Season 2 of Prime Video's Fallout TV adaptation is almost here, with the continuation of the story set to debut on 17 December, as fans finally get to head back to New Vegas, all these years later.
If you didn't manage to catch the first season of the show, or simply feel like you need a refresher on everything that went on (which, in all fairness, was a lot), we thought it might be helpful to look at all the characters that appear in the show and where they ended up by the end of the show's debut.
Obviously, there will be major story spoilers for Season One here, so don't start shouting at us if you read on from here and something exciting comes up that you'd forgotten about.
Lucy MacLean
Played by the excellent Ella Purnell, Lucy MacLean serves as the show's overarching protagonist and a general force for good in a world that so often lacks much of it. Born and raised in Vault 33, the show opens with Lucy volunteering for an arranged marriage with a dweller from the neighbouring Vault 32. Unfortunately, the members of Vault 32 are revealed to be raiders after the wedding, with a huge fight breaking out that sees many end up dead, and Lucy's father kidnapped by the nefarious seeming Lee Moldaver.
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This sets Lucy on a quest to retrieve her father, heading out into the Wasteland despite protests from many in the Vault. It's there that she meets former Enclave scientist Dr. Siggi Wilzig, who escaped the organisation with a blue device in his neck, and his experimental dog CX404.
Wilzig has a major bounty on his head, with the Brotherhood of Steel and figures like Walton Goggins' Ghoul after him for the device he has. After he is injured in the town of Filly, he implores Lucy to grimly remove his head and take that to the aforementioned Moldaver, where her dad would be, as that's all they want.
Believing that to be a trade that would see her get her father back, Lucy agrees and sets out with the head to track down Moldaver again. She then loses the head in the mouth of a Gulper, before the Ghoul captures her and uses her as bait to get it back.
After eventually leaving the Ghoul following a fight with some Ferals, Lucy finds Brotherhood Squire Maximus, and they agree to travel together to retrieve the head, which has now ended up in the possession of Thaddeus, another lowly Brotherhood Squire.
After successfully getting it back, they eventually track down Moldaver and her group of acolytes, where it is explained to her that Moldaver and her father were both alive before the bombs dropped. Additionally her mother escaped Vault 33 with her children after finding everything out, but her dad Hank tracked her down and nuked the idyllic settlement of Shady Sands, turning Lucy's mother Rose into a feral ghoul in the process.
Lucy turns over the head to Moldaver, who uses the device contained within to complete her cold fusion reactor, restoring power to swathes of the wastes in the process, before she is eventually killed. After she disavows Hank, he escapes, before Lucy joins the Ghoul to track him down. Phew!
The Ghoul / Cooper Howard
The character who has been on the biggest journey in the show so far, is undoubtedly Walton Goggins' Ghoul. The show opens with him in human form as actor Cooper Howard, entertaining children at a party in one of his trademark cowboy roles. The bombs drop whilst he's there, forcing him to scoop up his daughter and ride off on his horse to an unknown fate.
219 years later he is very much a ghoul, though not feral, and bounty hunters attempt to use him to track down the Enclave scientist Dr. Wilzig. Instead, the Ghoul kills them and decides to go himself, tracking him down to Filly, where he mortally wounds him before being distracted by a fight with the Brotherhood of Steel, allowing Lucy and Wilzig to escape.
He tracks down Lucy (now carrying the scientist's head) and takes her prisoner, attempting to trade her to organ harvesters for chems that he needs to sustain himself. He collapses shortly afterwards, with Lucy escaping, but not before she leaves him the chems he needs in a fairly remarkable act of mercy.
He awakes to find he has now been taking prisoner himself based on the crimes he has committed in the wastes, but he manages to escape and ascertain the location of Moldaver and her clan.
After descending on that area for the show's finale, the Ghoul is present for the revelations surrounding Hank and his wife Rose, much of which he already new, though some information leads the Ghoul to believe that his family may still be alive, particularly given his wife's extremely prominent position in Vault-Tec.
He invites Lucy to travel with him, given their similar direction, and they head off in the direction of New Vegas to track down Hank, and possibly Howard's family.
The episodes are littered with smaller flashbacks about Cooper Howard's life before the bombs drop, showing that his work advertising Vault-Tec had begun to cause him some moral quandaries.
Hank MacLean
Lucy's dad opens the show as a caring and considerate figure who ensures that his daughter has a good life in Vault 33, particularly compared to the poor souls who are forced to live on the surface.
After he is kidnapped by Moldaver in the raid on the vault, he mostly disappears until the end of the season, but his presence is felt throughout, either through Lucy's quest to find him, or storytelling via other child Norm.
Norm discovers that every overseer in Vault 32 and 33 comes from the also connected Vault 31, including his father.
Lucy eventually finds Hank locked in a cage at Moldaver's base of operations, following which we get a flashback from the viewpoint of Cooper Howard, where it is eventually revealed that his wife's assistant at Vault-Tec, before the bombs dropped, is Hank. It's a major revelation, but arguably an even more startling piece of information about Hank comes to light.
Some years previously, after something starts siphoning Vault 32's water, Lucy's mother Rose concludes that life has returned to the surface. Hank dismissed her, but Rose escaped with the children, where she met Moldaver in the relatively pleasant community of Shady Sands. Hank tracked them down and took the children back to the vault before destroying the town with a nuclear device, turning Rose into a feral ghoul in the process.
All parties descend upon Moldaver's base including the Brotherhood of Steel and the Ghoul, with the former releasing Hank, who ends up stealing a fallen Knight's power armour and escaping into the night.
Maximus
Maximus arguably has the most interesting journey in the first season, going through some things that would have left most of us dead in the post-apocalyptic dust.
He opens the series as a lowly aspirant in the Brotherhood of Steel, who is having a pretty miserable time getting beaten up by his immediate peers. After his friend Dane sustains an injury after being promoted to the rank of Squire, Maximus replaces them and goes on his first mission alongside Knight Titus, namely searching for the Enclave scientist that Lucy comes into contact with.
Both are attacked by a Yao-Guai, with Titus sustaining an injury that needs quick attention. Instead of saving him, Maximus lets him die, in all fairness after being treated extremely poorly by Titus.
Maximus dons the power armour and tries to complete the mission, first coming into contact with Lucy and the Ghoul in Filly, with the former escaping. At this point, Maximus basically assumes Titus' identity, claiming a new squire from the Brotherhood in the form of Thaddeus, one of the people who used to beat him up.
They both manage to recover the head of the Enclave scientist, actually bonding somewhat before Maximus feels comfortable enough to share his true identity with Thaddeus. Outraged, Thaddeus steals the fusion core from his power armor, trapping him in the suit to die a slow and excruciating death while he takes the head back to the Brotherhood.
Lucy finds him and they agree to try and find Thaddeus together. After some bizarre adventures in Vault 4, they do find Thaddeus carrying the head, but with the Brotherhood overhead, Maximus stays behind to cover Lucy's escape, as well as Thaddeus (who has since become a ghoul. More on that later).
Maximus takes part in the attack on Moldaver's base with the Brotherhood, during which the forces come to believe that he was the one who fired the fatal shot at Moldaver. They spontaneously grant him the rank of Knight, basically by popular demand, and we close that current chapter for Maximus.
That should catch you up with all of the major characters and their movements ahead of the release of season 2. All roads lead to New Vegas this time around, and I can't wait to see what they've got in store.
Topics: Fallout