Fallout Episode 105 recap and easter eggs: "The Past"

We're rolling into the back half of Fallout season 1. Vault Dweller Lucy has survived a terrifying ordeal and Maximus, aka "Knight Titus," is fresh off his victory over the gulper. Meanwhile, things are getting very interesting down in Vault 33. And The Ghoul is taking an episode off, presumably to take a nap after his epic bender.

We've done quick reviews for all 8 episodes of Fallout. Now we're recapping each episode of the season in detail, pointing out easter eggs and important plot points to help you get the most of your watch. It's time to give that treatment to Episode 105, "The Past." Beware SPOILERS beyond this point.

Fallout Episode 5 recap: "The Past"

The Brotherhood of Steel sat out of the last Fallout episode, "The Ghouls," so it's only fitting that "The Past" catches us up with them right at the top. Maximus (Aaron Moten) and his squire Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton) are celebrating their victory. When last we saw them, they had secured Wilzig's head and whatever artifact was inside. I still love the way the show is using the power armor and its deep voice for laughs. Thaddeus insists that Maximus brand him as a squire...but it's only afterward that Maximus decides to tell him the truth about his identity, revealing that Knight Titus died.

Thaddeus doesn't take it well, telling Maximus that the Brotherhood will kill him if they finds out. Maximus then makes the terrible decision to just try to ruthlessly kill Thaddeus, which doesn't work out for anyone. The power armor steps on Thaddeus' leg, crushing it, but the squire still manages to take advantage of Maximus' inexperience and yank the fusion core out of the armor. This renders it totally inert, making it impossible for Maximus to get out without help from another person.

Thaddeus then leaves Maximus to die in his power armor, taking the head and fusion core and setting out to reunite with the Brotherhood. CX404 tags along, because she follows whoever has the head.

The following morning, Maximus is sweating and suffering in his suit — though it looks like his pain will be short-lived, since a group of radroaches attacks his armor. These creatures are fully CGI, and it works pretty well for the scene. But just before they can find a way to get through the armor to the juicy person inside, Lucy (Ella Purnell) shows up and blasts them to bits. This is another one of those moments that feels a little too convenient, given the scope of the wasteland that these characters are traveling across. But it's easy to forgive, as Lucy stomps radroaches while Maximus smiles, smitten in his armor, and "Robin in the Pine" by Bonnie Guitar plays. Fallout cares far more about the vibes than it does details about how far these characters have to walk from one place to the next, and that's fine by me.

There's a great moment of tension between Lucy and Maximus as he tries to convince her to let him out of his armor. She's had things go sideways an awful lot in the past few days. Can she trust him? He says she can, while also slipping back into bartering mode when he realizes she has radiation sickness, and the Radaway medicine in his suit could help her. And he lies to her about his name. So even though there is a feeling that these two genuinely want to trust each other, the impulse to be duplicitous is too ingrained in Maximus to avoid.

Nonetheless, Lucy lets him out of his suit, which also serves as a fun way to let the audience know that she's already familiar with power armor, since they're a pre-war relic that she studied back in the vault. She hardly has a minute to geek out before she loses consciousness, and Maximus proves he was true to his word by helping her.

This display of goodness is enough for Lucy to try and team up with Maximus. She also realizes that the Brotherhood is after Wilzig's head and offers to help Maximus get it for them — on the condition that they lend her a few knights to help her get back her dad from Moldaver. He's still hesitant, but ultimately agrees, and they use the the tracker Lucy placed in the head to go after it.

We also spend quite a bit of time in the vaults during "The Past," picking up with Norm and Chet still exploring Vault 32. They find their most alarming clue yet as to what's going on. Vaults 33, 32 and 31 are all connected via tunnels, and before Norm heads back, he wants to check on the entrance to Vault 31. There, they find a pile of bodies outside the door, with "we know what's in there" scrawled in blood on the wall.

The mystery of what that means has to wait, as Norm and Chet rush back to Vault 33 hoping that no one noticed their overnight absence. They arrive just in time to vote in the elections that are happening that day. There's a lot of deadpan humor in the vaults, from Norm and Chet's explanation to Betty Pearson (Leslie Uggams) that they were off planting "tatoes" to Davey's (Leer Leary) painfully awkward explanation to Reg McPhee (Rodrigo Luzzi) that he'll be voting for someone else in the election. The humor's as solid as ever in this episode.

Speaking of Betty, this is a big episode for her. She sweeps the election to become the new overseer. This happens right as Norm does a bit of digging into the past, and realizes that every single overseer that Vault 33 or Vault 32 has had was a transplant from Vault 31. That includes Betty as well as Norm and Lucy's dad, Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan). That adds a bit of ominous weight to the way Betty's smile keeps slipping as she watches Norm in this episode. He's clearly asking the right questions.

This voting pattern even has a catchphrase in the vaults: "When things look glum, vote for somebody from Vault 31." But when Norm tries to bring up how weird it all is to Chet, he dismisses it out of hand. Surely there's some explanation for the fact that more than 200 years of overseers for Vaults 32 and 33 have all come from Vault 31. Chet doesn't want to dig into it, because his new girlfriend Steph (Annabel O’Hagan) also happens to be from Vault 31. When Norm asks her what it's like, she dodges the question. No reason to be suspicious here.

No one is armed but everyone is shooting

Norm's investigation into the past of the vaults parallels nicely with Lucy's storyline, where she finds out more about everything that's happened in the wasteland in the past 200 years from Maximus. Although he's confused on some points too; he says the bombs fell when he was a kid. We find out later that those were different bombs. The end of the world is all relative, and quite a lot has happened since the end of the the Great War.

But before we get to the full history lesson, there's a downright hilarious scene where Lucy and Maximus try to cross a bridge only to find two other wasteland survivors standing on the other side. They're all at an impasse; no one trusts anyone, and they all say they're not armed even though the chances are pretty good they are. Lucy dials up her optimism and negotiates a way for them all to pass with their hands up...but when the other people get close enough to see her Pip-Boy, they try to kill her and Maximus for the loot. Maximus just barely manages to grab Lucy's gun and kill them both, though he's also shot in the scuffle.

Lucy is upset about this turn of events, but cools pretty quickly when Maximus reveals to her that these people were "fiends," aka cannibals. "I hate it up here," she replies. She may have grown a lot since coming to the surface, but she's still a Vault Dweller at heart.

The fate of Shady Sands

From the bridge, Maximus and Lucy have a clear shot to Shady Sands, a former settlement that was the heart of the New California Republic before it was bombed off the map. This is an enormous Easter egg; Shady Sands was a prominent town in both the original 1997 Fallout game and the sequel, Fallout 2, and has been referenced in others. Lucy is confused by its existence, because the idea of a settlement with more than 30,000 people gives the lie to the vault mission to come back up and restart civilization. Attempts had already been made decades ago, and were going fine until the worst happened.

It's here we get another big reveal: Maximus is a survivor from this city. He weathered the blast by hiding in a refrigerator, and was later discovered by the Brotherhood of Steel.

We don't get much time to process this revelation, because he sways on his feet and Lucy realizes his wound is worse than she thought. Adamant that they need medical supplies, she leads them to a nearby medical laboratory — note the Vault-Tec logo on the ground in front of it. Lucy charges in, leaving Maximus to follow her a minute later...only to find that she's mysteriously vanished. He heads through a door, conveniently labeled "Medical Supplies," only to realize it's a trap. The doors lock, and the floor falls out from under him.

Vaults are the best place in the world...aren't they?

Back in Vault 33, new overseer Betty Pearson decides to hold a vault-wide meeting. She's conferred with the overseer of Vault 31, and together they have decided on a plan to repopulate Vault 32 with some of 33's residents. To drum up hype, Betty brings everyone over to Vault 32 to check it out.

All of the carnage that Norm and Chet found only a day ago has mysteriously vanished. The walls are freshly cleaned and wall-papered, everything is repaired, and there's not a spot of blood to be found. We have a good old-fashioned cover up on our hands, people! Remember that toaster Norm found, which someone had used to kill themself? Well now it's on the counter and the only thing it's got in it is toast.

Remember the overseer's computer with the incriminating information about Rose MacLean's Pip-Boy? Well, that is one of the few things that couldn't be covered up. Norm wanders into the office to find the computer, which was working fine, has now been smashed.

As Norm stands confused over the desk, Betty comes up behind him and asks if he found anything interesting. "Great job cleaning up," he says. Betty only smiles and drops a quippy remark about preserving the vault spirit. Clearly, she knows a lot more than she's letting on. But when Norm presses her about his mother and what happened to her Pip-Boy after she died, Betty says it was buried with her. And she knows this for a fact, because she and Hank MacLean buried Rose.

Look, I'm not gonna go wild spoiling things for you. But if you haven't played the Fallout video games, here's a hard and fast rule that's true in every single one: there is always some messed up twist with the vaults. Nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems at first glance. And here we're starting to really get a feeling that something is off. I love the way the show has built up this tension. It knows that millions of people will go into the series knowing that there's probably something wrong in Vault 33, and it's still managed to make a really compelling mystery. Kudos to the writers.

This all lends a lot more weight to Lucy and Maximus' final scene, where they wake up only to see people in vault suits through a nearby window. "We're in the best place in the world," Lucy says. "A vault." But which vault? This is a hard cliffhanger to leave off on — good thing every episode of Fallout is available to binge watch!

Easter eggs

• Lucy tells Maximus that when she was a kid playing with her mom, she thought the "big light" in the vault was the sun. File that bit of information away for later; it'll hit differently on rewatch.
• Davey tells Woody Thomas that when he was younger, he ran against Hank MacLean for overseer but lost because of Hank's leadership during a weevil famine, which happened right around the time of the election. Lucy mentioned this famine to The Ghoul in Episode 4.
• This episode is directed by Clare Kilner, who directed the Green Council episode of House of the Dragon.

All eight episodes of Fallout are available to stream now on Prime Video. We'll be recapping more of them so you can make sure you catch all the little details. Check back soon for more!

• Fallout Episode 1: "The End"
• Fallout Episode 2: "The Target"
• Fallout Episode 3: "The Head"
• Fallout Episode 4: "The Ghouls"
• Fallout Episode 5: "The Past"
• Fallout Episode 6: "The Trap"
• Fallout Episode 7: "The Radio"
• Fallout Episode 8: "The Beginning"

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