‘Fallout’ Season 2 Better Fill in These Blanks, or I’m Never Speaking to It Again!
J/K. I'll probably love it anyway.
Amazon’s Fallout TV series is considered a huge success by critics and fans alike, and has already been renewed for a second season! While season one was amazing, it left us with some burning questions that season two needs to answer.
1. What’s the deal with Lee Moldaver?
TMS‘ Sarah Barrett touches on many of the questions viewers have about Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury). Namely, how the heck has she survived intact since before the Great War? Cooper Howard is now a ghoul. Hank MacLean was a Vault-Tec employee frozen in a cryopod, as was every Vault 33 overseer. So, where does Moldaver fit into all this? She’s clearly not a ghoul, so she must have been frozen at some point. But where, how, and by whom?
Also, what’s her connection to the New California Republic? Was she one of the founders of the NCR and Shady Sands?
And lastly, what was the nature of her relationship with Lucy’s mother, Rose? Whether romantic or platonic, their relationship seemed to be a close one. Moldaver knew Rose well enough to speak knowledgeably about the kind of person she was and to recognize the same qualities in Lucy. As Barrett asks in her piece, if they were so close, how could Moldaver then allow such violence to come to Rose’s children while planning the attack and fake marriage at Vault 33? Children she knew when they were younger. Did she believe they would be strong and smart enough to survive and count on that? Or have her feelings about them turned sour over the years she’s lived with Rose as a feral ghoul?
Moldaver is dead, but in Fallout‘s world, death may only be temporary. I hope we get more information about Lee Moldaver as the show continues.
2. Does Norm get into a pod?
When we last see Norm MacLean (Moisés Arias), he’s been trapped in Vault 31 by Brain-on-a-Roomba Bud Askins (Michael Esper) after learning the truth about the nature of the Vault 31-32-33 relationship: Vault 31 is where Vault-Tec managers are kept frozen to act as overseers for the other two vaults, and Vault 32 and 33 are breeding pools designed to breed future managers to rebuild civilization in Vault-Tec’s image.
Bud suggests that, since he won’t let Norm leave Vault 31, Norm should get into his father’s cryopod to ride out the apocalypse until vault-dwellers can return to the surface. We see Norm step toward the cryopods with a worried expression … but we don’t see him climb in it and freeze himself.
From the start of the show, Norm has been a contrary character. When others go left, he goes right. When his family tries to start a book club, he plays games on his Pip-Boy instead. And when the Vault 33 council accuses him of “lacking enthusiasm,” he doesn’t exactly try to change that impression.
Hell, he’s in Vault 31 in the first place because, like his sister, he couldn’t let his questions rest. Though others warned him to forget what he saw in Vault 32, he had to keep investigating. So, it doesn’t seem likely that Norm would willingly freeze himself just because Bud tells him. Especially since Bud isn’t necessarily a physical threat. I predict that Norm will try to outsmart Bud and reach Vault 32 to get help from Chet (Dave Register) and Woody (Zach Cherry) to overthrow the Vault-Tec leadership.
Either way, we need to find out what happened to Norm!
3. What’s the status of the New California Republic?
As I mentioned in my piece about the Fallout season one finale, just because Shady Sands was destroyed doesn’t mean that the NCR is no more. Lucy passes a billboard where Shady Sands is touted as “the first” capital of the NCR, meaning that the capital has changed. Meanwhile, Bethesda’s Todd Howard has confirmed that not only is the Fallout series canon, but that the events of “Fallout: New Vegas” happened, and that the “fall of Shady Sands” doesn’t necessarily refer to Hank and Vault-Tec bombing it.
In the Fallout games, the NCR became a bloated organization that had trouble managing its holdings. Communication is tricky when all you have are holo-tapes, a janky computer terminal system for inter-departmental mail, and word of mouth. It would stand to reason that, Shady Sands or no Shady Sands, the NCR still exists. Weaker perhaps, but still in existence. After all, Moldaver is still flying the flag and working out of NCR headquarters at the Griffith Observatory.
With season two likely taking us to New Vegas, we’ll surely learn more about the NCR in season two!
4. What happened to Mr. House after “New Vegas?”
Fallout viewers learned that fan-favorite game villain Mr. House (Ravi Silver) was at the Vault-Tec apocalypse-planning meeting in the season finale. Gamers know that he survived by putting his consciousness into a robot. House then controls New Vegas (at least at the time of Fallout: New Vegas), which takes place 15 years before the TV series. Since New Vegas is still standing in the show’s timeline, many players believe that this makes the game-ending where Mr. House wins the canonical ending.
But did New Vegas’ survival require Mr. House? Will the New Vegas that Hank walks into in his stolen power armor be the same New Vegas of the game, or will 15 years have changed it significantly? Will Mr. House appear in the present-day timeline of Fallout season two? How will the show address his backstory if he does? Or, does Mr. House have an even more frightening and mysterious successor whom we’ll meet as a new character? Inquiring robo-brains want to know.
5. What happened to Cooper Howard’s family?
We know that Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) was the spokesperson for Vault-Tec and the origin of the “Vault Boy” logo. Howard, his wife Barb (Frances Turner), and their daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith) were guaranteed a spot in a management vault. After discovering his wife’s betrayal, they were divorced and Cooper started working as an entertainer at children’s birthday parties. Cooper and Janey are working a party gig when the first bombs drop, and when we meet Cooper 200 years later he’s become The Ghoul. But what happened during those lost years?
How did he lose his spot in a vault? Did Barb and their daughter get into one? When the bombs fell, did Cooper take Janey to a vault, or somewhere else? Did he still think he had a spot in a vault only to be turned away? Did he get into a vault, but eventually leave? Did Vault-Tec make him a ghoul?
When he confronts Hank toward the end of the Fallout season finale, he asks him “Where’s my f*cking family?” He expects Hank to know, meaning there’s a good chance they’re still alive. Perhaps they’re in Vault 31. Or maybe they’ve since been thawed and located elsewhere. Regardless of their whereabouts, The Ghoul is a fan-favorite character on the show, and we want him to get answers!
Speculation is an extremely fun pastime when it comes to genre shows. That’s why they call it “speculative fiction.” And we’ll have to entertain ourselves with a lot of speculating until Fallout returns to Prime Video for its second season … whenever that will be.
(featured image: JoJo Whilden/Prime Video)
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