We've entered a golden age of video game adaptations – and Prime Video's Fallout TV series just might be the best of the best. Instead of adapting a linear narrative from the popular video game franchise, the TV show takes just a bit of everything you love from the games and uses it to craft a brand new storyline.
After the first season took us out of Vault 33 and into the Wasteland, Fallout season 2 takes us all the way to New Vegas – introducing us to everything from Deathclaws and Radroaches, to strange factions like Caesar's Legion and the impossibly evil Robert House.
"We sort of approach it like we do a new game"
Todd Howard, executive producer
"We sort of approach it like we do a new game, right?" says Todd Howard, executive producer of Fallout season 2 (and creative director of Bethesda Game Studios, where we oversaw development of two of the best Fallout games). "Like, hey, we're starting fresh, and okay, we're going back to Vegas. Number one, we've got to honor the journey that every player had there, and maneuvering that is tricky."
"[Showrunners] Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet have some great ways to maneuver this fog of war, and 'What are the factions up to now?' But it's going back to authenticity. We're fans, so [it's] what would we want to see as a fan, make it as authentic as possible, and just come at it with a lot of thought, a lot of love, [take] what was already there, but also take some swings."
Return to the Wasteland
Fallout season 1, which followed all new characters but loosely stuck the overall structure of the games (i.e. Vault dweller is sent to the surface), focuses on the personal journeys of three main characters: the impossibly innocent Lucy (Ella Purnell), a Vault dweller who elects to head out into the Wasteland in search of her kidnapped father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan); Maximus (Aaron Moten), an aspiring member of an organization of soldiers known as the Brotherhood of Steel who sets out to prove his worth; and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a ruthless, irradiated bounty hunter styled as a cowboy who was a beloved Hollywood actor before the nuclear disaster that destroyed life on Earth as they knew it.
Fallout season 2 follows Lucy and the Ghoul, a rather unlikely duo (who still don't like each other very much), as they head out in search of Hank together… but this time in the hopes of bringing this villain to justice. It's also flashback heavy: giving us glimpses of a dazzling pre-war Vegas, as well as the Ghoul's former life as movie star Cooper Howard, just before the bombs went off.
"We get to spend more time with Cooper this season, and, and this is a man that has had the rug pulled out from underneath him," Walton Goggins explains. "He realizes just how little control he's had over anything in his life, and, and it broke my heart."
Of course, the Ghoul isn't the only one who gets a little more backstory. Hank has been rotten to the core prior to his time in Vault 33, much to Lucy's dismay. At the end of season 1, we watched him, in a stolen Brotherhood of Steel suit of armor, walk away from his daughter and towards New Vegas instead.
Why Hank would head for Vegas, however, is still a mystery to Lucy. Not to mention his son, Norm (Moises Arias), who is still having his own troubles underground. While the chaos and calamity continues in the Wasteland, the Vault dwellers still have their own problems – and it won't be long before more of them head for the surface.
"The first season, [the characters] were really well-established, and then the second season, they got better," MacLachlan says. "They got deeper and they got richer, and I think that's a mark of a series that is growing, that is really finding its voice and its forward movement, and I'm so excited to be part of it. It's really been fun."
As a franchise fan who is currently playing her way through Fallout: New Vegas for the first time in over a decade, it's almost impossible not to watch Fallout season 2 without stopping to pause every few minutes.
Much like the attention to detail that was put into designing the set of season 1, with filming even taking place in a sunken city off the coast of Africa, New Vegas has been recreated almost street for street, sign for sign. Easter egg hunters will have a field day spotting the instantly recognisable likes of the Atomic Wrangler Casino, or the heavily fortified entrance to the New Vegas strip. There's even an old poster for Maxis, a pre-war magician who never made it to his headlining gig, and successful pre-war singer Joey Baxter.
When it comes to notable set pieces, Howard lists Mick and Ralph's as his standout, commending the prop and set design team for creating all of the realistic "little doodads, ammo, and stimpaks," adding that it was "like browsing the store for real." For Moten, it's "the warehouse that the Brotherhood gets into" (aka the Sunset Sarsaparilla factory), and "the alien in the fridge." Aliens are indeed characters in Fallout: New Vegas, and they're the classic green-skinned, bug-eyed little freaks we've seen time and time again in pop culture. Whether we'll see a live one in the new season, however, remains to be seen.
This is the end
If you've played New Vegas, you'll be aware that the game has four possible endings – none of which have been technically confirmed as canon to the franchise. Some fans wondered if season 2 pick up from one of the four possible outcomes from the game… and if that ending would then, in turn, become canon.
Here are the options: Robert House (played quite evilly by Justin Theroux in season 2) turns New Vegas into the dominant power of the Mojave (known simply as the Wasteland in the TV series), effectively turning him into the overlord of what's left of post-nuclear America; The Legion (whose imagery and branding we've seen in various season 2 trailers) defeats what's left of the New California Republic and effectively rules over the Wasteland; The NCR more or less takes over and annexes the Wasteland; or the Courier, controlled by you, the player, takes control of New Vegas for themselves. Given that there's a little bit of everything in season 2…anything is possible. According to Dworet, however, the show might go with a completely different ending entirely.
"This season of Fallout takes place about 15 years after the events of Fallout: New Vegas," Dworet confirms. "And we tried as much as possible to avoid saying, again, [that] any canonical ending is real. Instead, 15 years have gone by, and Vegas is not exactly as you remember it, because naturally, in the Wasteland, there's constantly shifts, right? There's warring factions trying to kill each other, take over each other's territory every day. So, things would not remain the same over 15 years. [There are] some things fans will recognize as very, very much the same. But other things have changed."
The success of the Fallout TV show has also put the spotlight back on the games themselves, something that Howard acknowledges while remaining tight-lipped about the possibility of a new installment on the horizon. Instead he explains how there was also something of a reverse effect, with Fallout season 2 having an impact on the likes of Fallout '76.
"15 years have gone by, and [New] Vegas is not exactly as you remember it"
Geneva Robertson-Dworet, co-showrunner
"I will say the popularity show is way more than even we expected. So it really was making sure that games are ready for all the players who are coming into them," Howard explains.
"Particularly Fallout '76 has had this resurgence of popularity, and one of the things that's influenced it is bringing [in] a character like the Ghoul, this character who lived before the bombs. And it's interesting to think that every Fallout game that you've played, he was alive somewhere in the wasteland, like you think about that. So having him come into '76 and play a role there has been really great and so much of the stuff in '76 with this update, is really inspired by season two."
Fallout season 2 hits Prime Video on December 17. For more, check out our list of the best Prime Video shows to stream right now.
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