Fallout Season 2 review: Our introduction to New Vegas is a blast, and more relevant than ever
Post-apocalyptic shows give me a sense of both anxiety and calm.
Anxiety because, obviously, the world has ended. When I think of anxiety-inducing things to put on screen, societal collapse and environmental destruction are tough to beat. The calm, on the other hand, comes from knowing that as bad as things get in the show, at least it's just that: a show. There is no zombie fungus out to get me like in The Last of Us, no alien virus hive mind like in Pluribus, no Arctic volcano-mega tsunami-nuclear war combo like in Paradise. (At least, my anxiety would tell me, not yet there isn't.)
But lately, as the state of our world grows more and more dystopian, even that calmness has evaporated. Between a U.S. government that seems hell-bent on rolling back human rights and massacres playing out across the globe in real-time on social media, the bleakness can feel overwhelming, to the point that I'd rather face down a Clicker than exist under the current administration. With that feeling in mind, apocalyptic media can serve as a road map for navigating a continually awful moment. Who steps up and fights for a new, better way of living, and who accepts this awful reality?
These questions are on full display in Fallout Season 2, which stages an ideological showdown against the backdrop of an increasingly bizarro — and immaculately realized — nuclear apocalypse.
What's Fallout Season 2 about?
Picking up right on the heels of Season 1, Season 2 sees Fallout's core three scattered across the wasteland. Lucy (Ella Purnell) and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) are tracking Lucy's father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), to New Vegas. Meanwhile, Maximus (Aaron Moten) has returned to the Brotherhood of Steel, now with more status — and more disillusionment about the way the Brotherhood operates. Hovering over it all is the game-changing technology of cold fusion, a limitless power source that could improve life across the wasteland, if it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
Season 1 already did an admirable job of building out the world of Fallout, from its retro-futuristic vaults to the ruins of Shady Sands. In Season 2, though, it goes for broke, with stellar results. New Brotherhood of Steel factions offer up a more comprehensive look at the chaos that reigns across the U.S., while tensions between Vaults 32 and 33 gift us further Vault-Tec intrigue, all wrapped up in a chipper Vault Dweller smile. But it's New Vegas that's undeniably the star of the show.
As someone who's less familiar with the Fallout games, I've had New Vegas, both the setting and the game itself, hyped up to me by Fallout fans. Thankfully, the show delivers on the hype with a bold, bonkers new post-apocalyptic playground, all neon lights and sleazy storefronts.
New Vegas and the surrounding environs pop with colorful new factions, some of which have been altered from their game appearances. Members of the Kings gang are now ghouls, shambling around in their Elvis getups. Unsurprisingly, zombies rocking leather jackets and pompadours is a sight gag that pays off in spades. Elsewhere, the Roman-inspired Caesar's Legion's fanaticism is equal parts frightening and funny. (Bonus points for how they so confidently butcher the word "Caesar.")
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These groups, along with others Lucy and the Ghoul cross paths with on their journey to New Vegas, all have their own unique approaches to existing in the wasteland. And as Lucy explores more of the madcap world she's spent most of her life living beneath, she must repeatedly choose between succumbing to the unspoken laws of the wasteland, or sticking by her all-important Golden Rule of treating others the way she'd like to be treated.
Fallout Season 2 stages an ideological battle that feels all too real.
Lucy's tug-of-war between wild wastelander and goody two-shoes Vault Dweller was a key component of Fallout Season 1, but Season 2 throws it into sharper relief thanks to her alliance with the Ghoul.
On one side of this partnership, you have the optimistic, if naive, Lucy, who wants to bring wrongdoers like her father to justice. On the other side, you have the grizzled Ghoul, a nihilist who's seen all the evils the wasteland and Vault-Tec have to offer and who's accepted the chilling fact that war changes. The two spend much of the first six episodes sent to critics locked in an ideological battle, with Lucy's hopes for peaceful resolution often getting ground down by the Ghoul's knowledge of the brutal truths of the wasteland.
If Lucy and the Ghoul are polar opposites, then Maximus serves as a midpoint between their worldview. He's still enamored with Lucy, deeming her the one truly good person he's met. By contrast, the overly masculine posturing of the Brotherhood of Steel seems even more ridiculous now, prompting some golden, totally over-it reaction shots from Moten. Yet Maximus still has much to unlearn from his time in the Brotherhood, and he, like Lucy, finds himself caught between surrendering to the way things are and striving to make something better.
That internal battle feels all too real right now, especially since the show's fictional antagonists, like RobCo Industries' CEO Robert House (Justin Theroux), bear striking similarities to very real tech companies that put profit over people in increasingly dystopian ways. Watching his and Vault-Tec's plans play out is enough to send a creeping sense of all-too familiar dread running up your spine.
So, Fallout asks, what will you do with that dread? Accept and feed into it? Or try to push for something hopeful? I won't lie, I've been feeling pretty Ghoul-ish lately. But watching Fallout Season 2, with its own guidebook to the apocalypse, has made me hope I can make my outlook a tad more like Lucy's.
Fallout Season 2 premieres Dec. 16 at 9 p.m. ET on Prime Video, with a new episode every week.