Maybe it’s just years and years of games like Fallout and Dying Light and Metro, plus a few decades of movies like Mad Max that take place after some civilization-shattering calamity… but I’m just a bit burned out on post-apocalyptic wastelands. Bleak, barren landscapes. Ruined buildings and rusted metal. Grubby survivors wearing tattered clothes. I’ve got wasteland fatigue, big time.
I think that’s why my favorite places in Fallout games are the Vaults, places untouched (usually) by decades of rot and decay, and why my favorite parts of the Fallout show were the pre-war flashbacks, when the world was bright and colorful and alive (though still a dystopia).
Not only were Fallout Season 1’s pre-war flashbacks a welcome change of scenery, but I really liked seeing the lead-up to the war and how our characters got to where they are. I’m much more interested in Walton Goggins as pre-war Cooper Howard than I am as the post-war The Ghoul, or at the very least, the more we know about Cooper, the better we understand the 250-year-old gunslinger he’s become.
So I’m relieved to see the first handful of images from Fallout Season 2, because a couple of them show Goggins as Cooper, and means more tasty pre-war flashbacks.
One image is Cooper in a car in Las Vegas (before it becomes New Vegas), arriving at the Lucky 38 Casino, which Fallout fans know as Mr. House’s HQ both before and after the bombs fall. That sound you hear is me rubbing my hands together. I am ready to visit Fallout’s Vegas on both sides of the bombs.
Another image shows Cooper talking to Barb Howard, his wife (or perhaps ex-wife, depending on when this flashback takes place). In the leadup to the war, Barb (Frances Turner) is a loving mother, an understanding partner, and a very accomplished executive at Vault-Tec—with a teeny tiny character flaw in that she’s the one who suggested her company drop the first nuke that set off the war and killed billions. Y’know, to appease the shareholders!
I initially thought the image of Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) in a suit wearing a Pip-Boy was a flashback to pre-war Vegas, too, but a closer look shows it isn’t. We learned in Season 1 that before the war he was a young corporate go-getter (with that horrible CGI de-aged face technology that always looks bad yet Hollywood refuses to stop using), and he’s got that scar where The Ghoul shot him at the end of last season. Why wear a sharp suit in the post-apocalypse? A meeting with Mr. House, perhaps.
The other images are of the “present” in Fallout’s timeline: The Ghoul and Lucy (Ella Purnell) standing in one of those barren wastelands I’m so sick of, probably on their way to Vegas to find Hank. There’s also a picture of Lucy in one of those ruined buildings I’m also sick of, Moisés Arias as Norm (Lucy’s brother) in Vault 33 (which I am definitely not sick of) as he continues unraveling the mystery of what’s really going on down there, and Max (Aaron Moten) walking with a Brotherhood of Steel knight (I am still very much un-sick of power armor).
The good news: Even the stuff I’m sick of looks great, and everything else looks greater. The other good, but possibly also bad news: the creators of Fallout are gonna be walking a knife’s edge this season. Remember how Fallout fans freaked the hell out over lore inconsistencies in Season 1?
Well, this time the show is stomping its way into Vegas, home of the most cherished Fallout game ever. Every adaptation makes changes to the source material (that’s why it’s called an adaptation), but this December fans are gonna be watching Season 2 twice as closely as they did Season 1.
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