What’s the Real Experiment?

We’re going to discuss the second season of Fallout in just a bit, but I think it’s instructive, before we get to that, to first discuss Westworld. That series, which aired from 2016 through 2022, was a reinvention of a classic property that then built a mystery box story out of the bones of the original. It was fantastic in its first season but kind of lost its ways afterwards, struggling to find what made the first season interesting as it tried to build newer and bigger mysteries without actually knowing how to answer any of them. It got more complex, but not more interesting, and by the time of its fourth season very few people stuck around to see how it all ended (or, really, wasn’t supposed to end but did anyway).

I raise this point because Westworld was created by Johnathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and Nolan and Joy are also heavily involved in Fallout. This series, which aired its much anticipated and well received first season in 2024, is a reinvention of a classic property that then built a mystery box story out of the bones of the original world. Its first season was complex and interesting, with bigger and bigger mysteries hinted at by the time its first season came to a close, and audiences greatly anticipated where the series could go from there. And its second season… just wasn’t as interesting.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot that happens in Fallout’s second season, and many more complexities and mysteries are added into it to try and push the world further. But it feels like the more complex the series gets, the more layers it adds to its overall narrative, the less interesting it becomes. It’s becoming more and more like Westworld in that respect, and I have concerns that the series is marching itself into irrelevance in much the same way that Westworld did a few years back. You hate to see it, too, because the first season of this show was so good, but this season just doesn’t have it.

This season of Fallout finds vault dweller Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) paired up with "The Ghoul", Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), as they make their way across the wasteland towards Las Vegas. That’s where Lucy’s father, Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) went after he killed the leader of the New California Republic, and Lucy wants to bring her father back to Vault 33 to face justice. Cooper, meanwhile, wants to find his family, his wife and daughter, who have been in a special management vault since the bombs dropped, and Hank knows just where that vault is.

Hank, though, has other plans. He’s gotten hold of mind control tech that was developed before the bombs dropped by Robert Edwin House (Justin Theroux), a brilliant, but strange, tech industrialist. With that mind control tech Hank can reprogram the denizens of the wasteland and turn them into docile automatons. Meanwhile, there’s also Maximus (Aaron Moten), who has the cold fusion diode and who accidentally sets off a civil war between the factions of the Brotherhood of Steel. And there’s Lucy’s brother, Norm (Moisés Arias), who ends up out in the wasteland with a group of unfrozen management goons. Plus, there’s also the valutees back in Vaults 32 and 33, where Lucy is from, who are dealing with their own issues as well. How their stories converge, and what the series has in store for all of them, could lead to trouble all across the wasteland.

On one hand I really appreciate the ambitions of the series. In its first season the scope of the series was small, split between the stories of Lucy and Maximus before they came together, with the Ghoul hanging around, being a bad ass and stealing scenes. It built to a surprising twist at the end of the first season, a well plotted, well coordinated story that really paid off on all the plot points it raised while giving us more to chew on for season two. From that initial start we now have multiple plotlines with multiple characters, all running alongside each other as the stories of the wasteland get more complex and involved. It’s a lot, and it shows just how diverse these tales of the wasteland can get.

The problem with season two of Fallout is that it doesn’t really know how to focus its stories in any meaningful way. The previous season left things off with a lot of threads dangling, but instead of focusing on specific threads relevant to the story as a whole we’ve gotten bits and pieces of all of them, all scattered and thrown together, into a mish-mash that doesn’t feel anywhere near as cohesive or interesting as the season that came before. It’s more, a lot more, but that doesn’t actually make this series better in any meaningful way.

The main plot is still focused on Lucy and her chase after her father. This is an interesting story that should be told for her character to get closure. I appreciate how it dovetails into Cooper’s story, but, weirdly, on its own the story is really only enough for a couple of episodes of storytelling. We could cover everything that happens to Lucy, Cooper, and Hank in a double-header opening the show and then turn to other matters and the series would be just fine. That’s because most of the plot of the season doesn’t even have to do with the wasteland or what’s going on with our main characters.

The real plot of the series is told in flashbacks, cutting back to Cooper’s life before the bombs fell, as the show tries to color in the various factions that wanted the end of the world to happen. It’s a lot of backstory that, arguably, may or may not be actually needed. What can be said, though, is that it pads out the season and gives what otherwise would have been maybe four episodes of content a runtime of ten hours for the season. And I’m still not certain it was actually necessary.

This is because the series is still playing coy about where things are going and who all are the real masterminds of the apocalypse. Vault Tech and RobCo and all of them had their fingers in the tech that eventually led to the end of everything, and apparently many of these factions are still running hundreds of years later, and they all seem to still be planning… something. What, or why, or how, is all a mystery, and the series expects us to care about that after spending an entire season raising a lot of different points but actually explaining nothing. I feel like after all of the flashbacks I understand what happened even less than I did before, which is actually pretty bad storytelling when you think about it.

Beyond that, we have all the other bits and pieces of storytelling that don’t really seem to go anywhere. Maximus accidentally starts a civil war among the Brotherhood of Steel factions, but then he wanders away and we forget all about it. Norms gets caught out in the wasteland and has to deal with Vault Tech stooges, but that storyline is so removed from everything else we’re watching that we can hardly even think it matters. And then there’s what’s going on in Vaults 32 and 33, where our characters are originally from, but it feels so tangential to, well, everything that you have to wonder why we’re even still focused on it. The show seems unable to move on from the past and actually give us a cohesive story about our main characters now, and it’s working to the detriment of the show’s own ambitions.

The various bits and pieces of Fallout are still good, but this season needed to be massively restructured to actually make it work in its current form. For starters, all the backstory about Cooper and the fall of civilization should have been its own work, a movie or mini-series set between the main seasons of the show so we could get it out of the way on its own terms. The show should have remained focused on Lucy and Maximus while ditching almost everyone else. For instance, if Norm is important to the story he needs more screen time and more to do. We need Fallout to focus on what matters instead of trying to twist itself into knots to create some air of mystery about what’s coming next.

It all feels so much like the second season of Westworld, which tried to expand out its mystery box story with grander ambitions, only to fall apart because there was no plan and clearly the creators had no idea how to tell their big story the way they wanted to. While I don’t think season two of Fallout is as bad as that, it’s still not great, and that’s because it lumbers around, stumbling between plotlines that barely connect, all to tell a story that barely moves forward at all. We need big moves, more momentum, and a story that matters, and season two doesn’t deliver that, not frequently enough for its bloated runtime.

I like this show, but it’s pretty clear this season spun pretty far out of control. What we need for season three is for the creators to pull it back in and focus on the stories that matter. If we get another disjointed season like this, I think it’s going to be hard for Fallout to maintain its audience. And at that point who knows if the show will even make it to whatever grand conclusion its creators have in mind.