on track to finding the ones responsible for bringing about the end of the world as they pursue Hank across the wasteland.
• Red Scare: Fear of communism was used during the pre-war years to demonize anyone who understood that the big companies were planning to instigate the Great War and control the rebuilding of civilization with the Vaults.
• The Remnant:
  • Lee Moldaver leads the last remnants of the New California Republic army, stationed out of Griffith Observatory.
  • The Enclave is still clinging on, despite the defeats they suffered in Fallout 2 and Fallout 3; however, their overall impact is fairly minor.
• The Reveal: The series reveals the truth behind the Great War: the first nuke wasn't launched by either the American or Chinese governments, but Vault-Tec, who deliberately instigated the war with the end goal of conquering whatever's left of the surface in the aftermath. It is also revealed that the New California Republic has been decimated by a nuclear assault on their capital, leaving California in a worse state than even the original Fallout game.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • In the first episode, when Vault 32 residents arrive to send a resident to marry Lucy, her father, Vault 33 Overseer Hank MacLean, is suspicious when he meets the Overseer of 32, Lee Moldaver. Initially, it's assumed this is because Moldaver and the Vault 32 residents are actually raiders in disguise and Hank seemingly senses something off about them. However, later it's revealed during the last episode that all Vault 32 and 33 Overseers, including Hank, are cryogenically frozen Vault-Tec assistants from before the Great War. It's easy to infer that Hank was suspicious because he doesn't recognize Moldaver as one of his fellow employees, who would have been frozen with him in Vault 31.
  • Rewatching the first episode after finishing the series gives a better understanding of Cooper's situation and behavior in the opening scene. Once an A-list Hollywood actor and socialite, he is shown performing at a birthday party in a cowboy costume to make a living. One of the guests questions why a star like him is doing this, and the party's host speculates it's for alimony payments. He also refuses to do the famous thumbs-up pose that he made famous in ads for Vault-Tec "given the state of everything," as he puts it. That same guest calls Cooper a pinko, a derogatory term for communists, implying he may have been blacklisted for dissident beliefs. Cooper, after getting involved with those supposed "commies", eventually ends up learning that Vault-Tec was planning to start the Great War and his wife was part of that conspiracy, which suggests that Cooper separated from his wife after learning the truth and his career paid the price for it. It also explains his hostility toward Vault-Tec and Vault dwellers in general.
• Ripped from the Headlines: In a pre-war segment, Sebastian Leslie has a discussion with Cooper about selling his voice away for $138,000 (or possibly $138), much to his regret. At the time of the series' release, AI-generated voicework presented a similar threat to screen and voice actors who would be at risk of accidentally selling away their likenesses for a pitiful amount of money.
• Schizo Tech: The West Coast Brotherhood has a flying fortress of an airship, VTOL dropships, and multiple suits of Powered Armor, but their only means of transmitting images is by having radio operators tell the receiver where to mark lines on graph paper with a pencil.
• Searching for the Lost Relative:
  • Lucy's mission after episode one is to find and rescue her father after he's kidnapped by Lee Moldaver.
  • The Ghoul's ultimate goal is tracking down the Vault-Tec control vault where his wife and daughter went.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The series retroactively shows that the entirety of Fallout: New Vegas's core plot point, the acquisition of New Vegas itself, is made moot in the long run as the city has seemingly collapsed by the time of the show alongside the NCR.
• Shining City: Shady Sands is presented as having formerly been this, being an idyllic community home to tens of thousands who lived in comfort and safety without the dictatorial restrictions of the vaults or the Brotherhood. Lucy sees it as having been everything the vaults promised to one day be, and is devastated to learn that it's been destroyed, by her own father no less.
• Shown Their Work: Fallout fans have noticed that the series is full of small details that even some of the most ardent players would likely not notice or think about when playing the games. The various sets of armor (including the iconic T-60c Power Armor) and weapons used by the Brotherhood of Steel are consistent with those found in the games, what's shown of Vault 33 is consistent with the designs & layouts from those found in Fallout 4, and even the medical supplies used by the Mister Handy robot look like the various chem/drug containers & jars found in-game.
• Show Within a Show: The countdown livestream for the reveal trailer repeatedly references an in-universe Western movie called The Man From Dead Horse and its lead actor, Cooper Howard.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The work makes a point about how different environments shape characters differently. Lucy is a sheltered idealist from the vaults who lives by The Golden Rule and believes that Humans Are Good and Rousseau Was Right. The Ghoul has seen a different reality in the resource-scarce wastelands of Earth's surface and strongly believes in Hobbes Was Right.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The series has a penchant for pairing brutal scenes with cheery, upbeat, or smooth-sounding midcentury tunes.
  • Nat King Cole's soothing love song "I Don't Want to See Tomorrow" plays throughout the teaser trailer...all while the audience goes through one violent shot after another such as bloody gunfights, disturbing mutated creatures, things blowing up, a grisly riot in a Vault, and finally the detonation of nuclear warheads in the heart of Los Angeles that brought about the destruction of civilization. That same song is played in the series proper during a bloody and brutal battle.
  • Another trailer does the same with a perennial mainstay of the series, The Ink Spots' "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire".
  • The Castells version of "Some Enchanted Evening" plays over the fight with the raiders in Vault 33 in the very first episode.
  • Bing Crosby' version of "Don't Fence Me In" plays over a shot of Lucy wandering the wasteland.
  • Glenn Miller's "In The Mood" is the soundtrack of a fight between Maximus and Thaddeus with the gulper.
  • "Theme From A Summer Place" plays in the Super-Duper Mart that's been turned into a drug den/organ harvesting operation.
• Status Quo Is God: Horrifically enforced, as Vault-Tec, the true Big Bad of the setting, sees any civilization outside of one they'll create in the post-apocalypse America as an anathema to "the Great Game of Capitalism" and thus seek to eliminate any competition to that. Hank MacLean winds up having done exactly that with the NCR, one of the biggest players in the entire setting as a possible sign of hope that civilization is returning to the Wasteland, by nuking their capital Shady Sands to kingdom come and won't stop until all life that doesn't belong to Vault-Tec is purged from the Earth.
• Stealth Sequel: The series is revealed to be connected more to the classic setting of the series on the West Coast, following the events of Fallout: New Vegas more than the East Coast games with some continuation of about the fate of the NCR, New Vegas, and so on beyond the game they were focused in.
• Super Wrist-Gadget: The Pip-Boy 3000. It's a GPS system, communications device, video game console, personal computer, flashlight and Geiger counter all in one. No Vault dweller should leave home without it.
• Title Theme Drop: The Fallout theme plays when Lucy discovers an NCR flag in a classroom in Vault 4.
• Too Dumb to Live: Titus is critically injured and bleeding out, but decides to keep insulting and berating Maximus, who is the only person who can save him. Unsurprisingly, Max sits back and lets him die.
• Torso with a View: One of the gunmen the Ghoul shoots during the gunfight in Filly is blown back against a fence and has a grisly hole in his upper left shoulder.
• Visionary Villain: Vault-Tec's management are revealed as the Greater-Scope Villain of the series, with their leadership waiting in cryostasis for the opportunity to Take Over the World and shape society as they see fit After the End.
• "Wanted!" Poster: Both the Brotherhood of Steel and the various bounty hunter agencies put out a wanted poster of Siggi Wilzig... and humorously enough, one of CX404/Dogmeat. In Episode 6, several are seen at Sorrel Booker's headquarters, including Lee Moldaver, whom the Ghoul recognizes from before the war.
• War for Fun and Profit: It's made apparent that Vault-Tec and the other Mega Corps of the pre-Wasteland world are perpetuating the ongoing conflicts between America and her rivals to line their pockets, from stalling peace talks to smothering a cold-fusion project that could resolve the resource wars in an instant. Then comes Episode 8, when it's revealed they may have had a direct hand in the nuclear apocalypse itself in order to create a world completely free of political regulations that they could endlessly control and profit off of.
• Weird Currency: Just like in the games, bottle caps are the main currency.
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: This applies to the meds used in the future like the StimPack or RadAway.
• Wham Episode: The entire series is one for the Fallout franchise as a whole. At least one major faction in the west (the NCR) has been wiped off the map. New Vegas has been abandoned and fallen into ruin. Vault-Tec is revealed to be the true mastermind behind the Great War, and have been secretly campaigning against anything resembling civilization in the Wasteland so their chosen subjects can inherit the earth. Nothing Is the Same Anymore doesn't even begin to describe the ramifications of this series.
• Wrong Side All Along: Lucy, after discovering the extent to Vault-Tec's evil, teams up with her former enemy the Ghoul to track her father to New Vegas.
• Zeppelins from Another World: The Prydwen, the massive airship constructed and used by the Brotherhood during Fallout 4 in the Commonwealth, reappears in the first episode, now under the command of Elder Cleric Quintus and reinforcing the New California chapter of the Brotherhood on the West Coast.

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"Well, you know what they say: War Never Changes."