‘Fallout’ Season 2: Same Wild Post-Apocalypse, Even More Exploding Heads
The following article contains minor spoilers for Fallout season 2.
When the first season of Fallout arrived in early 2024, you’d have been forgiven for thinking it would quickly fall face-first into the radioactive mud. Sure, it was based on a mega-popular video game series, executive-produced and part-directed by a Nolan, and seemed to have been made with a ton of reverence for the source material. But it was still a game adaptation, and for every The Last of Us, there have been a hundred Dooms. Nonetheless, just under two years later, the early naysayers might as well have been blown away by a mushroom cloud: Fallout was a streaming mega-hit, ushered in the Walton Goggins glow-up, and cemented what The Last of Us had already proven—that games could flourish in live-action.
Fallout did it by leaning into the gleefully absurdist nature of its batshit universe. The games, and now the show, are set a couple of hundred years after nuclear war has destroyed the planet; it’s a premise that sounds as though it should be deeply self-serious and morbid, not least after our collective nuclear anxieties have gone up a notch since Ukraine, but the brilliance of Fallout is that it finds the fun in atomic hellfire. Most of that comes from the light-hearted tone and zany, retrofuturistic world—in Fallout, American culture essentially froze in the ’50s, so even in the flashback sequences everyone is rocking a Don Draper suit, listening to Ella Fitzgerald and driving around in cars with huge tailfins.
Even as a noted Fallout megafan, I can acknowledge that it’s all extremely weird. That’s kind of the point. Believe it or not, season two somehow feels even more delightfully ridiculous, silly, and bizarre. We pick up some time after the season one finale, in which it was revealed that Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) is less benevolent vault leader and more, well, genocidal maniac; The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) and Lucy (Ella Purnell) remain hot on his trail, pursuing him into the Mojave wasteland, with their sights eventually on the post-war utopia of New Vegas. Game fans will know it well: New Vegas and its surrounding environs make up the setting of the 2011 instalment Fallout: New Vegas, the consensus favorite of the series among Fallout mega-geeks. It soon becomes clear that a lot has changed in Vegas over the 15 years since we saw it in-game, having at some point succumbed to the perils of the wasteland—though not down and out completely. After all, as the series’ famous tagline goes: War never changes.
We’re also properly introduced to a major new player who will be all too familiar to New Vegas fans in the form of Robert House, the genius proprietor of robotics manufacturer RobCo, who also owns half of the Nevada gambling oasis, and whose defense systems saved Vegas from being totally destroyed during the Great War. (In terms of style, the character was influenced by Walt Disney and Howard Hughes; there are also obvious, timely comparisons to Silicon Valley mega-billionaires like Musk and Zuck.) He’s played now by Justin Theroux, and is introduced in a flashback that opens the first episode, in which he tests a new mind-control device—the season’s major McGuffin—on an unassuming bar patron, whose head promptly explodes.
On the subject of exploding heads: the first season was gnarly enough, but the new season leans even more gleefully into Fallout‘s penchant for cartoonish gore. Baddies are blown to smithereens left, right and center; plenty of poor background characters are subject to the same fate as House’s pre-war test subject, coating the walls in thick slathers of human jam (with added skull). Beyond the series’ vibrant, visceral style, season two keeps up the uniquely Fallout brand of over-the-top corporate satire, and the show maintains its gonzo sense of humor. Not that it’s entirely unserious: in the figure of Robert House, there are deeper philosophical questions posed as to one man, especially one who is so seemingly sociopathic, should hold so much unchecked power. (Probably not, you’d think.)
