The last time we saw Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), The Ghoul aka Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), and beloved pup CX404, their situation looked dire.

Lucy had learned her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) was responsible for the destruction of Shady Sands, The Brotherhood of Steel was in a heated battle with the New California Republic over control of Griffith Observatory, and Cooper realized that Hank held the answers to the whereabouts of his family. While Hank slipped out in the ensuing chaos and headed to New Vegas, Lucy decided to join Cooper in his quest for answers, which led them into unknown and dangerous territory.

The first episode of Fallout Season 2, "The Man Who Knew," opens with a brief Pre-War flashback that shows the public protesting against RobCo industries. The scene then takes us inside a bar where a mysterious stranger (Justin Theroux) manages to taunt a group of unemployed workers about how RobCo industries founder Mr. House is more powerful than the government. They then follow him outside, where he attaches a device to the back of one of their heads in return for millions of dollars. Using this device, he’s able to command the man to attack his friends with a baseball bat, but when the mind-controlled man begins to turn against the mysterious stranger, the device makes his head explode in gory fashion.

Jumping back to the present, we see that Cooper is captured in Novac by the Great Khans, one of the factions running rampant in the Mojave Wasteland. But when they’re about to execute him, Lucy reveals herself in an iconic sniper perch from Fallout: New Vegas and exposes their plan to rob the Khans of their bottlecaps. She fails a dialogue check and chaos ensues; Cooper is forced to intervene in bloody fashion, reminding audiences once again why he’s one of the best gunslingers in the Wasteland.

It’s not long after this fight that Cooper reveals that New Vegas survived The Great War, thanks to a missile system designed by Mr. House, which shot the bombs out of the sky. This includes a brief pre-war flashback in which Cooper learns of Vault-Tec and House’s plans for The Great War. He struggles to get his daughter to safety.