Fallout Season Two Plays the Long Game

Photo: Lorenzo Sisti/Prime

Just like the Ghoul reaching for another piece of ass-meat, Fallout is back for more. The Prime Video adaptation of the beloved postapocalyptic video game premieres its second season tonight at 9 p.m. ET, and this time around Fallout is leaving behind California for New Vegas, a fan-favorite location with a new lineup of monsters and villains but the same trio of protagonists. Walton Goggins’s the Ghoul, né Hollywood star Cooper Howard, who lent his likeness to his wife Barb’s (Frances Turner) company Vault-Tec, was horrified to learn she helped plan the nuclear war that plunged the U.S. into its enduring fucked-up state. Cheery and resolute Vault 33 dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell) left her underground home to find her abducted father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), and in doing so realized the difficulty of living by the golden rule in a world that’s defined by ruthlessness and want. And Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire of the technology-fetishizing group the Brotherhood of Steel, was tasked with finding and securing valuable cold-fusion technology that could provide infinite energy. By the end of the first season, Lucy learned that her father, Hank, was a nefarious Vault-Tec employee who destroyed a peaceful surface community, the Ghoul was committed to finding his wife and daughter in their secret vault, and Maximus was given the cold-fusion technology that could provide infinite energy.

Each of those motivations resurfaces in Fallout’s second season, which is just as retro-futurist as the first in look and increasingly sprawling in narrative. That sense of sprawl extends to the viewing experience, too, since the series will now be airing weekly instead of an all-at-once binge drop. (Prime Video made this same switch with The Boys after its breakout first season, so this is a good sign for Fallout’s ability to generate ongoing conversation.) That change means we all get to spend nearly two months watching how Fallout takes on New Vegas, cycling through our weird sexual feelings about the Ghoul, and wondering together if Lucy is going to make it back to her vault or if Maximus is ever going to make it out of his knight’s armor. Where’s this all headed? Since only six of the season’s eight episodes were provided for review, I have some sense of where this season’s priorities lie but also some questions about how those priorities fit into the show’s larger design. We won’t know the answers until the season comes to a close on February 4, but until then, here are three pressing questions about season two’s long game.

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Is Walton Goggins going to run away with this show again?

No disrespect to Purnell, who perfectly calibrated Lucy’s intrinsic hopefulness in the first season and slowly begins to curdle it this go-round as Lucy spends more time among ghouls, raiders, cannibals, and various other feuding factions. (Lucy has more Jackie-from-Yellowjackets DNA in her this season.) Or to Justin Theroux, who joins the cast as the mysterious Mr. House, a tech mogul with his own reasons for holing up in New Vegas; Theroux often feels too typecast as baddies, but he adds a real frisson of vulnerability to the character’s megalomania here. And MacLachlan is having a lot of fun with Hank’s smugness as he pursues a secret mission of his own on the surface. But six episodes in, this season absolutely belongs to Goggins: The series spends more time with the Ghoul in the present, as he continues to fight off the undead transformation that would strip him of his identity, and continues its flashback timeline to trace the connections between Cooper and Vault-Tec.

Maybe the Ghoul’s makeup has been tweaked, because Goggins’s face looks a lot more expressive this season, which allows him to cycle more fluidly through the Ghoul’s contrasting emotions, like his frustration with Lucy’s naïveté and his increasing fear that he’ll never find Barb and their daughter. That allows the transition between the Ghoul and Cooper to feel smoother, so that Cooper’s increasing cynicism is more in step with the Ghoul’s rising desperation. And overall, Goggins feels totally locked in, whether his character is being pushed to his limit in confrontations with House (Goggins and Theroux deliver some of the series’ best acting to date in their first tense meeting) or simply shooting the shit with unlikely collaborators, including welcome returning cast members Dallas Goldtooth and Sarita Choudhury. It’s not that the season has any weak links in the cast — it doesn’t — but Goggins’s performance is so strong, and the Ghoul’s story line so expanded, that few others really feel like they are meeting him at his level. The first season was primarily about Lucy’s innocence being challenged, but this one tips far more into the Ghoul’s inner turmoil and Goggins carries it.

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Where is all the corporate-conspiracy stuff leading?

The first-season reveal that Barb suggested “dropping the bombs ourselves” as a corporate “opportunity” to create a “true monopoly” — and therefore, more money lining Vault-Tec’s pockets — was a relationship-shattering moment for Cooper. The same goes for Lucy learning that her father basically helped kill her mother and destroyed an entire innocent community at Vault-Tec’s behest. The company, it’s bad! With that firmly established in the first-season finale, Fallout now has the opportunity to run with it, which allows for three intriguing avenues for the plot to follow.

First is whatever Lucy’s younger brother, Norm (Moisés Arias), is up to down in the vaults, two of which we now know were specifically engineered by Vault-Tec to be their “breeding pool, the ultimate expression of HR R&D,” with Vault 31 being where all the frozen Vault-Tec employees are secretly hidden. As they start new lives in Vaults 32 and 33, they’re supposed to “inherit the Earth after we’ve wiped the surface clean,” as Vault-Tec employee Bud Askins (Michael Esper) explained to Norm, and Norm’s horrified by the level of deception at play here. While the vault story line is still pretty siloed off from what’s going on above them, Norm’s response gives Arias a lot more to do this season, and he’s able to grow the character into more of a calculating player — a little more like Hank than Lucy — who sparks well against new cast members Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh.

The second promising development this season is the continued characterization of Barb, who in the first season turns into a warmonger out of nowhere and in the second becomes more actualized as Cooper tries to understand what propelled her into that profit-first ideology. And the third compelling subplot, especially for non-game-playing viewers like me, involves Mr. House, a guy who Theroux first plays with mustache-twirling villainy but who eventually collapses out of caricature into a far more recognizable, perhaps even sympathetic, kind of selfishness. Overall the second season is steadily chipping away at the idea that any individual actors could actually be responsible for decisions this cataclysmic, and that’s an interesting, counterintuitive suggestion for a video-game adaptation since the experience of playing one is so singular. The only problem with making the Fallout story even bigger than it already is, is, well …

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… Will Fallout pull a Westworld?

The suggestion was already there once the first season of Fallout ended with the Ghoul asking Lucy if she wanted to go to New Vegas with him and “meet your makers,” phrasing that’s basically ripped from Westworld’s hosts trying to find the people who created and then enslaved them within the titular amusement park. Of course, there’s going to be some similarities between two properties playing in the sci-fi space and wondering what human beings are compelled to do when they have endless resources available to battle their fear of death. But Fallout is beginning to feel like Westworld not just thematically but episodically: how each installment breaks up its plot into little vignettes via fade-to-black transitions and Ramin Djawadi’s trilling stingers; how scenes cut away right after a major reveal, interrupting that subplot’s forward momentum to swing to another character; how the series keeps gesturing at a larger foe that its characters can’t even begin to comprehend yet.

Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are only executive producers and directors on Fallout; the series is co-created and showrun by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Yet Fallout feels increasingly indebted to that previous series in ways that makes me worry it could sooner, rather than later, become so convoluted and so dense that it loses sight of its original animating questions. If the Ghoul starts pontificating about how we all live in loops or Lucy stumbles upon a maze in a random abandoned area of Los Angeles, we’re going to be in trouble. There are still two episodes that haven’t been shared with critics yet, and how Fallout chooses to end its second season, with a third already confirmed, will do a lot to affirm or deny these parallels.