Our Biggest Unanswered Questions After the ‘Fallout’ Finale

Editor's Note: The following contains full Fallout spoilers.

The big picture

• Power returns to the Wasteland with cold fusion technology, changing the lives of the survivors permanently.
• Moldaver's secrets of survival remain a mystery, potentially related to cryopods or advanced Vault-Tec technology.
• Norm discovers Vault-Tec's sinister plans in Vault 31, setting the stage for future conflicts in the world of Fallout.

Prime Video's Negative consequence it's a treat for experienced players and newcomers alike. It has been a pleasure to follow the adventures of Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), Maximus (Aaron Moten), and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) around the Wasteland, as they face this strange post-apocalyptic world. A lot of exciting things happen in this first season, though It is also very open, to answer in future seasons. As Season 1 ends, new revelations are made and new questions arise, which we hope to get answers to in the future.

Power returns to the wastelands, now what?

Ever since the bombs fell in 2077, every inch of what used to be the US has been in the dark. Even in the vaults, where the electricity is never off, they rely on fusion cores to provide power to the communities living below the surface. In the Wasteland, the the darkness of the night has become such a defining aspect of life that creating fires is actually dangerouslike Dr. Siggi Wilzig (Michael Emerson) tells Lucy in episode 2, “The Target”. It can attract all kinds of dangers.

In the end, however, Lucy finally delivers Wilzig's head to Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) at the headquarters of the New California Republic (NCR), and it turns out that Wilzig inserted a cold fusion core into his own head. Unlike the power generated by a normal fusion core, cold fusion can power as much as Old City Los Angeles for a long time. Moldaver ignites the cold fusion reactor during the battle against the Brotherhood of Steel and lights up the city. This will probably change the way people live, at least in that corner of the Wasteland, as the power has returned and no one has to endure the darkness anymore. It's unclear what range a cold fusion core has, but if this technology exists, there's hope for everyone in the Wasteland.

At the end of the ending, however, the Brotherhood takes over the observatory's control room and Moldaver dies, leaving the cold fusion reactor on as lights go out everywhere. Maximus is hailed as a knight and the Brotherhood wins right next to the reactor. The problem is that the Brotherhood's mission is to preserve technology, and they don't trust normal people, so this “illumination” of the city may be short-lived. It is not known how the reactor works if it can be shut down or the core can be brought back to Brotherhood headquarters, but the technology is effectively in their hands as of now.

How did Moldaver survive the Apocalypse?

We meet with Moldaver Negative consequencethe premiere of “The End”. She invades Vault 33, coming from Vault 32 with a group of raiders, wreaks havoc and kidnaps supervisor Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan). At first, it seems like she's just a surface prowler that found her way into a vault, though it is slowly revealed that he actually planned the whole thing for two centuries. Later, flashbacks to Cooper Howard's past show that Moldaver has in fact existed for a long time and defended against Vault-Tec's Vault program.

So how did he survive the apocalypse? Towards the end of the season, Norm MacLean (Moses Arias), Lucy's brother, discovers the secret of Vault 31, and how it houses cryogenic pods that hold the original Vault-Tec workers to monitor progress in the Vaults and ensure the company's role as leaders in the future . On the surface, Lucy learns that Moldaver once ran the NCR and the city of Shady Sands, which Hank MacLean destroyed with a nuclear bomb.

Moldaver's antagonistic relationship with Vault-Tec makes it unlikely that he was in one of the company's cryopods, but he could have been an executive who defected years later. He may also have had access to the cryogenic technology used by Vault-Tec and replicated it. Some theories suggest that she might have been a synthesizer(what are androids called in the world of Negative consequence). It's a less likely possibility, and that answer may be one of the key points of Season 2, since he got Cooper Howard to spy on Vault-Tec in 2077, and his story in the past is far from over.

What happened to Cooper Howard and his family?

One of the saddest plots Negative consequence it's from Cooper Howard. We meet Walton Goggins' characters in very different contexts: Howard as a Hollywood icon, the Ghoul as a long-lived gunslinger who has become dependent on radiation medicine to keep from going wild. uuntil the pieces come together, and they are revealed to be one and the same. Howard's story will likely continue to unfold in two different timelines, the “present” one when he goes after Vault-Tec with Lucy, and the past one set in 2077, when the nukes fall.

In the past, Howard didn't really like his wife Barb's (Frances Turner) worked at Vault-Tec, and caused some friction between the pair whenever he brought it up. Barb often talked about how she did her job. He intended to secure his family a place in “one of the good vaults,” something that always made Cooper suspicious. From the episode 1 flashback, it's implied that Cooper somehow fell out of favor sometime after that, working at children's parties with his daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith), and the two were together when the bombs fell. We know that Cooper and Barb were divorced at the time, but did Barb and Janey survive the explosion?

Another important point about The Ghoul is how he stayed alive after the apocalypse. In episode 1, he is revived by a group of bounty hunters, and their leader talks about how someone called Dom Pedro revives Howard once a year to torture him and then buries him again. The Ghoul's tomb even has some anti-radiation medicine attached to it, to keep it from going wild for over 200 years. Dom Pedro is sure to be pissed when he learns that his beloved Ghoul is roaming the Wasteland, and he may even become a villain in future seasons.

Will Norm ever leave Vault 31?

After Lucy ventures into the Wasteland in the Negative consequence premiere, his brother, Norm, begins to pay attention to what is happening in Vault 33. He begins to investigate the fact that every Overseer Vault 33 ever had came from Vault 31including Hank MacLean and Betty Pearson (Leslie Uggams), until he finally enters Vault 31 and discovers the secret of Vault-Tec.

In Vault 31, Norm encounters the brain of Bud Askins (Michael Esper), who was a Vault-Tec executive in the past and created the “Bud's Buds” program to perpetuate the company's leadership into the future through cryo-pods. Bud closes Norm on lap 31 with him and offers Hank's cryopod for Norm to hibernate in, but Norm isn't likely to accept. He could easily kill Bud too, but it doesn't seem like it's in his best interest to do so.

What will happen to the pioneers of Vault 32?

Moldaver and his raiders nearly destroy Vault 32 at the beginning of Fallout, but Vault-Tec mysteriously restores it to its pristine condition almost immediately afterward. Having an empty vault is bad for business, so Supervisor Betty, in partnership with Vault 31, decides repopulate it by sending people from Vault 33 to be “pioneers” into Vault 32. Among the people chosen are Chet (Dave Register) and his new wife, Stephanie Harper, who becomes supervisor. And of course it comes from Vault 31.

Stephanie's appointment as the new supervisor at Vault 32 implies that the conspiracy surrounding the connection between Vaults 31, 32, and 33 will continue to be a major plot point in the coming seasons. In Vault 33, Betty continues as supervisor, and something bigger is happening that only the executives who hibernated in Vault 31 know about. Stephanie will probably work with them and probably even go against Chet eventually, but it's unlikely that these three times simply continue to exist as normal.

Negative consequence is streaming exclusively on Prime Video in the US.

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