Fallout is back for a second serve of apocalyptic adventure.
The man in power armour fled across the desert and the ghoulslinger followed – as did nascent adventurer Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), plucked from her relatively comfortable life in Vault 33 and thrust into the dangers of Fallout’s retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic Wasteland. The ghoul is, of course, former pre-war TV star Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), now a cynical and, for all practical purposes, unkillable bounty hunter. The man in power armour is Lucy’s father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), revealed to be a bad ‘un at the tail end of the first season. And now you’re pretty much up to date with Fallout season 1.
Fallout season 2 kicks off with a scenario familiar to fans of Sergio Leone and a location familiar to fans of Fallout: New Vegas: Novac, where Lucy is on sniping duties while Cooper is “captured” by a raiding party of Great Khans. The problem that often arises with derivative works like this is that the impulse to plant Easter eggs everywhere kiboshes suspension of disbelief – your audience is too distracted by repeatedly doing the Leo DiCaprio couch meme that they don’t buy into the world or story being presented. Luckily for us, showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet (and Jonathan Nolan, who doesn’t get a creator credit for some reason) manage the simple but surprisingly difficult trick of fully integrating all those little elements. Fallout the series doesn’t feel “real” exactly, but it also doesn’t feel like a clunky reinterpretation of the source material. Game aesthetics are abstracted enough to feel practical but still accurate. Characters and factions show up in organic ways, and if it ever feels like the show is betraying itself to squeeze in some video game cameo, it’s only ever a fleeting feeling.
The big character stepping forward in Fallout’s second season is Mr. House, New Vegas’ enigmatic bigwig, here played with oily charm and sociopathic confidence by Justin Theroux. House is this world’s Howard Hughes (well, before he went doolally): a technological genius and industrialist, untroubled by the strictures of morality. As gamers know, House is the guy pulling the strings behind the scenes in F:NV, and here we get a glimpse of how he rolled before the bombs fell and his connections to some dangling plot elements from last season – chiefly those pesky brain-exploding mind control chips.
If the first two episodes of this season (and they showed us only two) have a problem, it’s that the series struggles at times to throw a lasso around all the different plot threads currently going. In addition to the ghoul and the girl following MacLean Senior, freshly anointed Brotherhood Of Steel knight Maximus (Aaron Moten) is off dealing with the complex internal politics of the hidebound Brotherhood, while Lucy’s brother Norm (Moisés Arias) is in yet another Vault, Vault 32, where he finds himself leading a bunch of Vault-Tec staff recently decanted from cold storage. And back at their home Vault, 33, new Overseer Stephanie Harper (Annabel O’Hagan) is consolidating her power.
That’s a lot of plot to wrangle, and that’s before we jump back in time for the pre-War sequences where the still-human Cooper has twigged to the fact that Mr. House, Vault-Tec, and various other shadowy power players are manipulating the apocalypse into being, and his wife Barb (Frances Turner) is in on it. The writing in the first season was impressively deft, so we can be reasonably confident that all these threads will cohere meaningfully and elegantly.
Until they do, there’s just so much fun to be had here, from the Novac-set gunfight soundtracked to – what else? – Marty Robbins’ “Big Iron”, to the flea soup vendor who keeps her ingredients close to hand, to the murderer’s row of character actors who show up to play the BoS’s various high muckety-mucks (I’m always happy to see Brian Thompson, who was gutted by Arnie in The Terminator, played an alien bounty hunter in The X-Files, and suffered one of the gnarliest on-screen deaths outside of a straight horror at the hands of Sylvester Stallone in Cobra – what a CV!). It’s hard to get a sense of the overall shape of this season based on two episodes, but beat by beat and element by element, Fallout remains an absolute blast.
Fallout season 2 is now streaming on Prime Video.
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