Do we know how Moldaver lives so long in Fallout?

Moldaver kicks off the plot of Amazon’s Fallout series by attacking Vault 33 and kidnapping Hank MacLean, and as the show goes on, we learn that she’s so much more than an ordinary raider. 

Here’s your warning, the rest of this article is rife with spoilers.

Episode 6 has two different revelations about Moldaver’s identity. We learn that some people know her as the Flame Mother, and the survivors of the Shady Sands attack seem to worship her as some kind of savior. Incidentally, in the season 1 finale we see her commanding a small group of New California Republic soldiers, but we’re still not quite sure about the details of her relationship with Shady Sands and the NCR. 

The bigger revelation is that Moldaver was alive before the war. She knew Cooper Howard and was leading a discussion group of communist sympathizers who were opposed to Vault-Tec’s apocalyptic prep work. That one’s a doozy, especially because the rest of the season leaves us completely in the dark about how Moldaver survived from 2077 to 2296. 

The Fallout games have shown us three different ways that people from the pre-war era have survived into the wasteland’s present. In the Fallout 3 DLC Mothership Zeta we meet some very old human beings who’ve been preserved by the aliens that abducted them ages ago. Personally, I’d be pretty surprised if the Fallout TV show ever gets into the alien lore from the game, partly because it’s so ridiculous but also because it’s never an integral part of any game’s story. 

The other two survival methods that the games have shown are already present in the TV show. There’s ghoulification, and there’s cryogenic freezing. Unless Moldaver’s found some next-level skincare treatment, she’s probably not a ghoul. That just leaves the freezing, which actually makes a lot of sense to me. In the pre-war days, Moldaver clearly had a ton of insider information about Vault-Tec, so it’s possible she was a high-level employee working against the company. On the other hand, Vault-Tec has plenty of competitors, and it’s equally plausible that Moldaver was, or is, working for one of them. We don’t yet know for sure how she’s survived for over 200 years, but this is almost certainly going to be a plot thread that the next season, assuming it gets made, picks right back up.