Norm MacLean: Lucy's Brother and the Truth About Vault 31

Norm MacLean is Lucy MacLean's brother and the son of Hank MacLean, overseer of Vault 33. He's the vault's sceptic. While Lucy goes up to the surface, Norm stays behind and works out that Vaults 31, 32 and 33 are a Vault-Tec experiment and that his own father is part of it. Moisés Arias plays him. (Fallout, "The End"; Fallout, "The Beginning")

Who is Norm MacLean?#

Norm is the MacLean who doesn't fit. Lucy says the family book club is still trying to get her brother on board, and on her wedding day he cheerfully suggests her husband could be a cannibal or "crammed full of tumors". When the council refuses to look for Hank, Norm says they don't want to find him, because then they'd no longer be in charge. (Fallout, "The End")

The council hauls him in for helping Lucy out of the vault door. They remind him he has already worked janitorial and kitchen duty, and he expects a demotion. At a vault meeting about 16 captured raiders, he suggests doing to them what they would have done to Vault 33, and the room gasps. (Fallout, "The Head")

Norm and the secret of the vaults#

Delivering Jell-O cake to the prisoners, Norm is told by a raider that whatever the people of Vault 32 were up to, it was "anything but innocent", and then "31 and 32." Norm takes Chet into Vault 32. Everyone there has been dead for about two years, apparently strangled by each other, and the terminal shows the outer door was opened from outside with his mother Rose's Pip-Boy. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

He keeps digging. The dead of 32 seem to have been trying to get into Vault 31. He realises Vault 33 always elects an overseer from Vault 31, and Vault 32 did too, and asks: "You think 200 years of coincidence comes down to a slogan?" Steph Harper, from Vault 31, says only that its mashed potatoes were a little better, the same thing his father used to say. When he asks Betty Pearson what happened to his mother's Pip-Boy, she says she and Hank buried it with her. (Fallout, "The Past")

The raider prisoners are poisoned, and Chet leaves with the settlers for Vault 32, telling Norm they're all cowards, "That's why we live in a vault." During the send-off Norm slips away and gets into Vault 31. (Fallout, "The Radio")

Inside Vault 31#

Vault 31 has one waking resident: Bud Askins, a Vault-Tec executive whose brain now drives a small robot. It tells Norm he shares only 50 percent of Hank MacLean's DNA. Rows of cryo pods hold "Bud's Buds", Vault-Tec junior executives, and the robot explains that Vaults 32 and 33 are their "breeding pool" for a class of "super managers". It also tells him the vault cannot let him leave and suggests he wait in his dad's pod. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Norm refuses. By season 2 he has disabled the inter-vault communications and is starving among empty ration cases. Bud offers him two "rational" choices, his father's pod or a quick poison, and says Reclamation Day will come when there's no one left on the surface to disagree. Norm replies that he has plenty of irrational ones and starts thawing everyone. Bud protests they are meant to come out once every 30 years. "Chaos is easy," Norm says. (Fallout, "The Innovator")

Leading the 31ers out#

The thawed executives assume it's Reclamation Day and panic when Norm tells them Bud Askins is dead. So he gives them Bud's own pitch: he is "the product of 200 years of genetic engineering", a super manager, and they are his staff. Escaping Vault 31, he says, is Bud's final test. They find a hatch in the cryo bay ceiling, and Norm is the first one out. Looking at the wasteland, he says, "It's beautiful." (Fallout, "The Golden Rule")

His authority doesn't last. In the ruins of Los Angeles he tells everyone to ration their food, but Ronnie McCurtry, who was Bud's personal assistant, mentions "Future Enterprise Ventures" and Phase 2 of the plan for Vaults 32 and 33. Norm has no idea what they are, and lets Ronnie lead. (Fallout, "The Demon in the Snow")

At Vault-Tec's abandoned headquarters they meet Ma June, who tells Norm she met his sister and that Lucy is probably dead. He refuses to believe it. A new hire named Claudia guesses he isn't really Bud's successor and remembers that Bud's boss, Barbara Howard, ran the vault proposals. Norm searches the database in Barb Howard's old office for Future Enterprise Ventures and finds a link to F.E.V., the Forced Evolutionary Virus, before Ronnie strangles him unconscious. (Fallout, "The Wrangler")

Norm at the end of season 2#

The executives decide that impersonating management deserves death. Claudia frees him, and Norm uses the headquarters radio to call Lucy, saying he's on the surface and needs her help, and then his father: "What's gonna happen to our Vault?" Neither answers. (Fallout, "The Handoff")

Ronnie drags him off for a "fair trial", but the elevator shafts open and Ma June's radroaches pour out. Ronnie shoves Norm away from the break room where the others hide, and the swarm kills everyone inside. Norm survives under a table, finds Claudia wounded but alive, and pulls her out on a sled, telling her, "Let's get you home." In the same finale his radio call is heard in a montage alongside Hank's, as Steph asks for Phase 2 to begin. (Fallout, "The Strip")

Norm and his family#

Norm has more reason than anyone to be angry with Hank. Lee Moldaver tells Lucy that their mother fled to Shady Sands with both children and that Hank took them back, so Norm too was raised on the story of a mother who died in the vault. He finds the lie piece by piece, from Rose's Pip-Boy in Vault 32 to Hank's empty pod in Vault 31, while Lucy hears it all at once at Griffith Observatory. (Fallout, "The Ghouls"; Fallout, "The Beginning")