Fallout 2 and New Vegas designer Chris Avellone has never hesitated to share how much he despises Amazon's Fallout TV show adaptation, but he still has another 15 or 40 minutes of complaining to do about its second season, which he apparently sat down to watch despite hating it and wanting it to get hit by a car.
In this way, Avellone was just like 83 million other viewers who tuned in for Fallout season 2, Amazon's second-most-watched returning show: flies flocking to a molding chicken dinner. We weren't especially amazed by season 2 either, describing in our Fallout season 2 review how it's "a little overcrowded and at times convoluted," – but we at least had more patience than Avellone, who sometimes got so irritated, he tells YouTuber TKs-Mantis in a hefty new interview, "I had to shut it off within a minute."
"I got right up to the beginning of episode 3" in season 2, Avellone says, "and I honestly just couldn't go on any longer. But it doesn't mean, like, it was absolutely terrible." He repeats a few times that he found season 2's first episodes "just not well-crafted," and overall, "I don't think the scripts are very good."
He gives an example of where Vault Dweller Lucy has to choose between protecting a Legion slave and her uneasy ally, the near-immortal Ghoul. But since Avellone knows the Ghoul will survive nearly anything that happens to him, he says "all the tension got evaporated" while he was watching a scene that was supposed to turn his stomach into a smoothie.
"There were so many things like that where, I would have to watch it for 10 minutes, I'd get frustrated, take a long break, I'd forget why I was frustrated, then I'd start watching it again. Another 10 minutes would go by, if that," Avellone says.
There's a particular moment where he felt like Brotherhood of Steel soldier Maximus was meant to look forlorn about his love interest Lucy, "but the framing and the camera work in that scene is so fucking bad that, like, it was hard for me not to laugh out loud, and I had to shut it off, like, within a minute. And I'm like, 'These are basic cinematography techniques for conveying emotion, for framing a scene, and you guys are just being clowns about it.' Like, grow some skills."
So, yeah, I don't think Avellone's opinion of the Fallout show has changed much from season 1's release in 2024, when he posted a negative two-part review on his Medium blog page and summarized it in a Twitter post saying, "The lore in this series is a hot mess."
"If you like the show and you're enjoying it, fantastic," Avellone disclaims in his YouTube interview. And, "I am very proud of Bethesda for being able to bring it to a TV series, which is something that Interplay could never have done. And the fact that Amazon picked it up, and the show is getting a lot of views, it's getting a lot of attention, a lot of great ratings – that's just great for the franchise." But it's not great for Chris Avellone.
