Fallout Season 2 is a $153 million mess that muddles through eight meandering episodes to the finish line, except there really isn’t a finish line, just a teaser for Season 3, and there’s really not a reason for the viewer to care about Season 3, or even remember what happened in this season.
In my review of the first season, I mentioned how it felt like the script was split between two different teams who didn’t communicate with each other, so the second half of the episodes feel barely connected to the first half, and there are some serious contradictions. The biggest one being that the raiders who violently attacked Lucy’s vault turned out to be working for a good guy. It’s also odd that Lucy turns out to be a super important character, despite the fact she was nearly killed at random in the first five minutes. As bad as that was, the second season is worse. The script seems like it was passed around a classroom to teenage students who just wrote down whatever random cool thing comes up in their heads. I’m not trying to be mean here, but there’s no foreshadowing, or even evidence that the writers knew what was going to happen next and weren’t just making it up as they went along. That’s excusable for a 1990s sitcom, but not a TV series that cost more than $300 million so far.
The second season also got a lot more meta. Naturally, Season 1 made a bunch of references and jokes about the video games, and in a way that’s clever and interesting. Like jokes about passing dialogue checks, or recruiting a companion NPC just so you can dump all of your extra weapons and loot on him. But the geniuses behind Season 2 decided, why stop there? Why not pick a Fallout game that was popular and just blatantly reference places, characters, and things from it over and over again? So Season 2 is a rehash of Fallout New Vegas. But just pointing out things that exist isn’t clever. Especially since the show doesn’t even try to be clever with these references. So it is neat to see the NCR trooper from the intro cinematic of New Vegas, or the dinosaur sniper’s nest in Novac, but they almost never add anything to the plot. Worse than that, very often I am sure these scenes only happen in the first place so they could reference a thing that exists in New Vegas.
And that leads me to another problem with Season 2, the gimmicks. It’s like the writers sort of heard of what a MacGuffin is, but don’t use the trope correctly. Like the maltese falcon, or the platinum chip in New Vegas, are good examples of MacGuffins. The first season of Fallout had the nuclear fusion device that was comically hidden in the Enclave scientist’s head, and that sort of drove the plot a little. But the mind control devices in the second season don’t really do anything except fill up time. Imagine if that part was just completely cut out, would it substantially change the characters or direction of the plot in any meaningful way? Not really. Another thing they like to do in this season is do big “reveals” of pre-war characters who miraculously survived, and it started getting a little ridiculous. What did showing the congresswoman as a disembodied head really add to the story? And isn’t it kind of silly to show so many named characters surviving the war? Who actually died in the war? Did anyone die? It’s a less extreme case of what happened to Palpatine’s Order 66 to wipe out the jedi, then later media kept retconning jedi characters who actually survived, until eventually it seems like Order 66 barely killed any jedi at all.
That’s actually a problem with the series in general, so much of it is filler of characters just doing stuff, almost any scene or character could be cut out without reducing the viewer’s understanding of the plot. Part of the reason so much of the show feels like meandering time filler is because Season 2 inherited so many different character threads from the first season, and for some reason decided they were all equally important. Season 2 actually reminded me a lot of the later Game of Thrones seasons, which was filled with interchangeable and in some cases confusingly similar characters with ultimately inconsequential roles in the overall fate of the kingdom. Fallout could be much more interesting if it let Lucy and Cooper have some screentime in their own show, instead of dividing it between 11 or 12 other characters I’ve mostly already forgotten.
Filler with a New Vegas twist is particularly bad because that game was open ended, with around five “main” endings that happened depending on the player character’s choices. Maybe the show writers didn’t want to make any one of those ending “canon,” so deliberately stayed vague. But the result was a mess, with all of the powerful factions shown in the game either destroyed or severely weakened. That’s fine, but it’s not clever. For example, what was clever about showing Caesar dead and the legion divided in civil war? The viewer might wonder what Caesar’s plan was to ensure the tribal empire survived his death and the succession crisis, but the show has a “twist” reveal that he had no plan at all and expected the legion to collapse. One could argue that’s clever writing, but it’s equally possible to argue that this is really lazy. They treat the billionaire genius Robert House a similar way. Loosely based on the real-life Howard Hughes, House is obsessed with consolidating power, that’s pretty much his entire motivation in the game. But then in the show, House has completely lost power, his casino is in ruins, and the Vegas strip is abandoned and overrun by deathclaws. Again, that could be called clever subversion of expectations, or incredibly lazy writing by people who didn’t want to deal with the trouble of taking House’s character to some logical conclusion.
Speaking of House, wasn’t the whole point in the game that he had predicted nuclear war but ran out of time before he could finish preparing for it? In the show, it’s explicitly stated that evil US businessmen, including House, intentionally caused the war. Why would House start the war before he was ready for it? That doesn’t make any sense. For that matter, at this point in the show’s flashbacks, Cooper knows about the war too. So why did the opening episode of Season 1 show him caught by surprise at a children’s birthday party? If he knew the world was about to get blown up, why would he be performing at parties to begin with? He needs the money?
To circle back to Caesar, besides the gimmicks, another thing that bothered me was lack of understanding of scale or proportion. The NCR and the legion are supposed to be huge empires covering much of the former continental USA, with hundreds of settlements and thousands of soldiers. The exact condition of the NCR is left vague in the show, but the legion is depicted as a single camp split into two factions, which doesn’t make any sense. I could understand if Caesar’s generals split the empire into several competing factions, but the writers would have had to think about it for more than three seconds and I guess they didn’t want to.
In that one episode when Cooper gets seriously wounded, his dog runs off and finds two other main characters closeby and brings them back at the perfect moment, which I find impossible to believe because none of those people were doing anything related to each other so there was no reason they would all by coincidence be so close. And this keeps happening over and over, with characters randomly running into each other at important moments.
By the last episode, I didn’t feel excited for the conclusion, because by then it was so obvious there wasn’t going to be one. There was no way they could possibly wrap up all those character threads, but perhaps the most insulting part is they didn’t even try. They just end the show on nothing and tell us to come back for more slop entertainment in Season 3.
Watch Fallout Season 2 on Amazon Prime
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Ian Kummer
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Make bears, not wars
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Make bears, not wars
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