Last Updated on December 22, 2025 by Angel Melanson
Fallout is finally back with Season 2 with Lucy, The Ghoul and Maximus continuing their mission across the wasteland. The wait for the show’s second season was blissfully short by post-quarantine standards, with there only being about a year and a half between the Season 1 finale and 2025’s premiere. However, in case you’ve forgotten where we left off: Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) officially team up after it’s revealed that Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) isn’t just responsible for nuking an entire city, but likely had something to do with what happened to The Ghoul’s family.
Season 2 starts right where the first left off, following the unlikely duo across the Mojave desert as they track Hank to New Vegas. Purnell and Goggins get the opportunity to play off each other right off the bat, with The Ghoul’s endless cynicism grating on Lucy’s hopeless optimism and vice-versa. Maximus (Aaron Moten), however, is missing from this premiere entirely (don’t worry, we’ll undoubtedly catch up with the recently anointed Knight in Episode 2).
While Maximus’ absence from this first episode is surely a bummer for fans, it’s the right move from a narrative perspective. We were introduced to some of Lucy and The Ghoul’s back-and-forth in Season 1, but the series needs time to establish the dynamic between the two leads before re-introducing the third into the bunch. Moreover, Maximus is dealing with quite the pickle with his Brotherhood brethren. The militia believes that he was the one to kill Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) in the Season 1 finale rather than helping Lucy meet her goals, so he’s got a lot of work to do as an inside man before we see what will eventually become of the core trio when they unite on their journey.
This Season 2 premiere has a good balance of reiterating important details — the wasteland is difficult, The Ghoul’s a bastard, Lucy’s too nice, there is no food — while also setting the standard for what’s to come. We get more of Robert Edwin House (Justin Theroux) right off the bat, building off of Season 1’s very brief introduction to establish what a danger he is to anyone in his orbit that he does not find of immediate value while also seeing the tone for gore and violence for this season established promptly. Head explosions: there will probably be a lot of them.
What’s more interesting is the premiere’s firmly established theme. Now that we know that the New California Republic was working to bring (literal) power to the people, the show can turn its attention to the root of all evil: unchecked capitalism. We’re not minutes into the premiere before the line “every dollar spent is a vote cast” is uttered and, while that might seem a little too on the nose for some, it’s become violently evident that subtlety doesn’t reach audiences lately. Now, is a whole chested discussion about unchecked capitalism occurring on a Jeff Bezos-owned property a little (lot) ironic? Sure. But the broader discussion about participating in that capitalism being the only way to get your stories made nowadays is a whole separate conversation.
All that narrative depth is lovely, of course, and very important to me as both a critic and fan. But you know what’s also important? Watching bad people die in fun ways. Sure, sometimes in Fallout it can be less of a straight up “bad person” scenario and more that said party has had all meaningful choices made for them by their circumstance, but the bottom line is that it’s fun to watch cruelty meet the end it actually deserves. For Fallout, a lot of those ends will come gradually. But that doesn’t mean that this premiere doesn’t see its fair share of gnarly deaths doled out to both the good and the bad among the background cast. We’re not skimping on the blood and guts (and brains) here, and it seems likely that trend will continue as Season 2 unfolds.
It shouldn’t be noteworthy but, given that you can’t see half of modern television shows, it’s worth a mention that all of those gory details remain in full display and complete visibility. Everything that happens above ground is brightly lit because the majority of it occurs during the daytime in the Mojave and Vegas proper, but the series also does well lighting its defunct vaults and night scenes. Maybe if we praise it enough everyone else will remember how to light dark shots again.
Ultimately, the chase for Hank MacLean has proven an interesting foundation for Season 2. The odd-couple quality of Lucy and The Ghoul make the journey engaging regardless of the destination, and we have enough mystery between Hank’s goals and The Ghoul’s quest for his family to leave us with plenty of meaningful questions as the story unfolds. This is most certainly a premiere that does its job well. Here’s hoping the rest of Season 2 manages to maintain the quality and intrigue.
