Who Is Lucy MacLean's Father?

Lucy MacLean's father is Hank MacLean, the overseer of Vault 33, played by Kyle MacLachlan. To Lucy he's the kind, devoted dad she leaves the vault to rescue. The truth comes out in the season 1 finale: he's a pre-war Vault-Tec man who was frozen for two hundred years, and he destroyed Shady Sands with a nuclear bomb to get his children back. (Fallout, "The End"; Fallout, "The Beginning")

The dad Lucy thought she had#

In 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. When the raiders posing as Vault 32 dwellers attack, he shoves Lucy to safety, tells her she is his world, and is carried off. (Fallout, "The End")

He'd told his children their mother died. Lucy repeats the family story to the Ghoul: Rose starved in the "Great Plague of '77", and her father dropped to 128 pounds from grief. On her wedding morning Hank also tells her he'd never set foot outside Vault 31 before he met her mother. Both stories are cover. (Fallout, "The Ghouls"; Fallout, "The End")

Who Hank really is#

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

He was frozen in Vault 31 with other junior executives, part of Bud Askins's programme known as "Bud's Buds". As Bud later 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. Interpretation: that makes Lucy and Norm, in Vault-Tec's eyes, part of the experiment, though the show leaves it at that. (Fallout, "The Beginning"; Fallout, "The Innovator")

What he did to Lucy's mother#

At Griffith Observatory, Moldaver tells Lucy the rest in front of him. Rose worked out that something was siphoning the vault's water and guessed people were living on the surface again. Hank called the idea ridiculous and told her to tell no one, so she ran away with the children to Shady Sands. When she refused to come home, he took them back and burned the city to the ground. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

His defence is cold: "I loved your mother. But she stopped being your mother when she left home." He says he chose between "their violent world and our peaceful one". Season 2's "The Golden Rule" shows the attack itself, with the bomb carried in by a caravan trader under Hank's control, and then cuts to a young Lucy asking him when her mom is coming back. (Fallout, "The Beginning"; Fallout, "The Golden Rule")

Rose survived as a ghoul, and Lucy, finding her, shoots her to end her suffering. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Lucy and her father in season 2#

Lucy leaves the observatory with the Ghoul to hunt Hank down. In season 2 she ends up a prisoner in his Vault-Tec facility under the New Vegas Strip, where chipped wastelanders work for him making more brain chips. He tries to win her over, and at the end tries to chip her. The Ghoul stops him, and Lucy puts the chip in her father instead. (Fallout, "The Innovator"; Fallout, "The Other Player"; Fallout, "The Strip")

Outside on the Strip, Hank tells her the surface was the real experiment all along, and that he has already sent chipped people out under orders written before the war. Then he says he loves her and triggers his own chip. He no longer knows her, and she leaves him there. (Fallout, "The Strip")

Read more#

Hank MacLean has his full story, including who he may be working for, and what happened to Lucy's mother covers Rose. (Fallout, "The Beginning"; Fallout, "The Strip")