Fallout Season 2 is predominantly a cynical reminder you should be doing something else
Review
The first time we meet the protagonist of Amazon's Fallout adaptation, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), in its second season, she is covering Walton Goggins' The Ghoul from the mouth of Dinky the T-rex. A group of horn-helmeted thugs are about to string him up. Initiated viewers will recognise them as Great Khans; the place as Novac.
Both play a major part in Fallout New Vegas, the video game from which Season 2 of Fallout is loosely adapted. The Great Khans, particularly, are a complex faction possessed of a history laced with tragedy and meaning within the broader narrative of the Mojave Wasteland. Amazon's Fallout renders them as nameless goons. They become target practice for the series' heroes and reminders of just how inhumane and petty Fallout is as a viewing experience.
Season 2's broad strokes — and its strokes never get more precise than that — see Lucy pursuing her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) across Vegas, The Ghoul in tow. As they embark on a whistle-stop tour of New Vegas references her former companion, Maximus (Aaron Moten), returns to a Brotherhood of Steel on the cusp of civil war. As usual for this series, a sequence of eye-roll-inducing pratfalls sees a situation that could be defused erupt in comical violence and gore. This, at least, is shot with a kinetic panache that lends Fallout some credence as watchable.
Both narrative paths are strewn with uneven flashbacks, trying to humanise its subjects — most often without success.
The Brotherhood of Steel, however, remain an interesting mob. Maximus' story — a misfit within a fascistic order — never elevates above a tepid rehash of Finn's (John Boyega) journey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Curiously, in a series devoid of interest in the broad church of its source material, its rendering of the Brotherhood as xenophobic frat boys, football kits swapped for giant armor, is appropriate.
Still, dripping in Bethesda's influence, Fallout cannot escape Bethesda's obsession with the faction at the expense of exploring literally anything else. Jonathan Nolan and company write them as suitably unpleasant, obnoxious, and unyielding, but the childish glee with which Fallout maintains focus on them belies any comment it could be making about their motives.
Lucy has more luck. Purnell is charming as the sheltered vault-dweller succumbing to the influence of the wasteland. Her delving into vice is a rare comedic triumph for a series that is keen to be seen as a comedy but rarely lives up to the concept. Goggins, too, is unsurprisngly versatile as the cliched antihero, considering his broader oeuvre, who is both protective of his new ward and a willing bad influence upon her. Both do their best with the material. Ultimately, however, they're fuelling a fire with no warmth. The only kindling they're given is a string of lazy references, the only result adolescent humour and a lack of originality.
It's a shame. Fallout New Vegas is a rich and layered world which Fallout Season 2 abandons in favour of simply putting things we've seen before on the screen in live-action. Locales are stripped for parts, the good New Vegas did to Bethesda's Fallout disamantled, and characters become bare bones. The Great Khans become Bethesda's patented nameless raiders, The Kings a visual gag, and if you liked The Legion Fallout has two!
If Maximus' storyline is blatantly borrowed from The Force Awakens, Fallout's attitude to New Vegas feels more like The Rise of Skywalker and its desperation to undo a more interesting predecessor.
It's an insecurity that makes the otherwise childish and caustic Fallout harder to bear. Any hint of humanity, complexity, is lost. The world we may have left behind in-game is gone, replaced by the piles of rubble and ramshackle corrugated shacks that Bethesda mandates. If New Vegas offered a sense of renewal to Fallout's world, reminiscent of the game world before Bethesda absorbed it, Fallout Season 2 cements humanity as an irredeemable mob unable to conceive of a world outside maintaining a cycle of destruction. It's cynical, depressing, and unimaginative.
Which is the root of the problem. Fallout is a rich world: ridiculous, yes, but surprising also. Amazon's series, little more than a branding exercise for a stalled video game franchise, is instead a static, uncurious, and predictable reminder that you could be doing anything else and having more fun.