Prime Video has dropped an extended teaser for the much-anticipated second season of Fallout, widely considered to be among the best TV adaptations of a gaming franchise. In our 2024 year-end roundup, Ars senior editor Samuel Axon wrote that the first season gave us "a specific cocktail of tongue-in-cheek humor, sci-fi campiness, strong themes, great characters, and visceral violence [that] came together into a fantastic show." The second season looks like it will bring us more of the same, along with a major new character drawn from the Fallout: New Vegas game. We even got a glimpse of a Deathclaw.
(Minor spoilers for S1 below.)
For the uninitiated, Fallout is set two centuries after nuclear warfare between the US and China destroyed civilization in 2077—an alternate history version of 2077, in which post-World War II nuclear technology ushered in a retrofuturistic society. Some lucky survivors took refuge in various underground vaults; others were left to scavenge a meager existence on the highly radioactive surface.
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. 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.
Joining the cast in S2 is Justin Theroux as Mr. Robert House, founder and CEO of RobCo Industries. House is a brilliant thinker who—in the games, at least— used his superior intellect to help Vault-Tec bring about the nuclear apocalypse, while ensuring that both he and Las Vegas survived. He's the head of New Vegas in the games, and in the series, too, it seems. "I am the very best at what I do," he says in the teaser. "And what I do is I know everything." That should make House a daunting villain.
The second season of Fallout premieres on December 17, 2025, on Prime Video.
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