Fallout Season 2 Review: New Vegas Expands The World Without Losing The Fun

I have never played any of the "Fallout" video games, but I enjoyed the first season of the "Fallout" streaming series without needing that background. It might not be the best dystopian TV show ever, but it's a very entertaining one, with compelling characters, a twisted sense of humor, and just enough of a critique of capitalism to give some weight to the pulp. One of the few things I know about the source material is that "Fallout: New Vegas" is the installment that everyone loves (an eccentric friend of mine once named one of her pet rats "Fallout: New Vegas"). So even without having played the games, I knew to be intrigued when "Fallout" Season 1 ended with a tease of New Vegas as a fresh location for the next season.

"Fallout" Season 2 is finally here a year and a half later — a surprisingly short wait, given how many big budget shows these days can take two, three, or even more years between seasons. Judging from the six episodes provided for review out of this eight episode season, it continues the momentum from Season 1 and ups the excitement now that the premise has been established and the conflicts can escalate at a faster pace. Once again, the dynamic between the idealistic heroine Lucy MacClean (Ella Purnell) and the cynical Ghoul Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) is by far the best part of the show, but other characters' subplots have enough intriguing twists and turns this year that you won't get impatient when the focus shifts.

Season 2 opens with a flashback to before the war to properly establish this year's big villain, RobCo Industries CEO Robert Edwin House (Justin Theroux, replacing Rafi Silver in a recasting the show gives an in-universe explanation for). Striking workers are protesting being replaced by RobCo robots — a situation that immediately gets one thinking about companies like Amazon's unfortunate embrace of AI, including their production of error-filled recaps of shows like "Fallout" (consider watching Looper's human-made recap video instead). But this topical conflict isn't about to be the focus of the new season. Instead, House's antagonization of the unions is the set up for his test of a different sort of dangerous technology: brainwashing devices to control humans as if they were machines.

This technology, clearly evoking Elon Musk's Neuralink (the "Fallout" writers must not have been happy with Musk's appearance at the series' SXSW premiere party), has not yet been perfected. The brainwashing only lasts so long before things switch to brain-exploding. There are a lot of exploding heads in "Fallout" Season 2; if you made a drinking game out of it, your head would feel like it's exploding midway through the second episode.

The pre-war story follows Cooper's struggle to figure out the right thing to do after learning the truth of what his wife Barbara (Frances Turner) and Vault-Tec are planning. In the post-war story, the Ghoul has long since abandoned any sense of righteousness, and his once-naive sometimes-companion Lucy is struggling with morality in ways that sometimes parallel Coop's younger human self. Both of the lead actors' performances continue to impress: Ella Purnell's eyes convey so much emotion, and Walton Goggins can turn two straight minutes of groaning while impaled into a thing of beauty. Lucy's journey to track down her evil father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) in the remains of New Vegas finds her facing many new dangers. I particularly enjoyed the episode where she has to deal with the Legion, an army of Roman cosplayers with a comically mangled view of history.

Maximus (Aaron Moten) and the Brotherhood of Steel don't have as much focus in Season 2 as they did in Season 1, which is just as well given that their story was never as gripping as Lucy and the Ghoul's. The time we do spend with them here, however, is well spent, with big consequences for what happened to the characters last year and intense implications for the action going forward. Back in the Vaults, Lucy's brother Norm (Moisés Arias) pulls his own big power play as he tries to figure out the dark secrets of his community. 

Unlike Season 1, which came out all on the same day for binging, Season 2 is set up as a weekly series releasing one episode at a time. It feels like the season was designed to be digested that way because so much happens in each episode. This is a case where the balance of multiple plot lines comes in handy, because having five different stories going allows each episode to end on the most intense cliffhanger possible. Fans will be talking every week about the crazy things they just watched and speculating about just what's going to happen next.

It's odd that I'm now in a position of speculation, and I'm sure my overall opinions of "Fallout" Season 2 will be colored by how it ends. Some points in the last episode I watched left me with questions about whether certain cynical arguments were being put forth by the show itself or just the characters therein, so I'm not yet ready to make any declarative thematic statements about the season until I've watched it all. What I can say is they have me hooked, and even at its darkest, "Fallout" is still a fun time.

The first episode of "Fallout" Season 2 premieres on Prime Video on December 16 at 9 pm ET, with new episodes premiering weekly.