Prime Video has dropped an extended teaser for the much-anticipated second season of Fallout, widely considered to be among the best TV adaptations of a gaming franchise. In our 2024 year-end roundup, Ars senior editor Samuel Axon wrote that the first season gave us “a specific cocktail of tongue-in-cheek humor, sci-fi campiness, strong themes, great characters, and visceral violence [that] came together into a fantastic show.” The second season looks like it will bring us more of the same, along with a major new character drawn from the Fallout: New Vegas game. We even got a glimpse of a Deathclaw.
(Minor spoilers for S1 below.)
For the uninitiated, Fallout is set two centuries after nuclear warfare between the US and China destroyed civilization in 2077—an alternate history version of 2077, in which post-World War II nuclear technology ushered in a retrofuturistic society. Some lucky survivors took refuge in various underground vaults; others were left to scavenge a meager existence on the highly radioactive surface.
In S1, we met Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a young woman whose vault is raided by surface dwellers. The raiders kill many vault residents and kidnap her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), so the sheltered Lucy sets out on a quest to find him. Life on the surface is pretty brutal, but Lucy learns fast. Along the way, she finds an ally (and love interest) in Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire masquerading as a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel. And she runs afoul of a gunslinger and bounty hunter known as the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a former Hollywood actor named Cooper Howard who survived the original nuclear blast, but radiation exposure turned him into, well, a ghoul.
