‘Fallout’ Plays for Time in Season 2

Maarten de Boer

In this chaotic scene from the fourth episode, Lucy (Purnell) a wide-eyed, Vault-born young woman raised to abide by the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you); and the Ghoul (Goggins), a Wasteland bounty hunter —AKA, Cooper Howard, a once-famed cowboy actor from the 1950s (how he and others have survived so long is one of the show’s intriguing mysteries); have reached the gates of New Vegas after a brutal trek across the Mojave from L.A.

Both are looking for something in the former Sin City, and there’s safety in numbers crossing the desert together. Lucy is tracking her dad Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), the beloved Vault 33 Overseer whom, she learned in the Season 1 finale, had committed monstrous crimes, including bombing Shady Sands, a community that had risen from the ashes. The Ghoul is on the trail of his wife and daughter; he believes they were placed in cryosleep in a New Vegas Management Vault centuries ago. In flashbacks, signs point to his wife, Vault-Tec exec Barb (Frances Turner), inciting the world-ending war. 

“What I loved about that stunt sequence was Lucy is not herself for many reasons,” Purnell tells TV Insider, adding that this and the fifth episode are her favorites this season. “She’s a version we’ve never seen, I’ve never played, and she never would’ve conceived she could be. To play a character who doesn’t give a flying hoot, is not afraid of death, is acting on instinct and adrenaline alone — that was so fun. How often do you get to live without fear?”

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Not often on Fallout, whether that’s on the show or on the set. With his tattered gunslinger garb and scarred skeletal face, Goggins sneaked up behind us to say “boo.” (Not gonna lie; we sprinted a few steps.) Audience heart rates will be jumping too as Goggins brings that in-the-moment energy to his role of the nihilistic, decaying cowboy. Although his character has endured for centuries, the actor would rather die than survive a nuclear holocaust.

“I would be the first person to stand in the street: ‘Here we go. Give me that blast. I don’t want to live in that world,’” Goggins tells us later at our photo shoot alongside costars MacLachlan and Aaron Moten. (Editor’s Note: Purnell was absent due to illness, but sent along questions for her castmates.)

Audiences, however, do want to inhabit this world…at least for an hour a week. Wagner says it’s because the series draws from the strengths of the games. “They balance comedy, action, moral dilemmas. They’re funny, ingenious, inventive.”

You can love this series without being a gamer (many in the cast, including Goggins, haven’t played “Fallout”) but references are always present. James Altman, director of publishing at game-maker Bethesda Softworks and an executive producer on the series, says, “They’ve invented new things in a way that expands the world, but is faithful to it. Easter eggs are tucked in, and I’m excited to see if everyone finds them all.” Director Stephen Williams explains that part of today’s shootout is being filmed at 150 frames per second, so they can create a slow motion “VATS” (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) shot, a technique players use in the games to pause or slow down time.

The Wasteland Journey

The new season begins at a famous landmark from the games, a desert oasis called Novac (named for a ‘No Vacancy’ sign where only ‘No Vac’ is lit), featuring a roadside motel with a T-Rex statue (named Dinky) built by production designer Howard Cummings and his crew. Lucy is using the dino’s toothy mouth as a convenient sniper’s nest. She apologizes after every bullet…to the Ghoul’s annoyance.

“The big question this season is, ‘Is she going to become more like me or am I going to become more like her?’” Goggins says. It could go either way (with plenty of ups and downs in between) in these episodes.

Purnell acknowledges Lucy’s potential for violence. “She might think, ‘When I find my dad, I’m going to bring him to justice.’ But you never know. Lucy is surprised at what happens when she does finally find him.”

The Ghoul’s attitude towards Lucy could change too. Goggins says. “If [the Ghoul] can see her as a human and not bait or something that [he] can use transactionally, then that’s a long way for him.”

As Lucy and the Ghoul cross the wasteland, they enter vaults and find evidence that not every underground sanctuary was as idyllic as the one in which Lucy was raised. Some are downright gruesome. They also meet new groups of survivors. Some will be familiar to gamers, like Caesar’s Legion, a dictatorship modelled on Ancient Rome. A member of that group is a new character played by Macaulay Culkin. “He’s someone who has higher aspirations than his station in life,” teases Culkin, who played Goggins’ son on The Righteous Gemstones. “When I booked the thing, I was like, ‘Oh, great, I get to work with Walton again!’ First time I saw him, he’s in his makeup chair getting Ghoulified, and I was just like, ‘Oh, Papa Billy!’” But once out of the makeup chair, “he’s intense.”

For good reason — Goggins’ character is under almost constant onslaught from the desperate denizens of the dog-eat-dog Wasteland. He and Lucy do get a brief respite from a kinder, gentler group, the New California Republic (NCR), which believes in democracy and the rule of law. But then it’s on to messy business as usual.

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Also suffering the harsh above-ground life but on a different path is Lucy’s brother, the formerly fearful Norm (Moisés Arias). He has escaped from Vault 31, where he was trapped in the Season 1 finale, after awakening the occupants who’d been in frozen cryo-sleep since before the bombs dropped. Norm had lied to them, saying it was the promised Reclamation Day, when all Vaulties would return to the surface, and that they had been chosen to be his assistants and continue Vault-Tec’s corporate strategy. “In [his new] leadership role, he’s pulled from Hank’s example, but he’s different,” Arias says. “He’ll find ways to survive but also care for people. There are people he’s had to deceive to remain in power. There’s one person he can trust and that he might fancy.” He begins to uncover dark, dangerous secrets about his family — and then, of course, there are the giant roaches.

Monster Mash

That’s another truth about the series: The humans are mighty scary; the mutant animals are worse. “The creatures in the games, they all have this empathetic plight, right?” Nolan says. “They’re created by human wrongdoings and human experimentation. They’re attacking you and want to kill you; we are the creators of this problem for ourselves. That’s a key Fallout theme. We’ve gone even deeper, darker, and crazier with the second season.”

The craziest may be the debut of the games’ notorious reptilian monsters, the Deathclaws. The creatures were constructed by Legacy Effects, and the results scared even Robertson-Dworet, who says, “We thought we were going to be building this wearable puppet with swatches of fabric that we could finish out with [visual] effects. Those guys are maximalist. They came back, and they’re like, ‘We have the puppet. It can sprint, it can drool, it can run, its eyes move.’ It’s horrifying.”

It didn’t even take the biggest creatures to scare Purnell. “The radscorpions [mutated scorpions from the game] really freaked me out and I’m not that squeamish,” she says. “I had a baby one on my face. Walton was underneath one. I probably would not have done well with that, but it makes the performances better.”

For Goggins, there was no acting required. “There’s this one moment early where this creature comes out of nowhere, and it’s a genuine surprise, that’s my real reaction,” he says. “The puppeteers had it on a pulley and just yanked the thing out.”

What Happens in New Vegas….

As Lucy and the Ghoul cross the Wasteland, Hank has reached New Vegas. “There is a history with Hank and Vegas, which we learn in flashbacks,” MacLachlan says. In the present, he reaches a Vault-Tec facility that contains a science lab and begins working on a less-than-ethical project. “Hank believes [it will] bring back kindness, niceness, make the world livable. I’m borderline mad scientist, which is always fun to play.”

He’s racing against time because he knows Lucy and the Ghoul are tracking him, and he is deluded that once she sees his results, she’ll understand “the value of what he’s doing. He wants nothing more than to have her approval and to get back to the way things were. Hank’s happiest moments were raising his daughter in the vault,” MacLachlan says. The actor adds that the toughest scene he shot was the Season 1 finale, where Hank disappoints Lucy.

Lorenzo Sisti / Prime

Vegas flashbacks also introduce an iconic character and master manipulator from the games—Robert House (Justin Theroux), an enigmatic, all-powerful, self-interested technocrat. Founder of RobCo Industries, a pre-apocalypse corporation that sometimes aligns with Vault-Tec, House’s HQ is the luxe Lucky 38 casino (shot at an abandoned mall and the Hollywood Palladium). His motto, “The House always wins.”

“I won’t say who, but we know a number of figures in the world right now that are similar to Robert House,” Goggins says. “Let’s call it Howard Hughes. Let’s just play that safe. [House is] one of the most well-known people in the world.”

Goggins recommended close friend Theroux for the role. “I said, ‘He’s the guy,’ and started the ball rolling. I gave him a call and vouched for the experience. It’ll be the two of us, and I think we could do something really special with it. We had the time of our life.”

The Brotherhood

Back on the strip mall set, after most of the Elvis ghouls are left on the ground, we head to another location where child extras are running around in ragged costumes as both ghouls and “smoothskins,” AKA regular humans. The scene that day also features a reunion between Lucy’s love interest, Brotherhood of Steel warrior Maximus (Moten), and his onetime Brotherhood bully Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton, nearly unrecognizable in makeup that takes three hours to apply). The characters parted in the seventh episode of the first season.

“Neither was expecting to see each other. It’s a dramatic surprise,” says Moten. “These characters are going to have this journey with each other that isn’t necessarily by choice but becomes something that’s vital.”

“Even though they were at odds, it always felt like they’d come back together,” Pemberton says. “They have the shared experience of living in utter crap. They have different reasons, but they’re bonded in how much they dislike the Brotherhood.”

Maarten de Boer

Before the surprise reunion, Maximus begins the season on a Brotherhood airship, the Caswennan (built on an LA soundstage, it’s an integration of practical sets and fancy tech), hovering over Area 51. He’s hailed as a hero after the events of the Season 1 finale where he was wrongly credited with killing resistance leader Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) in an operation that secured a cold fusion device that could power the Brotherhood’s ambition to take over the planet.

After that battle, Lucy left him behind with the words, “find me.” “[He thinks] he was abandoned because she didn’t feel the same way that he feels about her. He feels like he failed. That creeps into his behavior in this season, and ultimately his inability to feel happy, settled, complete. There’s a question mark constantly being drawn in his mind: Where is she? Is she okay? And if she isn’t, it is all his fault.”

He’s got plenty to distract him though, with visits from more factions of the Brotherhood and the Commonwealth and a quest with a character played by Kumail Nanjiani. Moten also hints at “a really powerful scene” between Maximus and elder cleric Quintus (Michael Cristofer) regarding the ghoul waifs currently darting around set. “He [calls them] ‘abominations’ and I say ‘children.’ We will not get past it.”

Moten glances over at the carefree kids and gets reflective. “When people ask, ‘what would you do to survive the apocalypse?’ I’m a person with three daughters. I want my family unit. I want to not be alone.”

Lorenzo Sisti / Prime

Maximus has his own yearning to belong, the roots of which are seen in flashbacks to his idyllic childhood in Shady Sands. Hank’s bombing wiped out the city and left Maximus an orphan, but the values instilled in him there drive him in the moves he makes this season. For him, “It’s about having newfound courage to face the things out in the world as opposed to continuing to just hide behind the faction, especially if you don’t align with their beliefs.”

We head over to where two stunt players are getting into the massive, armored suits worn by the Brotherhood. Another battle looms, but some in this barren world are fighting for what’s right. “I think one of the things that is so successful about Fallout is the optimism,” Nolan says. “OK, the world’s over. What do we do now and how do we build the next world? It’s part of what entertainment and art does—allows humans to think through different outcomes, possibilities and simulate those a little bit, to think about how that could work out, whether it’s a cautionary tale or a fantasy.”

Fallout, Season 2 Premiere, Wednesday, December 17, Prime Video