Hank MacLean: the Vault 33 Overseer Who Destroyed Shady Sands

Hank MacLean is the overseer of Vault 33 and the father of Lucy and Norm MacLean in the Fallout TV series. He looks like the ideal vault dad, but he is a pre-war Vault-Tec employee who spent two centuries in cold storage, and he destroyed Shady Sands with a nuclear bomb. Kyle MacLachlan plays him. (Fallout, "The End"; Fallout, "The Beginning")

Who is Hank MacLean?#

To Vault 33, Hank is the kindly overseer who believes the vaults will one day bring civilisation back to the surface. At Lucy's wedding he toasts the next generation, who he says will be able to go back up, and admits he sometimes fears that the "mean old world" will change them instead. (Fallout, "The End")

On the wedding morning he tells Lucy he had never set foot outside Vault 31 before he met her mother. He has told his children that Rose died in what Lucy calls the Great Plague of '77, and that his grief left him at 128 pounds. Both stories turn out to be cover. (Fallout, "The End"; Fallout, "The Ghouls")

Hank before the war#

In the season 1 finale's 2077 flashback, Hank turns up at Cooper Howard's house as "Henry", a new man who works with Barb, and asks the film star for an autograph. Years later the Ghoul remembers him as the kid who used to pick up his wife's dry cleaning. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

In season 2 he travels with Barb Howard and Cooper to the Lucky 38 in Las Vegas with a briefcase chained to his wrist. He talks his way into Barb's meeting with Robert House's double, where RobCo shows off its brain chip. Cooper gets him drunk, and Barb takes the cold fusion diode Hank is carrying. A hotel maid named Steph takes him back to his room, and by the next morning they are engaged. (Fallout, "The Wrangler"; Fallout, "The Other Player"; Fallout, "The Handoff"; Fallout, "The Strip")

Bud Askins's "Bud's Buds" programme then froze him with other junior executives in Vault 31. As Bud tells Norm, the plan was to wake them one at a time to run Vaults 32 and 33 and breed with the dwellers there, creating "super managers" to inherit the surface. (Fallout, "The Beginning"; Fallout, "The Innovator")

Rose, Shady Sands and the bomb#

Hank married Rose in Vault 33. At Griffith Observatory, Lee Moldaver tells Lucy what happened next. Rose noticed someone was siphoning the vault's water and guessed people were living on the surface again. Hank told her the idea was ridiculous and to tell no one, so she ran away with the children to Shady Sands. When she wouldn't come home, he took the children and burned the city to the ground. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Season 2's "The Golden Rule" shows the attack. A caravan trader with a chip in his neck walks into Shady Sands repeating an NCR trooper's line about patrolling the Mojave, pulling a cart with a nuclear bomb on it. The episode then cuts to Hank in Vault 33, being called to read to young Lucy, who asks when her mother is coming back. (Fallout, "The Golden Rule")

The show never puts a year on screen for the bombing. A Vault 4 classroom timeline in "The Trap" lists "the fall of Shady Sands" in 2277, the year Lucy remembers her mother dying. Todd Howard told IGN that everything in the games happened and that the bombs fall just after the events of New Vegas, and fans infer around 2283 from the ages in the published pilot script. (Fallout, "The Trap"; Todd Howard on the Fallout timeline)

Hank defends himself to Lucy in the observatory. Rose, he says, stopped being her mother when she took them into danger, and he chose "their violent world" over "our peaceful one". He describes the wasteland's problem as factions endlessly at war, and his answer is to get rid of them and make the world "only ours to shape." (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Hank in season 1#

Moldaver's raiders pose as a wedding party from Vault 32 and take Hank in 2296. Given a choice between his daughter and the hostages, he shoves Lucy into a room, tells her she is his world, and is tranquillised and carried off. At the observatory he gives up the code for her cold fusion reactor when Lucy tells him to. During the Brotherhood of Steel attack he climbs into a dead knight's power armour, knocks out Maximus, is shot by the Ghoul and flies off. The last shot of the season finds him looking down at New Vegas. (Fallout, "The End"; Fallout, "The Beginning")

Hank in season 2#

In New Vegas he reaches a Vault-Tec facility under the Strip and radios an unnamed "sir", reporting for duty and saying nobody in Vault-Tec knows he is there. He means to combine work from Vault 24 and this vault into one chip, and he talks about a promotion. Tests kill his mice and a thawed pre-war customer before a version works on a kidnapped wastelander. (Fallout, "The Innovator"; Fallout, "The Golden Rule"; Fallout, "The Wrangler")

He uses Cooper's family as a bargaining chip, claiming through a chipped messenger that Barb and Janey are in his cryo chambers, and gets Lucy brought to him. He shows her an office of chipped former killers and legionaries now making more chips, and when a bound legionary breaks free and beats an NCR soldier, he stands back until she presses the button that chips them both. He calls the New California Republic "just like the Legion". Lucy handcuffs him to the oven and goes to destroy his mainframe, which turns out to be the living head of Congresswoman Diane Welch. (Fallout, "The Wrangler"; Fallout, "The Other Player"; Fallout, "The Handoff"; Fallout, "The Strip")

The Ghoul stops Hank from chipping Lucy, and she puts the chip in her father instead. Outside on the Strip he tells her the surface is the experiment, not the vaults, and that he has already sent chipped people into the wasteland under orders written centuries ago. Then he says he loves her and triggers his own chip. He no longer knows her. (Fallout, "The Strip")

Who is Hank working for?#

The show only hints. His "sir" is never named. In the finale Robert House tells the Ghoul that one of the hidden enemy's acolytes is in his building, and calls the Enclave the greatest threat to the wasteland. In Vault 32, Hank's wife Steph takes a Pip-Boy from a keepsake box he kept, introduces herself over the radio as Hank MacLean's wife, and asks whoever is listening to "initiate Phase 2". (Fallout, "The Innovator"; Fallout, "The Strip")