We got our first glimpse of the much-anticipated second season of Fallout (adapted from the popular video game franchise) back in August when Prime Video released an extended teaser. We now have the official trailer, with all the deadpan humor, explosions, and mutant atrocities one could hope for—including ghoulish Elvish impersonators in New Vegas.
(Spoilers for S1 below.)
As previously reported, in S1, we met Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a young woman whose vault is raided by surface dwellers. The raiders kill many vault residents and kidnap her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), so the sheltered Lucy sets out on a quest to find him. Life on the surface is pretty brutal, but Lucy learns fast. Along the way, she finds an ally (and love interest) in Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire masquerading as a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel. And she runs afoul of a gunslinger and bounty hunter known as the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a former Hollywood actor named Cooper Howard who survived the original nuclear blast, but radiation exposure turned him into, well, a ghoul.
The first season left off with Lucy deciding to join the Ghoul and the plucky dog CX404 (now named Dogmeat) to track down the leaders of Vault-Tec, revealed to have orchestrated the nuclear apocalypse—with Lucy’s father among them. Per the official S2 longline, “The new season will pick up in the aftermath of season one’s epic finale and take audiences along for a journey through the wasteland of the Mojave to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas.”
Purnell, Goggins, MacLachlan, and Moten all return for S2, along with Moises Arias as Lucy’s younger brother, Norm, and Frances Turner as Barb Howard, Cooper’s wife and a high-ranking Vault-Tec executive. Justin Theroux joins the S2 cast as Mr. Robert House, founder and CEO of RobCo Industries, as well as Macaulay Culkin (possibly playing Caesar) and Kumail Nanjiani, both of whom appear briefly in the new trailer.
The trailer opens with Maximus chatting with another denizen of the wasteland, who insists that while he’s seen lots of crazy and unnatural things in his struggle to survive, he’s never seen good people. Maximus has met one good person: Lucy. But his acquaintance isn’t having it. “I would be a good person too if I grew up in some cozy impenetrable home,” he says. “Wouldn’t have to steal and stab and fib all the time just to get by.”
Lucy, of course, has been challenged to hang onto her fundamental decency while navigating the brutal surface world, hardening just enough to do what’s necessary to survive. She’s now looking for her father with a new motive: to bring him to justice, “so people know that how they conduct themselves matters, and they don’t give up hope.” (We catch a few glimpses of Hank, most notably experimenting on a mouse in the lab, with disastrous results.) The Ghoul, for his part, is looking for his family; it’s the only reason he’s hung around for 200 years. Meanwhile civil war is brewing, and you just know our main cast will all end up caught up in the conflict.
The second season of Fallout premieres on December 17, 2025, on Prime Video.
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