Fallout Season 2 Review: If The First Season Was A Love Letter To...

In case you're wondering if you've come to the right place, you have.

I was worried about Fallout Season 2. The dud second season is a cliché in TV just like it is in sport—the sophomore slump where a show loses its spark. Amazon should know this well, having turned a bunch of The Rings of Power's second season into a weird rehash of Star Wars with Tom Bombadil as Yoda. And though I didn't hate the second season of The Witcher, it was a shame to lose the twisty structure of the first season's jumbled timeline, which relied on viewers spotting details to untangle which events took place when, and not gain anything nearly as thinky to replace it.

So I went into Fallout Season 2 with concerns. For starters, I expected the pre-war flashbacks to become vestigial, hurried past to get on with the modern day story of Lucy, Maximus, and the Ghoul. Praise be to the Atom then, that the flashbacks remain central. Barb continues making moral compromises on behalf of her family and Coop keeps finding out about corporate shenanigans that force him to become involved.

But usually the reason TV shows disappoint in their second season is, while the first season can focus on introducing the core cast, the second needs to broaden things to keep generating new story. There's just no guarantee we'll be as interested in the B-listers as we were in the leads.

Fallout set itself up for success on this count. The first season was full of great bits where the stars were absent, when it bounced back to Norm or over to Wilzig and Thaddeus and all the rest. Season 2 carries on some of those stories—Norm continues to be a highlight—and introduces new ones, like what Hank's actually up to in Vegas, which are as interesting as the activities of the core trio. (No, he's not just hitting the slots and vomiting in the fountain.)

When the season starts, Lucy and the Ghoul are trailing Hank, which means crossing the Mojave. It's a real treat for anyone with fond memories of New Vegas, bringing back the Legion and Novac and Freeside and whatnot. Things have changed since we saw them last (the dinosaur's facing the other direction, for one thing), but I was constantly delighted by seeing the show's fresh characters interact with familiar leftover remnants of New Vegas, and the references to its most memetic moments. I was basically the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing jpg for hours.

Maximus, meanwhile, has finally become a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel, attaining his dream, but realizing it

Source: PC Gamer