Fallout: Season 2 - 5 things to know about the return of Prime Video's apocalyptic hit

Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout TV show didn’t just set the world on fire, it started a flame in our hearts, too.

Apocalyptic alchemy, it pulled off something near impossible by distilling the essence of a much loved, free-roaming game franchise into a tight TV show that not only nailed the feel of the series, but didn’t alienate newcomers, either. The nuclear-charged show was a streaming mega hit in the Spring of 2024 — and now all eyes are on whether lightning can strike twice for a second spectacular season.

Though the dust is still settling on its teasing final episode, the Fallout TV show’s season 2 is starting to take shape, with cast and crew commenting on what to expect, and a provisional filming schedule revealed. It won’t be long until we’re exploring the irradiated wastes once more, it seems.

Ready to crawl out through the fallout once more? Here’s everything we know so far about Fallout season 2.

But before any of that…

Fallout: The story so far…

Here’s the excellent Man of Recaps YouTube channel to bring you up to speed with everything that happens in Fallout season one. Reader beware: this video, and the rest of the article, will include heavy spoilers for the Fallout TV show. You’ve been warned!

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1. Fallout season 2 shooting and release date schedule

As is the way with modern TV streaming releases, expect a decent wait until Fallout season 2 releases. Season one of the Fallout TV show dropped all at once on a single day — April 10th, 2024 — which will make the return for season 2 feel even longer for the many viewers who binged the show all at once, compared to series that have weekly episode releases.

As of mid October 2024, the show’s star Ella Purnell (who plays Vault Dweller Lucy on the show) had yet to receive a script, suggesting production was far and away into the future. But a recent surprising comment by fellow cast member Lesli Uggams (Betty Pearson, the Overseer in Vault 33) stated that filming would restart in November 2024, suggesting those scripts are now finalised.

What’s that mean for a Fallout season 2 release date? Well, even with the time-saving elements of production of a second season (existing costumes, props, sets, location scouting) out of the way, you’ve still got to deal with scheduling issues, reshoots and post-production VFX work. That last point is a big one for Fallout — it’s quite heavy on the CGI. So we’re going to say not to expect season 2 any sooner than early 2026. We’d love to be proved wrong though!

"We are going as fast as we possibly can, and we've got a lot of heavy lifting from season one already done,” co-showrunner Graham Wagner told The Hollywood Reporter.

“We have sets, assets, visual effects, that are already done. We are hitting the ground running this season. We're going to be pedal to the metal to get season two out as fast as humanly possible."

2. Fallout season 2 cast

A few obvious cast announcements have been made for Fallout season 2 already — namely its three leads: Ella Purnell (Lucy McLain), Walton Goggins (Cooper Howard, aka the Ghoul) and Aaron Moten (Brotherhood of Steel knight Maximus). As per her own admission, we can expect Lesli Uggams to return as Better Pearson, too, though that’s not been officially confirmed.

No other official casting announcements have been made, but you can assume any second season will once again require the talents of Kyle MacLachlan’s Hank McLain, who ends season one as, in many respects, the show’s main antagonist.

Likewise, Moises Arias, who plays Lucy’s brother and Hank’s son Norm, will likely be back as his side plot about the secrets of the vaults takes shape. Frances Turner’s Barb Howard feels likely to return too — it appears she, like the Ghoul, has survived hundreds of years in the wastes by the time season one closes out, even if we only see her in pre-war scenes for that first run of episodes.

Likewise, Sarita Choudhury’s Lee Moldaver could make a return — her fate was not clear by the end of the first season, with her death more implied than confirmed.

One interesting rumour has Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul circling the cast list for season 2. He’s reportedly lining up a role on the show and has been vocal about his desire to get involved with season 2. He’s worked with showrunner Jonathan Nolan before on the Westworld TV show, so there’s a relationship already in place — we can see this one happening.

3. Theories: what could happen in Fallout season 2?

No storylines for Fallout season 2 have been confirmed yet. But given the motivations of the characters and the threads left hanging in season 1, there’s a few things we can presume with some certainty.

The uneasy alliance between Lucy and the Ghoul will continue, for starters. Both need to know what the true story behind Lucy’s father Hank is — by the end of season 1, he’s been revealed to be a shady Vault-Tec employee, the company behind subterranean survival shelters built with not-so philanthropic goals in mind.

He’ll have been working with the Ghoul’s wife Barb, who was revealed to have been a relatively-senior Vault-Tec person herself, and perhaps even partially responsible for the nuclear war that devastated the world and resulted in the apocalyptic Fallout universe.

That she may have survived hundreds of years, just like the Ghoul, since the catastrophic events of the nuclear war, is one of the great mysteries set up by season 1.

All the action is almost certainly headed toward the settlement of New Vegas too, pictured in the final scenes of the first series.

It’s a major location in the Fallout games — an irradiated, dilapidated take on Nevada’s Las Vegas. It’s the wasteland at its best and worst — a symbol that a complex society can be rebuilt, but also that it’ll be underpinned by the same greed and vices as the pre-war period. Like the real Vegas, it’s seductive, but dangerous.

It’s run by Mr House in the games, and the character makes a cameo in season one, played by Rafi Silver. Expect to see him return, shuffling the deck and playing puppet master across the New Vegas strip.

4. What the cast and crew have said about Fallout season 2

Cast and crew have been pretty loose-lipped about their hopes and desires for Fallout season 2, as well as some of the things viewers can expect from the new episodes.

"There are more monsters, more environments, more factions that we are currently designing and building right now to begin production quite soon,” executive producer Jonathan Nolan told The Wrap. “We’re really excited."

"We wanted to get Deathclaws, but we didn’t want to just throw it away. It’s such a monumental piece," co-showrunner Graham Wagner said of an iconic Fallout foe in another interview with The Wrap.

"We want to save something for Season 2 to be able to do it properly, not just add on to the massive world-building we had to do already in Season 1. So, Season 2, we’re very excited to finally tackle one of the most iconic elements of the games."

Ella Purnell told GQ to expect a different sort of Lucy in season 2, if she gets her way on the direction of the character. "I want the audience at the end of the show to wonder if their hero is still a good person," she said. "I don't know who she's gonna be in season two, [but] this is what happens when you break the unbreakable. I don't know who she's about to become."

It’s something Purnell had also discussed with GoldDerby. "That's the part that really drew me to this role and the part I really wanted to do. Lucy, in Episode 1, she's really funny, she's really strong, she's really smart, but I wasn't interested in playing this perfectly put-together character for eight episodes. I wanted to destroy her. I wanted to break down and get to the very limits of desperation, where you get to when you are forced to survive.

"You need to feel how far she's fallen from Episode 1. I loved that."

Purnell is also expecting another physically-gruelling shoot. Speaking to Variety, she said: “My only preparation so far is that I'm attempting to work out — and that's just me knowing that in six months I'm going to be running up a hill 500 times and trying not to have an asthma attack."

Walton Goggins teased that the team had so many ideas for season one that got left on the cutting room floor, there’s loads of story just waiting to be told in the next series.

Speaking to Men’s Health, he said, “We've just scratched the surface, to be quite honest with you. According to the writers, they thought they would be much further along in the story by the end of season one. But it was just too much to unpack."

Sarita Choudhury told our friends at GamesRadar there’s a lot left to find out about Moldaver, what with her centuries-spanning timeline. "Part of me knows a lot and purposely in the season you see and you get what you get. [...]I know a bit and I can't share it, but I also don't know a lot. But it's also what I loved, because you're like, 'Wait a minute, I want to know from when the bomb fell [what life was like] day by day and then for 200 years. Because she didn't have access to what the Vault dwellers had. I need it to be revealed. You know what I mean?"

Don't necessarily expect all episodes of season 2 to drop at the same time as they did with season 1, warned Jonathan Nolan: "For some series, it makes sense to do it that way for the first season and not necessarily that way going forward." But it’s not set in stone, and those decisions are "a long way out."

5.What we could still see from the games

The Fallout game series on which the TV show is based is gigantically deep, spanning five mainline role playing games and four spin-off titles. Each is filled with fully-realised characters, narratives, locations, monsters and lore for the TV show’s crew to mine from. The well is deep, and there’s much more from the games that could yet be brought to life from the TV show.

First up, let’s start with what season one teased. The biggie here comes with season one’s ending, which saw Kyle MacLachlan’s Hank MacLean race off into the sandy sunset towards what looked very much like the Las Vegas strip.

In the Fallout games the rundown den of iniquity and vice is now known as New Vegas, as brought to life in fan-favourite game Fallout New Vegas. It seems a safe bet that this will be a major location in Fallout season 2, and has ripe storytelling potential. Think sleazy mobsters, iconic neon landmarks, and perhaps even the introduction of ‘Mr House’ New Vegas’s enigmatic ruler, and a key antagonist for the franchise.

That ending also teased the introduction of the Deathclaw, with a skull of one of the beasts buried in the sand at season one’s close. Deathclaws are one of the most ferocious enemies a player can face in the games, towering over you with an armoured horned head and nasty claws, like a flesh-eating dinosaur crossed with a man.

They’ll have to make an appearance in the show at some point as Graham Wagner suggests, and their creation (biologically engineered by the US military in an effort to create super soldiers) will offer great storytelling potential.

Season one also broadly teased the introduction of the games’ iconic Super Mutant faction, too. We saw a military scientific installation running all kinds of tests on animals, and at one point a stretcher bearing the covered remains of a giant person with a humongous green arm was revealed too.

Super Mutants in the Fallout games are another attempt at biologically bettering mankind, applying a muscle enhancing virus to humans with destructive effect. Super Mutants prowl the wasteland and live in their own camps, feasting on humans and are generally not-fun-dudes — but from time to time players will encounter intelligent, peaceful Super Mutants that they can partner up with. Despite their ferocity, they offer a good chance for the comic relief that made the Fallout TV show such a refreshing watch — Super Mutants are big dumb-dumbs, and can be unintentionally funny as well as deadly.

That’s just scratching the surface of what the show has already teased. What about mirelurk and radscorpion enemies? Fat-Man personal nuclear missile launchers? Locations like Nuka-World, The Pitt, Little Lamplight? The many, many more vaults, each with their own wicked twist on subterranean living?

There’s enough for the showrunners to play with for Fallout to last dozens of seasons. Here’s hoping, Vault Dwellers!

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