The Fallout TV show gives fans of new and old a never-before-seen tale set in the iconic post-apocalyptic universe. On top of the exciting Easter Eggs on the surface, there are tons of deep story connections. Here is a full recap of Fallout, Season 1.
- Read more: The Fallout Series, Ranked
This is not a mere adaptation–rather, the Fallout TV show tells a new tale set in 2296, the furthest that the franchise has explored its timeline. Meaning, that every Fallout game that has come out since the show debuted takes place in the past.
Fallout Season 1 Recap
Episode 1: The End
LA is nuked to the ground. Cooper Howard, a celebrity cowboy, flees the scene on horseback with an iconic slow-panning shot of the skyline on fire.
216 years later, we follow Lucy (Ella Purnell), an inhabitant of Vault 33, one of the underground communities built to protect humanity. When her vault gets invaded by raiders and her father kidnapped, she sets off for the surface to look for him.
In the final segment, we get a brief glimpse at Maximus (Aaron Moten), a bullied member of the Brotherhood of Steel, a military faction.
Episode 2: The Target
In a surface-level enclave, viewers meet Dr. Wilzig (Michael Emmerson), a scientist implanting a glowing chip in his neck.
Meanwhile, Maximus and Knight Titus (Michael Rapaport), both members of the Brotherhood of Steel, get attacked by a mutant bear during an expedition. Knight Titus dies, and Maximus seizes his power armor.
Lucy visits an outpost called Filly while searching for her father. Soon after arriving, a massive fight breaks out between her, Maximus, and an irradiated version of Cooper known as The Ghoul (now a bounty hunter). Lucy escapes with Dr. Wilzig, and the duo sets out to find the raider leader named Moldaver who has her father.
Episode 3: The Head
Lucy presses onward to locate Moldaver. A gulper attacks and swallows Wilzig’s head. The Ghoul shows up with Wilzig’s experimental dog, CX404, attempting to secure the head. They have to fight off a massive, mutated salamander.
Maximus is struggling in a vicious scrap with a gang that desires to steal his power armor, and in Vault 33, Lucy’s brother Norm seeks revenge against the raiders that attacked his home.
Episode 4: The Ghouls
Dwellers in Vault 33 vote for a new Overseer as the previous was dragged away by raiders. On the surface, Lucy and The Ghoul enter a Super Duper Mart.
Inside, Lucy fights a chipper robot desiring to harvest her organs. She then grapples with a horde of ghouls before escaping.
She emerges to find The Ghoul lying on the floor, close to death. Taking pity on him, she feeds him a bunch of drugs and medicine.
Episode 5: The Past
Maximus and his squire Thaddeus are bonding until Maximus discovers his power armor was stolen. This prompts Thaddeus to sneak behind him and insert an off-key which traps Maximus.
Lucy encounters Maximus and agrees to free him in order to get an anti-radiation medicine. Together, they set off to search for Lucy’s father and Dr. Wilzig. Along the way, they learn about a town known as Shady Sands, formerly home to over 34,000 people. This upturns her identity as a Vault Dweller, tasked with repopulating the world.
At the conclusion of the episode, they fall down a hole and land in a new vault. In another scene, Norm is unraveling a massive conspiracy in Vault 33.
Episode 6: The Trap
This episode explores the events that took place prior to the fallout. In a flashback, we learn (from Cooper’s perspective) about Vault-Tec, the organization that created the vaults.
A representative from Vault-Tec tells Cooper how the vaults are meant to help America win the war against competing nations by outlasting them over time.
Lucy and Maximus quickly discover the idyllic life in Vault 4 harbors human experimentation.
Episode 7: The Radio
After Lucy discovers that Vault 4 serves as an experimentation chamber for scientists attempting to combine human DNA with animals, she gets banished.
Lucy and Maximus visit a radio station in which the Brotherhood of Steel picks up Maximus. Thaddeus gets hit in the neck with an arrow but does not die due to his ingestion of drugs from earlier. He is now cursed as a ghoul, forced to live forever.
The Ghoul is now hunting for Moldaver.
Episode 8: The Beginning
In a flashback with Cooper, we learn about the show’s most horrific truth. Corporations dropped the bombs to sell access to the vault. What’s worse, his own wife is one of the key perpetrators.
An additional revelation happens when Lucy finally confronts Moldaver and her father, finding them in a cage at the Griffith Observatory. Moldaver reveals her father bombed Shady Sands, turning her mother into a ghoul.
In Vault 31, below the surface, Norm discovers cryopods containing thousands of Vault-Tec executives who have been frozen for centuries. They are meant to breed with inhabitants of Vault 32 and Vault 33 to create a superior race that’s been approved by the Vault-Tec.
During the climax, Moldaver uses the cold fusion chip from inside of Dr. Wilzig’s head to restore power to LA. Meanwhile, Lucy’s father steals a set of power armor and flees. In the final shot, he discovers New Vegas, one of the most popular settings in the games that fans know and love.
Fallout Season 1 Easter Eggs
Music
The Fallout series has always embraced early 20th-century pop music, and there are tons of throwbacks seen in the live-action show. While many of these songs are new picks for the franchise, there are some that have been previously used in the games, such as “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire”. This plays in the show when Lucy tries to chop off Wilzig’s head at the end of Episode 2. Furthermore, there are multiple tracks featured by The Ink Spots, a group that has been played throughout the games.
The Enclave
The Enclave, featured in Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 as the main antagonists, are the remnants of the pre-war US government. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that Wilzig worked at a West Tek facility, as the Eastern and Western branches were thoroughly eradicated in the games.
Super Mutants
When Wilzig escapes the compound, he briefly comes across the corpse of a green super mutant found on a slab. These super mutants were humans once subjected to a virus created by West Tek.
Dogmeat
Fallout games give players a dog companion, each of which is referred to as Dogmeat. Episode 2 of the Fallout show actually provides some backstory for the dog companion, showing how she was raised and trained at Wilzig’s facility. This means she isn’t some stray dog who is inexplicably great at following orders like the Dogmeats seen in the games.
Brahmin
In Filly, there is a glimpse of the iconic two-headed cow known as Brahmin. This is one of Fallout’s greatest animals.
Bloody Mess Perk
Cooper’s shots do far more damage to the people he fires at in Filly than you think they should. Essentially, any body part that his bullets hit during the scene explodes in a spectacular fashion. This pays heed to the games’ Bloody Mess perk, which makes it so that when the player shoots an enemy, it frequently explodes in a large gorey mess. It also is a nod to the VATS system.
Gulper
Several mutant creatures called gulpers appear throughout the show. These are geckos in Fallout 76 and the Far Harbor DLC in Fallout 4.
“Thou shalt be sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time”
The line by Cooper Howard breaks the fourth wall, joking about all the side quests players are encouraged to complete in the Fallout games.
Super Duper Mart
A large portion of Episode 4 takes place in a Super Duper Mart, a memorable store brand from the games. There’s always something strange happening at Super Duper Mart, just like the organ-harvesting operation that several guys and their robots have.
Hacking
When Norm is attempting to unravel secrets regarding Vaults 31, 32, and 33, he hacks into a terminal using the same interface seen across the games.
New Vegas
The last shot of Season 1 has Overseer Hank (Lucy’s father), approaching New Vegas. This represents the wasteland’s version of Las Vegas.
Fallout is an American post-apocalyptic drama television series initially released in April 2024 on Amazon Prime Video.
