Part way through Fallout Season two, the loveable Lucy is asked who she’s searching for. “Someone you care about or someone you hate?” Now that’s a complicated question. At the end of season one, the Vault-dwelling innocent, played with wide-eyed, aw-shucks bashfulness by Ella Purnell, had seen her world turned upside down, after scouring a post-nuclear LA, circa 2296, in search of her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), only to find out he’s not quite the heroic figure she’d grown up with.
Indeed, things have switched so much for Lucy that at the beginning of season two, she’s teamed up with The Ghoul (Walton Goggins, sublime), that gun-slinging mutant, for a grisly twist on that gallows sequence in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. They’re the oddest of odd couples, but this is just one of the neat shifts that makes this second season worth tuning into. It’s bigger, yes – more monsters, more shoot-outs, more cameos. But, like those Vault-Tec bunkers, it also drills deeper.
With the season one set-up well and truly in the rearview mirror, season two wastes no time in widening out the mysteries. The Ghoul wants to find Hank for news of his own wife and daughter, although as increasingly intricate flashbacks to pre-War LA indicate, The Ghoul’s former existence as actor Cooper Howard – the face of the shadowy Vault-Tec corp. – and his relationship with wife Barb (Frances Turner) isn’t a picture of innocence either.
Deftly juggling strands, rogue Brotherhood member Maximus (Aaron Moten) is still at large and Lucy’s brother Norm (Moisés Arias) is holding the fort back at Vault 33, as revelations drop like carpet bombs. Again executive produced by Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Fallout strikes a balance for those that played the video game series it’s based on – 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas is tapped up here – and newbies who don’t know their T-60s from their Gulpers.
Certainly compared to The Last Of Us – that other great video game adaptation of our age – it’s brighter, funnier and more twisted. Part Western, part sci-fi, with a bit of 1950s kitsch thrown in, there’s something irresistible about this post-apocalyptic cocktail. The cartoon violence – notably one scrap in season two with guitar-swinging rockabilly-style mutants – is gorgeously gory. And needle-dropping those old standards, from Guys And Dolls’ ‘Luck Be A Lady’ to Tony Bennett’s ‘Rags To Riches’, remains as potent as ever. This season, we get show-stopping appearances from The Big Sick’s Kumail Nanjiani, Macaulay Culkin and Justin Theroux, as Robert House, the murky CEO of RobCo Industries, and one of the big swinging dicks behind the fallout. The more it digs into the Mojave Wasteland, the more weird it gets, from denizens dressed up as Roman soldiers – where a snooty-looking Culkin appears – to the return of Jon Daly’s dapper Snake Oil Salesman.
Less frenetic than, say, Twisted Metal – the other post-apoc game-to-show currently doing the rounds – Fallout season two is as ghoulish as you’d hope. By the time episode five comes around, it really hits its stride, with Lucy proving all this time above-ground has rubbed off on her. “I am nothing like you,” she tells The Ghoul. Don’t bet on it. Survival at all costs has a funny habit of morphing the brain chemistry of even the sweetest of souls.
‘Fallout’ is streaming on Prime Video now