Fallout Season 1 was an absolute blast. It was goofy, gory, and gratuitous, with solid acting, lush production design, and tight story telling. The result was a zany good time and one of the best series of 2024. Unfortunately, Season 2 is the fallout from that blast. The goof and gore get replaced with dead-end subplots and wasted talent.
Our core characters, Lucy (Ella Purnell), Maximus (Arron Moten), and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) are on their quests through the wasteland. Maximus is back with his Brotherhood of Steel gang and their giant power armor. Lucy and the Ghoul are on the road to New Las Vegas to try and find Lucy’s dad and the Ghoul’s wife and daughter respectively.
If S2 stuck with these core characters, it might have worked. Instead, it wanders off to explore numerous side quests that deliver minimal payout. Maybe all these side stories are satisfying to fans, who can appreciate the easter eggs and references. For the rest of us, they are distracting and unsatisfying.
One such side quest is Lucy’s diminutive brother Norm (Moisés Arias). Last we saw him, he was trapped in a special vault with all sorts of sinister things afoot and a talking brain at his feet. In S2 he kicks the brain to the curb, unfreezes a bunch of Vault-tec bootlickers, wanders around an office building, and (spoiler incoming!) … they all die when radioactive roaches attack. Conveniently, Norm escapes with only minor head wounds, a new girlfriend, and knowledge of some horrible virus experiment.
Uhhh, okey dokey?
Norm’s subplot takes up a lot of screen time to deliver minimal payoff. There are also side quests about deceptive Canadian overseers, rebellious snack clubs, suspicious husbands, New Vegas monsters, ghoul kids collecting bottle caps, World War I attired New California Republic soldiers, and warring Roman legions lead by a grim-looking Macaulay Culkin. It is all quite Byzantine.
However, even the primary quests are a bit dull. In the early part of the season, we spend an incredible amount of time with Maximus and his Brotherhood of Steel buddies. We get to meet some badass soldiers, including a swaggering tough guy named Xander (Kumail Nanjiani) who is a dick and gets karmic payback fast. These scenes are stuffed with political intrigue and backstabbing, only to amount to Maximus touching off a civil war among the various factions. He then flees with his ghoul buddy Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton). It was a lot of tangential screen time just so the two characters could deliver the season 2 MacGuffin, a glowing vial of “cold fusion.”
Which gets us to Justin Theroux, typecast yet again as a mustachioed sinister guy. He shows up mid-season as Robert House, or you may know him as that evil guy on the green CRT screen. House is bad, but kind of good, and then he’s a sinister digital assistant (think Clippy, but meaner.) Thanks to that glowing blue MacGuffin, the Ghoul brings him back online and installs him on a Pip-Boy to serve as a Waze app to find his wife and daughter. All of this feels like a waste of Theroux’s talent and budget.
Let’s not forget the star of the show, the ever chipper Lucy. This season, the showrunners seemed to just want to dwell on her face. The show routinely screeches to a halt for long, languid takes centered on that wide-eyed, Ella Purnell look of confusion, shock, disgust, or whatever. Lucy’s character feels lost among the rubble, backstabbing, and intrigue of the season. Even when she finds her dad doing evil deeds, she cannot make up her mind if what he is doing is awesome or horrific. The Ghoul shows up in the nick of time to clarify her thinking and save her butt.
The Ghoul / Cooper Howard also gets a lot of screen time in flashbacks before the war, when he was a simple cowboy actor trying to take care of his daughter while his wife Barb (Francis Turner) cavorted with evil corporate guys. Goggins is a great actor, but his performance this season is extremely restrained. He spends more time reacting to events than driving them forward. When he (and again — spoiler alert incoming!) finally does find the vault with his wife and daughter, it quickly transforms from a happy ending to a groan-inducing teaser for Season 3. 
Goggins’ Ghoul gets a lot of screen time, but little character development (Courtesy of Prime / Amazon MGM Studios)
Fallout Season 2 is a victim of Season 1 Success Syndrome. When the first season of a show is a hit, invariably the showrunners — that would be Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet in this case — feel pressure to make a follow-up season that is bigger and more serious. Armed with more of everything, they go too far. More becomes less. We have seen this syndrome many times before, with shows like Stranger Things. The show abandons what made it successful. Not all successful shows catch this syndrome. Andor S2 (see the Screenopolis review) is a good example of a show that stayed true to its story and characters, delivering a knockout second season.
What made Fallout S1 so good was its lack of seriousness. Everything was outlandish, campy, and zany – much like its spiritual successor, Robocop. Purnell’s Lucy was the perfect foil as a wide-eyed, innocent gal who only wanted to get her family back together. Her innocence contrasted well with the lawless chaos of the wasteland, and the leathery, wisdom of Goggins’ Ghoul. Now, Lucy is unsure of anything as she stares blankly into the camera wondering how big her SAG-AFTRA check will be from Star Trek Prodigy. Likewise, Maximus’ brutal opportunism is lost among the pissing matches of his fellow soldiers. Rather than take advantage of a bad situation, he merely slips out the side door to go find Lucy.
I think the showrunners wanted to contrast how the Ghoul was reclaiming his humanity, Maximus was discovering his, and Lucy was losing hers. The problem is that this moral quandary was buried under a lot of excess baggage, making the hero’s journey this season more of slog than a triumph.
Nevertheless, shows can reset in a third season. Stranger Things did this. They brought in some new characters, gave the show a new villain, and the result was a fundamentally better experience. Season 3 of Fallout is obviously venturing off to Colorado to a place called the Enclave. Perhaps there the show can reset back to what makes it so good.
