SPOILER: This column contains potential spoilers for “Fallout” Season 2.
While I was previously unfamiliar with the game “Fallout,” I quickly became a fan of the first season of the show's adaptation when I started watching in May 2024. However, the second season, which aired its final episode Feb. 3, fell flat in comparison.
The “Fallout” TV and game franchises occur within a post-apocalyptic world following the “Great War,” which left society in ruins and radiation. Select citizens are safe within the underground vaults built by Vault-Tec, the megacorporation selling off fallout shelters to profit from nuclear bombings. Everyone else must survive in the outside world.
Season 1 of “Fallout” introduced me to the complex story built upon this post-nuclear society. Every character goes through their own survival journeys. For instance, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) plays a ghoul, whose wife has ties to the nuclear bombing, and vault dweller Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) spends the first season discovering her father is part of the fascist Enclave faction.
What I enjoyed a lot from this first season was that it was simultaneously comical yet suspenseful. For example, I found that the juxtaposition between Cooper’s disdain and immersion within this post-nuclear world, as well as Lucy’s naivety as a vault dweller discovering the surface, quite comical.
However, “Fallout” Season 2 didn’t actually solve any problems the first season set forth. The latest season creates plotlines that do not pay off at the end, ultimately leaving loose ends for the next season to resolve.
For example, Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias) finds himself trapped in Vault 31’s Cryochamber by the chamber’s overseer. He then prematurely sets free the executives who had been frozen. In the end, these Vault-Tec executives meet their demise to large radioactive roaches due to their unwillingness to help Norm. As this is Norm’s only conflict within Season 2, I feel that he was given a vague future journey for Season 3.
Another side plotline is that Stephanie Harper (Annabel O’Hagan), another vault dweller from Lucy’s vault, is revealed to have been in cahoots with Lucy’s morally unjust father. This explains the shadiness of her character within the first season, yet leads to questions unanswered when she deploys a new stage of her unknown plan at the end of Season 2.
Though much of the first and second seasons focus on the underground vaults being Vault-Tec's main experiment, the ending episode turns this on its head, revealing that the vaults were only just the beginning. This opens the door for the main question of Season 3.
In combination with all the other storylines, this season felt like it was more about setting up expositions for the show’s third season, which Amazon renewed in May 2025, rather than providing a plot-driven viewing experience. This is further amplified by the way Prime Video released this season as one episode each week, rather than all at once like the first season.
Although I didn’t enjoy Season 2 as much as the first season, I can acknowledge the service this season has done to more intense “Fallout” fans by introducing new tech and mutants from the game franchise, such as the “Elvis ghouls” which give a lighthearted appearance to the often-dark nature of ghouls. These ghouls draw reference to the “Elvis” impersonator called “The King” in the game “Fallout: New Vegas.”
Looking forward, I hope Season 3 ties up loose ends and continues to service fans of the original game’s content. And even though Season 2 was not my favorite, “Fallout” continues to maintain its place as one of the best game-to-TV adaptations with its darkly comedic and intense tone.
