Review of the second season of “Fallout” series; A great video game adaptation!

As disappointing as the second season of “The Last of Us” was, the second season of Prime Video’s wildly successful post-apocalyptic series has created quite a stir. The series “Fallout” (Fallout) showed with its first season what a good video game adaptation should be. Now with its second season, “Fallout” proves itself as the best video game adaptation ever; An adaptation that expands on the radioactive dystopia of the first season and keeps players satisfied with plenty of references and allusions to the original video games. In the review of the second season of the “Fallout” series, I discuss the adventures of Lucy, Ghul, and Maximus, who, passing through California, this time will encounter a familiar place for fans, New Vegas.

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Review of the second season of “Fallout” series; On the way to New Vegas

The series “Fallout” is back for its second season in a blink of an eye and fortunately only one year after the release of the first episodes. This new season, released in eight weekly episodes, shows that the creators of the TV adaptation are not as full of good and creative ideas as the kids at Bethesda.

If you remember, the story of the series “Fallout” takes place about 200 years after the nuclear war that destroyed human civilization as we knew it. Now a few people continue to survive in shelters that Vault-Tec has built. In the first season, we saw Lucy (Ella Purnell); A kind and optimistic girl who grew up safely inside these vaults and follows her father Hank (Kyle McLachlan) to the surface of the wasteland for the first time. While searching for her father, Lucy meets a bounty hunter named Ghoul (Walton Guggins); A former cowboy and movie star who became an immortal monster after a mushroom explosion and under the influence of radioactive radiation. The third protagonist is Maximus (Aaron Moten); A member of the Brotherhood of Steel military sect, who, in order to prove himself to his group, with a giant mechanical armor, went barefoot to find the fusion device and met Lucy and the giant. At the same time, Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias), also trapped in Vault 31, awakens the members of VaultTech being held there.

At the end of last season, Lucy found out that her father is not who she thought and was even behind her mother’s death. More importantly, it was a brief appearance in the final moments of the season, which caused the fans of the games to be confused. In the final scene, Hank MacLean climbs a hill and on the horizon, amidst the barren post-apocalyptic ruins, a familiar sight is shown: New Vegas.

If you’ve heard anything about the Fallout games, you know that Fallout: New Vegas is the best game in the franchise. The second season of the series takes us and the protagonists to this city. Las Vegas is one of the few cities in the United States that escaped the nuclear explosion of the Fallout world; Mr. House’s philanthropist is at the head of the Rob-Co company. In “Fallout: New Vegas”, Master House equipped his casino in Las Vegas (Lucky 38, the same building we saw in the last frame of the first season of the series) with all kinds of radar, laser and defense systems to save himself from the apocalypse, and his efforts paid off.

In the second season of the series, however, the character of Mr. House will remain in the aura of ambiguity for a long time. At the same time that in 2296 Lucy is looking for her father, and Ghoul is looking for his wife and daughter (who he thinks must have been cryogenically survived in one of the vaults) in New Vegas, Ghoul’s past, his adventures with Mr. House and the course of events that led to the explosion 200 years ago are revealed to us. As in the last season, relying on flashbacks, we follow Cooper in the world before the nuclear bomb, with the retro-futuristic image of the 50s, and we see that before he wandered in the desert without a nose and like a wild west revolver, and even before he was an actor, he personally wanted to prevent the explosion of atomic bombs.

Cooper meets Mister House (played by Justin Theroux): America‘s most powerful tech giant for whom moral values ​​are meaningless. Mister House wants to lead the United States to full mechanization by implanting mind control chips. Knowing that nuclear war is imminent, he wants to survive forever with the help of the fusion device and endless energy; The idea that turns out to be the year 2296 has yielded results.

It is also during the giant’s flashbacks that we learn about his role in the fateful event 200 years ago. A group of rich investors and mysterious figures (Enclave) build the vaults in which Lucy lived in one of them, and to answer their business, they destroy the world through nuclear explosions to shape it according to their mental utopia, and Cooper, unaware of everywhere, has prepared the ground for this sinister event by giving the president a small glass of cold fusion.

The difficulties of adapting a masterpiece

The second season of “Fallout” series has no time to scratch your head. With many new characters and locations and storylines to follow from the first season, the series has taken a big risk; Of course, the risk that was necessary to adapt the best game of the franchise. In the second season, the ultimate goal in one sentence is to reach New Vegas; But like the video games themselves, the protagonists go through many side missions and gain information as they explore the post-apocalyptic wasteland. In each episode, “Fallout” advances several storylines simultaneously, from the endless deserts to the Roman camps of Caesar’s legions and dizzying retro-futuristic buildings. Fallout’s bareness looks even wilder and more violent than the first season; But violent and shocking actions, combined with black comedy and absurdism specific to “Fallout” games, make the post-apocalyptic land of the story even more dynamic than before. To complement this dynamic, our heroes are introduced to new factions that are often at war with each other.

One of these factions is the New California Republic (NCR), who want to expand their power throughout the West, and to do so, they must rule over New Vegas. However, they face a major obstacle: Caesar’s Legion, who are the exact opposite of the NCR and an extremist faction inspired by the ancient Roman Empire. Their ultimate goal is to destroy the NCR and impose a military dictatorship on the city of New Vegas. Lucy and the giant encounter these two factions on their tour of the Mojave desert. Although the life and death of the heroes depends on how to deal with these factions, there is no need to worry; Because Lucy can handle it.

Lucy is no longer the surprised and compassionate girl we met at the beginning of the first season. After an entire season in the desert and discovering truths that have changed her world, Lucy spends most of the second season with a bloody face. He who no longer hesitates to get his hands dirty and knows that the law of the desert is “Kill or be killed”, now he has found new courage and courage and faces questions of morality and value.

In the second season, these character developments, especially for Lucy, who was not even an ant in the beginning of the first season, have been achieved in a completely logical process. After Lucy’s confrontation with her father, Hank explains to the girl that he wants to rid the world of all cruelty and misery with the help of mind control chips. This puts Lucy in the duality of morality and expediency. In the end, Lucy refuses to let her father’s idea of ​​unethical robotic advances go ahead. But there is an imminent war in New Vegas, and on second glance, his father’s idea doesn’t seem so bad; Although at the cost of losing human agency. With its second season, “Fallout” invites you to ask yourself if the advancement of technology is ultimately detrimental to humanity? Is human nature tied to war? Lucy is also struggling with these questions. With these dualities that Lucy (and sometimes Maximus) find themselves in, “Fallout” occasionally reminds you that the real monsters in this world are not Deathclaws or giants, but people; In fact, those who bear the name of Adam have only brought misery and brutality to this world; Those who hide behind a dirty smile and a pressed suit, but easily control and massacre millions of people, or make decisions that lead to the deaths of millions.

Of course, “Fallout,” like the video games it’s based on, is less about fundamental questions about the nature of evil and human nature, and more about the funny and loud adventures the heroes go on or the strange characters they meet along the way.

One of these strange characters is Mister House; A mustachioed villain who makes his mind immortal by predicting the future. He, who seeks to fully control people and exploit them, hates humanity and only looks at them as numbers. Justin Theroux has brought this calculating spirit, intelligence and at the same time the convicting character of Mr. House with precision and elegance. The guest actors of this season, Macaulay Culkin and Kamil Nanjiani, one is a confident and war-loving Caesar and the other is a crazy legionnaire, with slapstick jokes and black comedy for Fallout, leave their mark in their short appearance in the season.

Among the actors who returned to the series from the first season, Walton Guggins with his monstrous makeup has a different appearance and has become the most attractive character of the season; He continued his charismatic performance from the first season in the second season and makes every scene memorable. Goggins, who recently hit the headlines with The White Lotus, skillfully shifts between an ironed-out Howard and a bedraggled giant in a cape in Fallout, and his backstory with his wife and Mr. House is more interesting than the other storylines.

Like the first season, you don’t need to be familiar with video games to watch the second season of “Fallout”; But if you are a fan of games, the numerous references and hints of the Arithmetic series will delight you; From Fallout 4’s first VaultTech salesman seen in Cooper’s flashbacks, to the terrifying mutant monsters, Deathclaw, that Maximus battles with in the final episode.

However, the series isn’t all about tickling your nostalgia. Going to New Vegas, to which fans have a special devotion, shows the risk-taking of the series’ showrunners, Graham Wagner and Genevieve Robertson Dorrett, and at the same time their intelligence; Because the screenplay, rather than focusing on the past and nostalgia, understands today; Even the character of Mr. House, the conflict between the parties and the society on the verge of collapse, has become a kind of social criticism of the current United States.

But the second season has a big flaw: ambition. The series wants to advance the story of three different heroes (including Norm Four) at the same time, expand the world-building of “Fallout”, deal with the factions and history of the nuclear war, and do all this in eight episodes. In the meantime, it is not strange that some storylines have appeared weaker than others; For example, the duo of Lucy and Ghul is better than the first season and even Norm now has a more important mission, but Maximus is still the weakest part of the story.

With all that said, Fallout Season 2 answers the questions of Season 1, establishes logical arcs for the characters, and brings back memories of the best Fallout games for fans by arriving in New Vegas. After all, with surprises and noisy actions in episode eight, it makes a satisfactory end for the second season. An ending that promises a third season that will lead the heroes on a new path and even more exciting adventures, possibly in Colorado.

birth certificate The second season Serial “Fallout” (Fallout)

Makers: Graham Wagner, Genevieve Robertson Dorrett
Author: Graham Wagner, Genevieve Robertson Dorrett
Actors: Ella Purnell, Walton Guggins, Kyle McLachlan, Aaron Moten, Frances Turner
Product: 2025, United States
Site score IMDb To the series: 8.3 out of 10
Rating of the series on Rotten Tomatoes website: 95%
Summary of the story: After Hank is lost and buried, Lucy and Ghul set out to find his father. They leave California for New Vegas; But reaching the destination is not so simple; Because a new combination of villains and monsters are waiting for them. In the middle of the road, Lucy and Ghul encounter the warring factions that have filled the post-nuclear war world; But Lucy is determined to find her father and stop his evil ideas, and the giant wants to find his wife and daughter. At the same time, Maximus, who was tasked in the brotherhood to find the cold fusion device, after obtaining it, providing infinite energy and becoming a hero, is now stuck in the dilemma of loyalty or betrayal. Each of them is struggling with many challenges to reach the goal, but will the hand of fate put these three in each other’s path again?

The review of the second season of “Fallout” series is the author’s personal point of view and is not necessarily the position of Digikala Mag.

Source: Digikala Mag