The most impressive thing about Fallout’s first season was how well it nailed the tone. The games are a mix of grim and goofy, a postapocalyptic story in a bleak world that’s also full of crude jokes and ridiculous characters. It’s a tough balance to get right — too serious and it’s a miserable place to be; too silly and it renders the whole thing meaningless — but the Amazon Prime Video series struck the right balance. It was even accessible to viewers who had never played the games. With the scene-setting out of the way, the show’s second season makes a push to expand Fallout’s world and tackle headier subjects. But in doing so, it loses some of the playfulness that made the series distinct from the many other dystopias you can stream.
Fallout is once again mostly focused on three core characters: Lucy, Maximus, and the Ghoul, the wasteland’s version of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This time around Lucy (Ella Purnell), a vault dweller, is traveling alongside the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) toward the relative glitz and glamour of New Vegas. Lucy is following her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), hoping to bring him to justice for destroying an entire city. The Ghoul is also after Lucy’s dad because he believes this will lead him to his own missing family. Meanwhile, Maximus (Aaron Moten) has returned to the Brotherhood of Steel as a hero because fellow soldiers all mistakenly believe he killed the leader of their rival, the New California Republic. (If you’re lost right now, Fallout does have very serviceable recaps before each episode to get you up to speed, this in spite of the recent AI fiasco.)
That’s a lot to track, but it’s also only a fraction of what season 2 covers. For one, there is continued unrest in the wasteland. It seems that every group is fighting against not only each other but also among themselves. The Brotherhood is close to instigating a civil war as they argue over an ancient artifact, and Lucy’s old home, Vault 33, is in dire straits due a water crisis and a rogue faction that begins as an inbreeding support group. There are even newly introduced factions, like the Legion, a group that mimics ancient Roman traditions despite not understanding them. Also new this season: a prewar technology that can completely control a human being, which would potentially make the wasteland a much less violent place. But the tech isn’t quite there — it keeps making the user’s head explode.
On top of all of that, season 2 also gets more explicit about the origins of the nuclear war that created the wasteland in the first place. This necessitates a whole lot of flashbacks, which primarily follow the Ghoul’s prewar life as he spies on his wife, Barb (Frances Turner), a high-ranking executive at the powerful Vault-Tec corporation. (The easiest way to know what time period you’re watching: Does Goggins look like a zombie?) Fallout is never subtle with its social satire and that remains true here. The end of the world is brought about by a group of tech oligarchs who wield too much power, and as one character muses early on, “every dollar spent is a vote cast.” Board meetings show billionaires salivating at the business opportunities that come with the apocalypse. Much like with Severance, there’s a lurking tension seeing this kind of cultural commentary on a platform owned by the exact kind of oligarch the show is criticizing, though Fallout doesn’t interrogate this.
Most of these elements aren’t explicitly bad — there’s just too much going on. Season 2 is constantly jumping around between storylines, characters, and time periods, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for much else. And what gets left out is a lot of the levity. We’re not talking about a Last of Us level of grimness here — there are some good gags, particularly when it comes to the juxtaposition of Lucy’s continued obliviousness with the harsh realities of a postapocalyptic world — but these jokes stand out because they’re so much rarer now.
The caveat here is that I haven’t watched the entire season. Amazon shared six of the eight episodes with critics, so I don’t know how things wrap up, nor if that balance between dour and droll changes toward the end. What I saw is still unmistakably Fallout — but a little less fun.
Season 2 of Fallout starts streaming on Amazon Prime Video on December 16th at 9PM ET, with new episodes weekly.
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