After more than a year-and-a-half wait, the second season of Fallout has arrived on Prime Video. Unlike season 1, which dropped all at once, season 2 is releasing one new episode a week for the next eight weeks. That means we get to take our sweet time and savor this journey through the Wasteland with Lucy (Ella Purnell), The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), Maximus (Aaron Moten), and Norm (Mosés Arias).
And what a journey it's starting out as! The season premiere, "The Man Who Knew," picks up right where season 1 left off while also introducing a few new elements, like the unhinged genius villain Robert House (Justin Theroux), who seemingly rules the city of New Vegas. Yes gamers, we're heading to New Vegas, the setting of one of the most beloved Fallout games!
There's a lot to go over in the season premiere, so let's dive straight into the recap and review. FULL SPOILERS for the episode beyond this point.
The experiments of Robert House
Fallout season 2 begins with a flashback, showing a protest against RobCo Industries, the company which creates the Mr. Handy robots we saw during season 1. This company belongs to Robert House, and public opinion has swayed against it by this point in the flashback timeline. We get a glimpse of Robert House addressing the protests on a television, before the scene cuts to the interior of a bar...where the real Robert House is observing the discontented construction workers watching the broadcast.
Justin Theroux delivers an entrancing performance as House, complete with some physical tics and subtle mannerisms that make him impossible to look away from. He picks a fight with some construction workers, then when they throw him outside by his car, he tricks one of them into letting his guard down enough to implant a small chip at the back of the man's neck. This gives House the ability to mind control him, causing him to kill his companions. But the chip is still a flawed piece of technology, and when House is forced to up the levels on it as the worker turns on him, the guy's head pops like a melon, spraying blood everywhere.
"The world may end, but progress marches on," House murmurs to himself as he picks up the bloody chip, while "Dancing Cheek to Cheek" plays. Ah, how I've missed that incongruously fun Fallout tone. It's a great introduction for Theroux's House, and season 2.
A bungled showdown at Novac
Then we're back to the Wasteland, where Lucy and The Ghoul are attempting to pull a fast one on a raider gang. Raiders prepare to hang The Ghoul, while Lucy sets up in the nearby Dinky the T-Rex tower with their dog companion and a sniper rifle. These raiders are members of the Great Khans, a gnag of raiders from Fallout: New Vegas, and this location, called Novac after its fault "No Vacancy" sign, is one of the first players encounter the game. If you can't tell from this scene's reliance on a recognizable setting and antagonist faction from the game, this season is going to be paying some serious fan service.
Lucy misses her cue to shoot The Ghoul down, and instead tries negotiating with the raiders. Obviously that doesn't take, and it turns into a ridiculously bloody shootout. The Ghoul has a great time murdering the raiders, while Lucy watches on in disapproval. And there's a slow motion shot reminiscent of VATS from the game where a person's head explodes.
This scene is a solid re-introduction to The Ghoul and Lucy that wastes no time establishing their mismatched dynamic. He's a seasoned veteran of the Wasteland who delights in mudering people, while she's still prone to try talking her way out of problems even if it puts her at a disadvantage. I'm very curious to see how that evolves over the season.
They discuss these differences as they wander the desert near New Vegas. Fallout moved production from New York to California for season 2, and that was clearly a perfect choice for these natural settings. Lucy and The Ghoul see New Vegas in the distance, where they've tracked her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan). We learn a bit of backstory here, which is that the bombs didn't destroy New Vegas because Robert House built some sort of defense system there. You get the feeling The Ghoul has some kind of history with House; hopefully we learn more sooner rather than later.
No way out for Cooper Howard
The scene cuts from New Vegas to a flashback for Cooper Howard, putting us right back in the chilling scene where he overheard the meeting between Vault-Tec and the other companies planning to cause a nuclear war for profit. His wife, Barb, is leading the meeting, but this time we also get a better look at Mister House. In season 1, House was played by Rafi Silver as a brief cameo in this scene. Now we see the shadowy silhouette of Theroux's House observing the meeting from a balcony room and seemingly feeding lines to Silver's lookalike. (Or robot?) Whatever the case, this is a very savvy way to handle the recast of House for season 2.
Cooper runs straight home from this meeting, gets his daughter and dog, and tries to drive away. But then a test of the civil alert broadcast system goes off, and people start panicking because they think it's an actual bomb. Vault-Tec is there, of course, and the dissonance of Cooper comforting his daughter while looking at his own picture on a billboard promoting Vault-Tec is excellent.
This flashback sets the stage for something I've been wondering ever since season 1: what happened between Cooper hearing that meeting and the bombs falling in the season 1 premiere? Those two scenes seemed like they were a ways apart, and I'm glad that season 2 is going to bridge more of that story. It adds so much depth to The Ghoul, and Goggins is giving a career-best performance in the dual role.
The greatest achievement in the history of vertical integration
From there we check in with our trio of Vaults. In Vault 33, the water chip is dead and they're trying to ration water. Betty (Leslie Uggams) is the Overseer — remember, she's a management from Vault 31, the same as Hank. I love the nod of the broken water chip — that is the plot of the very first Fallout game, which saw a Vaultdweller go out into the Wasteland in search of a water chip to save their vault.
Betty is finding that being a leader is more of a headache than she anticipated. Reg (Rodrigo Luzzi) asks about Norm, and Betty says that he was sent to a leadership exchange program in Vault 31, confirming that she knows he's trapped there. She suggests that Reg starts a support group because he has nothing to do. Which he's game for, so long as he can submit a snack budget. Vault problems.
Next we leap to Vault 32, where new Overseer Stephanie (Annabel O'Hagan) is dealing with a ridiculously arbitrary complaint from one of her Vaultdwellers who can't get the hang of the slightly different Vault layout compared to Vault 33. Chet (Dave Register) is there taking care of Stephanie's baby, and there's tension as she treats him basically like a servant, refusing to give him a job because she wants him to continue watching her child (who she hasn't even bothered to give a name). Just like Betty, Stephanie is management from Vault 31, someone who was frozen from the past like Hank. She's fun to watch as a villain who's already fraying at the seams a little right at the start of the season, and the eyepatch is fun costume design.
Another design thing I love and have to shout out: the fake view out of Stephanie's windows. Living in a Vault means living underground your entire life, and having fake scenery is such a Vault-Tec way to try to offer relief for never seeing outside the bunker.
Stephanie's computer woes finally segue us to Vault 31, where Norm (Moisés Arias) is tearing apart all the systems to keep Bud Askin's brain-in-a-jar from communicating with the other Vaults. Bud is trying to force Norm to get into his father's crypod, where he'll stay frozen until Reclamation Day, a.k.a. when everyone on the surface is dead. The brain is a funny antagonist, with lines like "what hope do you have against the greatest achievement in the history of vertical integration?" Again, the show is just really nailing the tone. Norm's situation is dire, but still manages to have spikes of amusing dialogue.
But can he find a way out of this trap? The scene cuts away from Norm as he crawls toward his father's cryopod in the now-dark Vault, weighing his options. Confound you, cliffhanger!
What does justice even mean in the Wasteland?
Now we're back with Lucy and The Ghoul. Shoutout to Djawadi's score here. Lucy gives us some essential information about The Ghoul's motivation: that he believes her dad will lead her to his family, which means he thinks his family survived the apocalypse and is somehow still alive 200 years later. Which isn't all that unreasonable, considering it's true for Hank himself. They come across a corpse that's been ripped in half that Hank left in his wake, reminding us of the moral conflict Lucy is facing.
The duo heads up the hill to a little shop that has a fun design made out of dilapidated cars, where an old lady is selling "flea soup." The Ghoul plans to force information about Hank out of her, but instead Lucy buys a bowl of flea soup, tries it like a champ (while the fleas literally jump against her face), and then questions the lady. It turns out she's the mother of the guy who got ripped in half, and could not care less — except for the fact that he owed her money. She tells The Ghoul and Lucy what direction Hank went in, and they continue on their journey.
This leads into a really good conversation where The Ghoul asks Lucy what she'll do if she finds Hank, since she's so avoidant to killing. She plans to "bring him to justice," whatever that means. I can already tell that the tension between The Ghoul's realism and Lucy's idealism is going to be a major focus on which this season turns, and it's off to a great start.
Their next stop is none other than a Starlight Drive-In, which is a small location from Fallout 4 — I guess the show is establishing it as a chain. Here our heroes are faced with ghosts of their past: The Ghoul realizes it was Cooper Howard movies that were the last thing to play at the drive-in, while their dog companion leads Lucy to an open Vault door. Of course, they have to see what's inside, and why Hank went there.
Cooper Howard: assassin?
But first, we get another Cooper Howard flashback, where he meets with Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) at a diner while his daughter Janey plays Whack-A-Commie. In case you forgot from season 1, Moldaver is the one who urged Cooper to spy on his wife and uncover the plot to start a nuclear war. She's still pulling strings now, as Cooper tells her what she heard and she supplies him with information in kind: that Robert House has built a missile system in Las Vegas capable of following through on the threat of dropping nukes. She wants Cooper to go to Vegas and kill House, but Cooper isn't an assassin, he's an actor, and he wants nothing to do with it. How far he's come by the present Wasteland storyline.
Cooper takes his daughter home, where he tries to work through his emotions by cooking in a sleek retro-future kitchen. The radio broadcast has a story on Robert House, where he eerily echoes Moldaver's words about the coming nuclear war. Cooper's wife Frances arrives home, and there's a cool moment where they both stand exhausted in separate rooms before she walks in and they're both wearing plastered-on smiles. I want to see more of this plotline.
But for now, we're back to the present, where Lucy and The Ghoul descend into Vault 24 in search of Hank. The setting is the most ominous of the episode; whatever happened in this Vault, it wasn't good. In the world of Fallout, there are pretty much always some sort of messed up experiments associated with each Vault. What went on in this one, and why did Hank go there?
The Products of In-Breeding Support Group
Those serious questions have to wait a moment, because before we continue with Lucy and The Ghoul's descent, Fallout gives us a break to check in with Reg, who is holding the inaugural meeting of the Products of In-Breeding Support Group. That's right, that's the group he decided to start. There's an awkwardly funny bit where a brother and sister came to the meeting thinking it was going to be about changing the rules to allow in-breeding, and leave in disappointment after spending the whole time checking each other out. Reg manages to get his last remaining member talking though, setting the group in motion.
"The Man Who Knew" doesn't spend too much time on this moment of levity before jumping back over to Norm, with a nice scene cut that goes from a lady complimenting Reg's snacks, to a discarded snack kit in the ruins of Vault 31. Norm is out of food and water, and Bud's brain gives him an ultimatum: get in the cryopod, or let the brain robot inject him with something that will kill him. Rather than do either of those things, Norm embraces chaos, kicking off the robot's needle arm and wrecking Bud's carefully laid plan for Vault 31 by thawing every single one of his management prospects at once. They were supposed to wake up one at a time, 30 years apart. Now they'll all be conscious, and trapped in Vault 31 with Norm.
Norm was sneakily one of the most interesting plotlines of season 1, and I'm glad that's continuing to be the case here.
The Communists of Vault 24
After Norm makes his move, we head back to Vault 24 for the main event of the episode. To Lucy and The Ghoul's surprise, they find a bunch of long-decayed skeletons of people wearing matching communist outfits...and one of them has the same little mind-control device on the back of its neck that we saw Robert House use in the opening scene.
We find out that this Vault was specifically designed to test House's mind control devices by turning the residents into communists. Hank went there in order to retrieve and test out those devices, specifically the little square one we saw House implant in the back of someone's neck. Lucy and The Ghoul eventually come across a living person, who was obviously brought there recently by Hank. His head promptly explodes, splattering Lucy with gore and hardening her resolve to find her father and stop him from hurting more people. They leave the remnants of the device by a box of Suger Bombs cereal and get back to the hunt.
Workin' for the man
We end our episode by finally getting to see what Hank's up to. He arrives at a massive Vault-Tec Vault, which looks to be some sort of headquarters, since he has his own personal answering machine there. Striding into the place in his power armor, Hank decides its time to get back to work. He drinks some coffee, puts on a new suit (and gold-plated Pip-Boy), and heads to the comms room to call Robert House.
The message Hank sends out to House has a few interesting details. The first is that he says he's in House's "old stomping ground" of Vegas. To me, that implies that House may no longer be there; I wonder where he might have ended up? Hank also talks about the mind control device, called a brain-computer interface, and that this larger Vault developed a miniature version of it but couldn't quite crack how to make it work properly. Hank is determined to fix the design and get it working in order to get some kind of promotion from House, for all that's worth in the Wasteland. Why do I feel like Hank means something other than a literal job promotion here?
After so long in the dusty, brutal part of the Wasteland, it's a nice reminder of how much Fallout is about haves and have-nots to see Hank in the cleanly, secure Vault-Tec headquarters Vault. Too bad Hank won't be doing anything but viciously evil work there.
Verdict
"The Man Who Knew" is an all-around solid premiere for Fallout season 2. It's light on action, but more than makes up for that by leaning into the show's atmosphere, humor, and a plethora of new settings to get viewers prepared for the road ahead. And if you are the sort of fan who loved Fallout: New Vegas, it's all the better.