Everything We Know About Fallout Season 2

Fallout Season 2 potential storylines

The Season 1 finale of Fallout was full of twists and reveals — I won't bother summarizing it all, because that would take too long, but you can read a rundown at our sister site, GameSpot. And at the very end of the season finale, we learned that Season 2 will take us away from Los Angeles and into the desert city of New Vegas, the only major city in North America that didn't suffer from a direct nuclear blast when the bombs fell.

New Vegas was the main setting for the video game Fallout: New Vegas, which took place in 2281, just 15 years before the events of the show. And that means the show could potentially have a lot of familiar faces in Season 2, such as Mr. House, who was CEO of robot manufacturer RobCo before the war and who was part of Vault-Tec's apocalyptic conspiracy in the Season 1 finale. Mr. House ran New Vegas in the game, and he had set up the defenses that prevented the town from being nuked. Mr. House was played by Rafi Silver in his brief cameo appearance in Season 1, but in Season 2 he'll be played by Justin Theroux.

Likewise, two other companies that were involved with Vault-Tec's conspiracy, REPCONN and Big MT, have their headquarters in the area, which players are able to explore in the game. Big MT, which is inhabited by robots who carry the disembodied brains of pre-war scientists, is a prime candidate for being the home of a "crazy genius-type character" like the one Culkin is reportedly going to play. But let's be honest — basically every Fallout faction has somebody that fits that description. Big MT just has more than its fair share of that kind of thing.

For those who are hankering for more backstory on Walton Goggins's Mr. Ghoul, Jonathan Nolan has good news for you — there will be more flashbacks in Season 2 that explore what kind of stuff he's been up to over the past 200 years. 

"In a show, you can flashback and you can explore that world beforehand," Nolan said at the Paley International Summit in New York in November, discussing the difference in structure between the Fallout games, which stay with the present perspective, and this TV series. "It's one of the things I love the most about Season 1 and we will be doing more of that in Season 2."

The thing to remember about Fallout: New Vegas is that it can have several dramatically different endings depending on what the player chooses — you can help the NCR take over Vegas, you can help an army of barbarians called Caesar's Legion take over, or you can help the ancient and decrepit Mr. House, or the computer that runs his casino, maintain their control over the place. With the NCR seemingly out of the picture in Season 1, and the Mr. House cameo in the Season 1 finale, our money's on the TV series showing us House succeeded. Hey, it's Vegas, and you know what they say: The house always wins.

Fallout Season 2 new potential characters and factions

Season 1 took place in a part of the wasteland, Los Angeles, that hadn't been visited in the Fallout games since Fallout 2, which was set 55 years before the show. Naturally, we didn't meet any characters from that game during Season 1. But the events of Fallout: New Vegas are much more fresh, having occurred just 15 years before the show — opening up the door for any number of characters to make appearances. Not that you should expect a lot of game characters to show up, but cameos are going to be much more likely in that setting. And yes, as indicated in the trailer, Mr. House will be making an appearance, and he'll be played by The Leftovers' Justin Theroux.

But there are some other interesting groups around that area, like the previously mentioned Caesar's Legion — a group of truly horrible folks who like to wear post-apocalyptic versions of ancient Roman warrior garb while running around literally crucifying everybody they don't like. These folks will fit in well on this show after all the flippant brutality of Season 1, and indeed we get a brief glimpse at the Legion in the trailers above. It's not clear yet how involved they'll be on the series, but Caesar's Legion was one of the main factions in the New Vegas game.

Also near New Vegas we've got a little colony of intelligent super mutants. We didn't meet any of these green guys in Season 1, but this group from the games would be a good introduction to this mutated subset of humanity — because they're just regular people who look like gritty Shrek, really.

Meanwhile, Macaulay Culkin will play a key recurring role in the season as a "crazy genius-type character," per Deadline. There are a few characters already teased who could fit that description, so that's tough to speculate about.

New potential vaults in Fallout Season 2

Season 1 presented the idea of the Vault-Tec vaults as weird experiments on the people living in them, but we really didn't get to see any of the really interesting ones — we just got the relatively plain trio of 31, 32 and 33, and Vault 4 where the scientist overseers commissioned terrible hybridization experiments because they wanted to, not because Vault-Tec made them. But the best Fallout vaults are much weirder and more intentionally awful, and there are some really good ones around New Vegas. 

For example: Vault 11, where the inhabitants were told they had to vote to kill one resident each year or they'd all die (it was a lie, but the residents fell for it); Vault 19, where half the residents wore blue jumpsuits, and the other half wore red jumpsuits, and they were all treated to subliminal suggestions that the other faction is bad; Vault 21, under the Vegas Strip, where all conflicts were solved with gambling; and my favorite, Vault 22, where they tried to create plant life that survives without light, but only succeeded at engineering a fungus that ate every living being inside.

But there's plenty of room for other nearby vaults that weren't in the game, so the show could simply cook up some new vaults as they did with Vault 4 and 31/32/33 in Season 1.

Fallout Season 2 cast

Expect the main characters who survived Season 1 to move on to Season 2, so Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, and Walton Goggins will certainly be in the next round of episodes. And as for new characters, the potential new territory for the show opens the door for some big actors to join the cast, especially following the series' acclaim and popularity.

Fallout main cast:

• Ella Purnell as Lucy MacLean, a citizen of Vault 33 who goes to the surface to look for her father
• Aaron Moten as Maximus, a squire who takes over for a knight in the Brotherhood of Steel
• Kyle MacLachlan as Hank MacLean, Lucy's father
• Moisés Arias as Norm MacLean, Lucy's brother who works to unravel a conspiracy in Vault 33
• Walton Goggins as The Ghoul, a former celebrity who becomes mutated after exposure to surface radiation
• Justin Theroux as Mr. House
• Macaulay Culkin
• Kumail Nanjiani

Fallout Season 1 review

In his review of Fallout Season 1, Ben Rosenstock praised the show's world-building and acting performances, while admitting some character arcs worked better than others.

How to watch Fallout

You can watch Season 1 of Fallout exclusively on Prime Video. 

Watch on Prime Video