Vault 33 is a Vault in what was once Los Angeles in the Fallout TV series.[3] Its entrance is located shortly south of the Santa Monica Pier.[1] Along with Vaults 31 and 32, it is one of the "Three Vaults" linked by a triangle of tunnels,
Hank MacLean is the Vault's overseer as of 2296. His daughter Lucy is the main protagonist of the series.
Background[]
An experimental Vault built in California,[4] Vault 33 is unique in that it forms a part of a network of Vaults; it is connected directly to its sister Vaults: Vault 31 and Vault 32. To prevent the spread of threats (e.g., infectious disease), the three Vaults are isolated from one another, except for periodic trade (happening every three years, known as the Triennial Trade) and situations where the Vaults come to each other's aid. The Vault functions as a democracy like its sister Vaults, with the overseer chosen by the community in popular elections for four-year terms, advised by a Vault council.[5] Its dwellers are told that the surface is unfit for recolonization due to radiation levels and instead encouraged to bond with each other and the other two Vaults.[6]
The Vault was sealed as planned on the day of the Great War, with the external coast armoring protecting it against ongoing erosion by the Pacific Ocean. Although it functioned as designed, there were occasional technical issues and internal system breakdowns that were difficult to repair and address (eg. in February 2095). Vault 31 provided assistance as needed,[7] and the system endured for nearly 220 years. Vault dwellers were kept focused on the promise of Reclamation Day when the Vaults would open, and they would emerge to restart civilization.[8] In the meantime, the dwellers were focusing on keeping their Vault operational and training for the eventual Reclamation Day, honing their skills as part of community associations like the Young Pipefitter's Association, gymnastics club, fencing teams or simply participating in intermediate physical education and the rifle range. Much of the organization was horizontal and competence-based, although the overseer and council made the decisions in crucial affairs. The most important was selecting candidates to marry dwellers from Vault 32. To avoid incest, family trees were tracked and strictly controlled, and the Triennial Trade also included personnel transfers to inject fresh genes into the community.[9]
The Vault made regular exchanges with the other Vaults over the years and remained operational well into the late 23rd century. The overseers included Robert Olsen (2101-2109), Ava West (2109-2121), George Yaffe (2121 - 2125), and in subsequent decades Patricia Peters, Alexander Boamer, Laurence Ronald, Betty Pearson and Hank MacLean. MacLean served fifteen years as the Vault's overseer, elected four consecutive times.[10] He has guided the Vault through one of its biggest crises, the Great Plague of 2277, during which he imposed a strict quarantine, confining the dwellers to their apartments. Although numerous dwellers starved, MacLean was credited with saving the Vault, in particular due to losing weight and dropping to just 128 pounds (58 kg), as well as losing his wife, Rose MacLean, to starvation.[11]
Attack on the Vault[]
Lucy MacLean trying to survive the raid on Vault 33
By 2296, the Vault continued to survive as it always did, although two centuries of no contact with the outside world or fresh genetic stock (a problem Vault City experienced as well), has led to complications. In particular, it has led to instances of cousin-on-cousin intimate relations, eg. between the overseer's daughter and Chet,[12] though both were well aware that it was not a sustainable practice for maintaining the Vault's population.[13] The upcoming Triennial Trade (73rd, assuming they occurred every three years) with Vault 32 included the exchange of seed for planting and machinery parts to help the sister Vault cope with a devastating blight that wiped out its wheat, for an influx of new genes. The bride accepted by the council was none other than Lucy MacLean, the overseer's daughter.[9] Owing to the isolation, Vault 33 did not know what to expect, as telegrams mentioned Overseer Jackson's passing, replaced by a new overseer, Lee Moldaver.[14]
What the overseer did not expect was that the Vault dwellers were actually outsiders on a raid. After the wedding, when the Vault settled in for sleep, Moldaver initiated the attack. The raiders sacked the armory and killed numerous dwellers, eventually taking more hostage. At the intra-Vault passageway, Moldaver forced Hank MacLean to surrender and took him prisoner, blowing up the passageway behind her. The Vault was sealed once again, with dwindled numbers and sixteen violent raiders imprisoned in a repurposed reading room.[15] Following the clean-up, the Vault dwellers gathered to decide on the next course of action. Lucy proposed to send a search party to the surface to locate her father, but was shot down by both dwellers afraid of doing so and by Betty Pearson, former overseer, who prioritized security.[16] She refused to accept such a decision and decided to make a break for the exterior Vault door with the aid of Chet and Norm. Chet's gatekeeper credentials opened the door, allowing her to slip out (after tranquilizing Chet, who had last-minute doubts). Witnessed by Davey and Reg McPhee, both Norm and Chet were removed from their postings and reassigned as punishment. Pearson assigned Normanon to deliver food to the prisoners.[17]
In a subsequent Vault meeting, the dwellers gathered to decide the fate of the prisoners. Due to centuries of isolation and an idealistic, naive culture, they seriously consider rehabilitating and integrating them into Vault society to compensate for their reduced numbers. Norm suggested execution, but was shot down by Betty again, before the conversation shifted entirely to the broken water chip, which left the Vault with only two months of water reserves.[18]
Fate of Vault 32[]
Exposure to the prisoners had unforeseen consequences. Norman becomes troubled by what he sees in Vault 32 when he enters it during the wedding. Although he assumed the raiders killed the denizens, something didn't make sense. After persuading Chet to help him unearth the rubble and enter Vault 32, the two explored the abandoned Vault, finding traces of a brutal civil war and mass suicides, with the last bio-signal on the Pip-Boys from 2294, well before the raid.[19] Graffiti across the Vault suggested that the dwellers learned the truth, that their Vaults were not a shelter but an experiment, and violence erupted, with the overseer (a transfer from Vault 31) tortured to death and mass death leading to collapse. They also learned thanks to Norm that the Vault was accessed from the outside, with the use of Rose MacLean's Pip-Boy. The two returned to the Vault, but not before Betty Pearson ran into them in the atrium, raising her suspicions.[20]
Neither revealed the truth. The water crisis looming on the horizon dominated the elections. Although Reg McPhee and Woody Thomas stood for election, they had no idea how to run a political campaign; Vault 33 had no civics classes and Thomas, for example, was convinced that campaigning involved merely putting up campaigns and his effort amounted to ten posters. Reg McPhee was no different,[21] turning the election into a mockery of democracy; Betty Pearson was the only real candidate and relentlessly campaigned, including making public announcements Vault-wide that amounted to a thinly-veiled voting instruction. None of the dwellers aside from Norm picked up on it,[22] leading to a landslide victory for Betty with 98% of the vote. Even Reg voted for Betty.[23]
Norm investigated the Inter-Vault Archive and cross-referenced the list of population transfers from Vault 31 with the list of overseers elected, learning that every single overseer since 2077 came from Vault 31, not just in 33, but in 32 as well. When he tried to raise the issue with Chet, his cousin dismissed it as just a fact of life beneath the ground, crediting the slogan "When things look glum, vote 31" with ensuring these landslide victories.[24] Before he could investigate the matter further, Overseer Pearson announced a Vault-wide meeting about the future of Vault 32 as her first act of office.[25] At 10 a.m., she took the dwellers into Vault 32 to tour the empty shelter, which was hastily cleaned up and restored by Vault 31. All the bodies were removed and the damage covered up, creating the illusion of an empty Vault ripe for resettlement. Which led her to announce that after consulting with Vault 31, she will split the population of Vault 33 and use it to resettle the vacant Vault.[26]
The following day, the sixteen prisoners were found dead, poisoned with what seemed to be rat poison. After reprimanding Norman and having one of the dwellers assigned to the prisoners' care arrested, Overseer Pearson immediately sent out population reassignments, splitting the Vault. The decision was entirely her own, and she made sure to split Norm and Chet, leaving the resettlers with Stephanie Harper, another transfer from Vault 31, chosen as the interim and likely permanent overseer.[27] On the day of the Vault 32 Reclamation, Norm used the preoccupation of the overseer and other dwellers to sneak into the overseer's office and contact Vault 31, posing as Pearson. After claiming that the mission was not going too well, he managed to convince the Vault 31 overseer to open the door and entered the sister Vault.[28]
Role in the Vault Experiment[]
In the resulting confrontation with Bud Askins, the overseer, Norm learned the truth.[28] The Vault network was not an alliance of three democratic Vaults, but a eugenic experiment created by Askins,[29] to deal with the issue of human lifespans limiting the ability to implement projects requiring centuries, even millennia to come to fruition.[30] Considering the idea of keeping a failed nation like the United States alive an insane one, Askins instead decided to leverage the outsourcing of U.S. survival to the private sector to ensure that Vault-Tec would remain alive to rebuild the world as Askins saw fit. To this end, Vault 31 was filled with graduates of "Bud's Buds," an executive assistant training program set up by Askins for up-and-coming executives before the Great War, kept in cryostasis.[31]
Vault 32 and 33 were breeding pools, providing candidates for the junior executives (Buds) to breed with, to create a class of super managers to repopulate the Earth once the nuclear war wiped the surface clean (with or without Vault-Tec's help). Buds would strictly control both Vaults brought out of stasis, disguised as population transfers from Vault 31,[32] and operate under Bud Askins' supervision, disguised as telegrams and conferences with Vault 31.[31] The overseers are one example, but the council would also be dominated by them; Betty Pearson dominated the Vault 33 council after Hank succeeded her in the role, with Reg McPhee and Woody Thomas essentially rubber-stamping her decisions.[15]
This was made possible by social engineering; the dwellers were brought up believing in a meritocracy,[33] with no political education beyond a history of America curated by Vault-Tec[9] and no exposure to the outside world, and conditioned to conform to tradition and social expectations, in particular edicts by overseers.[34]
Being pre-War executives trained in social manipulation and navigating the cutthroat world of corporate politics, it was easy for the Buds to manipulate both Vaults and have them follow along with Askins' plan. Any challenger for the position of overseer would only be able to mount a pitiful campaign, at most, and when in doubt, the overseer could always engineer a crisis (e.g., a water chip breakage).[21] To ensure breeding success, sex and procreation have been stripped of social stigma and taboo, which creates a more egalitarian society, but also makes the Vault dwellers appear promiscuous in comparison with more repressed wastelanders.[35]
Both Rose and Lucy were likely examples of super-managers, with Rose deducing that civilization returned to the surface based on an imbalance in the Vault's water supply. Her husband, the overseer, dismissed the idea and instructed her to stay silent about it. Rose realized that he was hiding something and fled the Vault with her children, leading Hank to engineer a cover-up (likely the weevil famine) and give pursuit. He took the children back and returned to the Vault, after ensuring the capital of the New California Republic would be obliterated by a nuclear device, with his wife caught in the blast and competition for the future Vault-Tec supermen eliminated. At the same time, he unknowingly set in motion events that would lead to his downfall. Lee Moldaver, herself a pre-War survivor, swore vengeance, marshaling NCR remnants in New California in a bid to recover cold fusion research and unlock it for the people for the wasteland. She needed Hank's Vault-Tec credentials to activate the technology.[36]
Norm was unable to return to the Vault, with Askins using his own control of the Vault's systems to lock him in the cryo suspension chamber, giving him a choice: Either starve to death or enter stasis in his father's former chamber to be awoken at Bud's discretion.
Layout[]
A stylized diagram of the Vault, based on the Vault of the Future promotional art for Vault 13.
Located next to the Pacific Ocean, the Vault is almost entirely underground, with the only above structure a reinforced concrete bunker housing the main Vault door, sitting atop a shaft extending down through the bedrock. To protect against coastal erosion, the bunker complex is surrounded by concrete seawalls, particularly the most vulnerable area outside the Vault door (a significant part of the Santa Monica's beachfront was torn down to make way for the Vault). The outer concrete walls extend to the top of the bunker and have proved stable enough to hold out against erosion for over two centuries.[37][38]
The main shaft connects all 12 levels of the Vault (including the surface) through the main lift. The main feature of the Vault is a large atrium stretching down through three levels (underground levels 5, 6, and 7), which simulates the outdoors: The blank walls act as screens for a Telesonic projector, showing images of the Nebraskan countryside. The atrium serves multiple duties, including being a space for exercise, for social gatherings, and as farmland: Vault-Tec combined artificial lighting, irrigation, and natural soil to allow the dwellers to raise crops. The primary crop is maize,[33] although tatos, sunflowers,[39] cucumbers,[40] beans, potatoes, and peaches are also cultivated. The Vault can also produce animal or animal-like products, enabling the Vault to provide a varied diet and even luxury foodstuffs like jello or cake (typically reserved for celebrations, such as the election of a new overseer or a wedding).[41] Fertilizer is provided by composting organic waste in room 214, including human bodies.[42] Water is provided by a filtration system controlled by a standard Vault-Tec water chip, which managed to operate for nearly 220 years, until breaking in the wake of the raider attack, leaving the Vault with two months' worth of water.[43]
Living quarters are organized into discrete apartments for families. Unmarried Vault dwellers stay with their families in the apartment, with couples moving into a new space on their wedding day. Each apartment is small, but furnished with all modern amenities, including a bathroom with a shower, a living room with a kitchen annex and refrigerator, and a bed for the couple, with a small patio in the adjoining room that simulates the outdoors. Each room is identified with a number (e.g., 626 for Lucy's newlywed apartment and 538 for Steph and Bert's), but variations are possible.[44] Common spaces are used as necessary and can be repurposed in need (eg. turning the reading room into a temporary jail for Moldaver's raiders). The nexus of control is the overseer's office, overlooking the atrium,[45] though the Vault council convenes in a separate council room (967).[46]
Unique among other Vaults is the fact that Vault 33 is part of a network. As one of the Three Vaults, the neighboring Vaults 31 and 32 are accessible by inter-vault passageways, though standard Vault doors limit access. Designated gatekeepers (e.g. Chet in 2296) are responsible for handling door operations and are instructed to keep the doors closed, except for the Triennial Trade between Vaults 32 and 33 or personnel transfers from 31 to 33. The intervault spaces, such as the Vault 33 fencing club, are otherwise used for community activities.[47][38] Only Vaults 32 and 33 have direct access to each other. Vault 31 can only be opened by its overseer. In fact, dwellers cannot contact each other and only the overseers remain in contact through their terminals, giving them the ability to exchange text messages (called "telegrams") and even engage in instant messaging.[48]
Inhabitants[]
Overseers[]
- Robert Olsen (2101 — 2109)
- Ava West (2109 — 2121)
- George Yaffe (2121 — 2125)
- Patricia Peters
- Alexander Boamer
- Laurence Ronald
- Betty Pearson1
- Hank MacLean (2271 — 2297)
- Betty Pearson (2297 - onward)1
1 Betty was also the overseer of Vault 33 for an unspecified period before Hank took office and preceded him. The list is based on the Reactivated list in Vault 31 (seen in "The Beginning,") which shows Betty Pearson reactivated before Hank, but after Ian Jackson, the overseer of Vault 32.
Other dwellers[]
Named:
Unnamed:
Notes[]
- Being located in Santa Monica places Vault 33 in or near the territory of the New California Republic, specifically the Los Angeles Boneyard, which was admitted to the NCR as the state of Los Angeles during its founding in 2189. Prior to this, it would have lay in or near the territory of the Children of the Cathedral, a religious cult serving a super mutant army known as the Unity, which raided numerous Vaults to grow their numbers before being defeated in 2162.
- All Vault dwellers wear a variant of the Vault jumpsuit based on the version introduced in Fallout 4.
- A promotional video from the Vault-Tec Holotapes broadcast channel on Instagram gave a tour of the Vault, narrated by Overseer Hank (played by Kyle MacLachlan).[Non-game 1]
Appearances[]
Vault 33 appears in the Fallout TV series.
Behind the scenes[]
The Vaults encountered over the course of the many games imply that there's somewhere below 200 Vaults, although it's also possible that the number is even lower and that some Vaults were just never completed (leaving gaps in the numeric list). California has a big population, so it presumably might have a large number of Vaults-but it also might not; since forces behind the scenes turned the Vaults into labs for sociological experiments, their purpose was not to save large quantities of people, but to draw people from a local town into an unwitting experiment. You don't need to place a huge number of Vaults in the places with lots of people if your true goal isn't saving as many people as possible.
Once the bombs drop, communication infrastructure collapses. There are any number of reasons that the Master might not have any record of a Vault right under their noses, since there is no guarantee that the Master has access to an actual and complete listing of every Vault, the Master's "help" isn't always the most competent, and some Vaults may take more rigorous steps than others to protect themselves from the outside world.”— Jesse Heinig, Modiphius Discord- When asked on whether the idea of a Vault so close to the Unity's power base in the Cathedral was explored, original Fallout developer Jesse Heinig explained as above, that there was no definitive list of Vaults during development and thus further developments for a TV series over 25 years later could not be taken into account. He has also floated several possibilities as to how the Master and his army could miss a Vault right under their noses, including lack of information, his super mutant soldiers being incompetent, or the Vault being simply better protected than others.
Vault 33 jumpsuit in Fallout 76
- Between December 2—12, 2023, Fallout 76 allowed players to download a free Vault 33 jumpsuit underarmor to promote the TV series.
- The Bethesda Pinball table, released in 2016, contained A Vault numbered 33, wholly unrelated to the Vault that would later appear in the Fallout TV series.
- Additionally, the Creation Club image for the Vault Suit Customization content (released in 2019) features some numbers written on a booklet featuring Vault suits, jotted down near one of the jumpsuits themselves. One of the numbers written is 33, which has been crossed out alongside 41, in favor of 101 and 64.
Design[]
- Vault 33 uses the same construction technology and layouts as Vaults from Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, with the external Vault door and entrance hall similar to Vault 76:
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- The Vault uniquely has a large cornfield in the atrium, though most of it is just a "2.5D" projection created by a special technology.[Non-game 2] However, the Vault does have a smaller crop field modeled after a rural farm, surrounded by the cornfield projection. This crop field is located on sub-level 4 of the Vault, along with the mess hall. The living quarters are located on sub-level 2, and sub-level 5 is experiencing a radroach infestation.[Non-game 1]
- Although much of the interior spaces were created as physical sets, the Vault door hallway, the main shaft, and background shots of the farm area, were created in Unreal Engine by Magnopus. Sarah Hudson Semple was responsible for modeling, texturing, and laying out these areas, which were later seamlessly combined with the physical sets. The work was featured on the Unreal Engine blog as an example of the flexibility of the engine.
Gallery[]
Outside[]
Entrance area[]
Rooms[]
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Promotional slides[]
Technical images[]
References[]
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Non-game
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