In the world of Fallout, nothing is more important than family.
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Plucky heroine Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) leaves the safety of Vault 33 to find her kidnapped father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan). Maximus (Aaron Moten) is devoted to his found family, the Brotherhood of Steel. And Cooper Howard a.k.a. The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) has wandered the wasteland for centuries in search of his long-lost family.
Before he became the noseless gunslinger we know and love, The Ghoul was Hollywood star Cooper Howard, known for playing heroic cowboys in Western films. Howard was a devoted husband to his wife Barb (Frances Turner), a Vault-Tec executive, and a loving father to their daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith).
Barb recruits Cooper to be the spokesman for Vault-Tec and assures him that she’s reserved their family spots in the “management” vaults. But after he’s confronted by Moldaver (a.k.a. Ms. Williams), he realizes that something nefarious is happening at Vault-Tec. After planting a bug in his wife, Cooper overhears Vault-Tec execs in a meeting with other CEOs. Cooper listens as his wife lays out their grim plan: Vault-Tec will drop the bombs themselves, ending the world to rebuild it in their image.
After discovering his wife’s betrayal, Cooper and Barb (presumably) got 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 in 2077, and when we meet Cooper 200 years later he’s become The Ghoul. But what happened during those lost years?
The last we see is Cooper and Janey riding away from the nuclear fallout. Did Janey and Barb make it into a vault? Cooper certainly seems to think so, as we learn in the season one finale that he is still searching for his family. Did Barb and Janey enter cryostasis like Hank and Betty? Are either of them still alive? We’ll have to wait until season two to find out.
(featured image: Prime Video)