DLC for Amazon’s cheerfully nihilistic game adaptation Fallout has finally dropped.
And like the best DLC, it doesn’t reinvent the experience so much as expand it – deepening the world, advancing the story and preserving everything that made us fall for it in the first place. In this case, that’s the show’s gorgeous tonal cocktail of pitch-black humour, sudden violence, moral ambiguity and retro-futurist irony, lifted straight from Bethesda’s best-selling games.
Picking up immediately after the climax of Season One, this opener wastes no time revisiting its dangling narrative threads. Lucy MacLean and the Ghoul (Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins) continue their pursuit of Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan): she intent on dispensing her own brand of relentlessly cheerful, bloody justice, he desperate to uncover what really happened to his family. Meanwhile, Stephanie (Annabel O’Hagan) struggles to settle into her new role as Overseer of Vault 32, with poor Chet (Dave Register) floundering in his new position as little more than her surrogate baby daddy. While back in the mysterious Vault 31, Norm MacLean (Moises Arias) finds himself trapped underground with only frozen Vault-Tec middle management corpses and a disturbingly upbeat, psychopathic talking brain for company.
There’s also a notable increase in pre-war flashbacks, expanding the storyline of Goggins’ character uncovering Vault-Tec’s apocalyptic ambitions and his doomed attempts to stop them. These sequences suggest a more overt parallel-timeline structure this season, deepening the show’s political and moral subtext while reinforcing the idea that the end of the world was engineered more in boardrooms than on battlefields.
Notably absent from this opening chapter is Aaron Moten’s Maximus and the Brotherhood of Steel, clearly being held back for a more dramatic re-entry later in the season. Their absence allows this premiere to focus on lore-building and thematic groundwork, signalling an ambition to explore Fallout’s past, present and future in equal measure – and crucially, to do so in a way that thinks like the games, particularly Fallout: New Vegas, rather than slavishly recreating them.
And so Fallout returns much as it left us: confident, cruel, funny and morally compromised, now with an added dose of Mad Men-meets-Mad Max nuclear lunacy. If this opener is any indication, Season Two is less interested in escalating spectacle and gooey mutants than in following some devious Lynchian roots of burrowing deeper into the rot beneath its irradiated Americana. And that makes it one of the most promising returns to the wasteland imaginable.
The premiere episode of Fallout Season 2 is streaming in 4K HDR10+ and Dolby Atmos on UK Amazon Prime now, with later episodes released on a weekly basis.
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