It may be darkly violent, but Fallout is a slow-blooming buddy comedy at heart

Fallout (season two) ★★★★

Having spent much of its first season below ground with the survivors of a nuclear war in 2077 – or, to be more precise, their descendants 219 years later – Fallout spends most of its second season in the wastelands above.

In terms of world-building, it’s more The Last of Us than Silo, but the tone is as darkly, violently comedic as ever. It’s dense, with multiple locations, dozens of characters, complicated plotting and hidden agendas – so much so that you could do a lot worse than have the fandom page on hand to keep track of it all.

Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) is on the trail of her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), the former overseer of the underground Vault 33, who was abducted by raiders. What began as a rescue mission has become a hunt for justice, as the big-eyed, big-hearted Lucy realises her father was, in fact, a murderous tyrant deeply implicated in the machinations that brought about nuclear war. But precisely what his role was (and is) takes time to unfold across this second season.

With her is The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), the near-dead, radiation-affected post-apocalypse version of Cooper Howard, a Hollywood actor-cowboy who was married in the before times to Barb (Frances Turner), a senior executive at Vault-Tec, the company that manufactured the subterranean refuges.

Barb, too, was deeply implicated in the events that led to the end of civilisation as we know it – or at least the retro-futurist version of civilisation that Fallout peddles, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the aesthetic of the recent Fantastic Four movie. Space-Age 1950s Americana, in short.

Lucy and The Ghoul have an uneasy and slow-blooming buddy dynamic, though each is willing to sell the other out if it helps them attain their goal (he is searching for his wife and daughter, whom he believes survived the blast, and are likely cryogenically frozen in a bunker reserved for Vault-Tec execs and their families).

The warrior Maximus (Aaron Moten), meanwhile, is on a journey of his own, away from the military fascism of The Brotherhood and towards … well, who knows?

The world above is riven by factionalism and rampant individualism. Resources are scarce, trust is scarcer, mutant creatures – including the massive, terrifying straight-from-hell colossus known as the Tooth Claw – plentiful. If this is life after the apocalypse, armageddon outta here.

With its origins in one of the most acclaimed computer games ever, Fallout is teeming with quests, characters, zones, uniforms, weapons and fuel (The Ghoul can only avoid going full zombie with the aid of an elixir; the clean-cut Lucy discovers an affinity for a drug called Buffout).

But it’s also a well-wrought critique of late-stage capitalism, with governments supplanted by megacorporations, human life deemed of no significance in the pursuit of profits, and unbridled power leading inexorably to abuse.

There are clear parallels with The Boys in tone and themes. It’s at least worth noting that both are produced for Amazon, a megacorporation whose unlimited ambitions surely rival those of Vault-Tec in this show or Vought in The Boys.

Fallout (season two) streams on Amazon Prime Video from December 17.

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