Fallout season 2 has come to a close, bringing reunions, explosions, more deathclaws than we know what to do with, and a shocking post-credits scene that will give us plenty to ponder as we wait for Fallout season 3.
Amazon’s sci-fi post-apocalyptic show has also thrown plenty of twists and turns at its audience. And while many have been seriously unexpected (Canadians? In Fallout? Who’d have thunk, right?), there are some narrative beats throughout this second season that felt pretty familiar. Despite Fallout season 2 spending so much time in Fallout: New Vegas’s Mojave Wasteland and the city of New Vegas, I left the second season with one glaring thought: Fallout season 2 felt an awful lot like Fallout 4.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for all Fallout season 2 and Fallout 4]
Season 2 of Fallout begins with Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) teaming up with the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) in search of her father Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan). Lucy wants to bring him back to their original vault, Vault 33, to answer for his crimes against the Wasteland and its people. As the season continues, Lucy soon discovers that her father’s meddling with the Wasteland doesn’t just stop with blowing up entire towns.
Inside a Vault-Tec laboratory deep within the heart of New Vegas, Hank has been carrying out revolting mind-control experiments. With the help of a device inserted at the base of the neck, he’s able to pacify any individual within the Wasteland. We’ve seen this mind-control technology at work on several characters, with the most drastic change being when it’s inserted into a member of Caesar’s Legion, who quickly loses his taste for bloodshed and instead becomes docile and friendly.
However, it doesn’t stop there. Come season 2’s finale, Hank reveals to Lucy that the chips aren’t just inserted into the handful of individuals he has working for him at the laboratory, but in an unspecified number of test subjects across the Wasteland. This technology could lead to a far less violent Wasteland, but it would also rob people of both their identity and their free will. This is further proven when Hank activates his device using the chip Lucy had inserted into him, permanently erasing his memory.
It’s a startling revelation and shows how much Hank — and the people he’s presumably working for — are willing to sacrifice for scientific advancement. If anyone could appreciate that level of commitment to Hank and the Enclave using the entire Wasteland as guinea pigs, it would be Fallout 4’s big bad, The Institute.
The Institute, a reclusive group of scientists who survived the nuclear apocalypse and banded together, has a long-term goal of advancing humanity, regardless of the cost. One way they attempt to do so is through kidnapping and replacing the people of the Commonwealth with synths (synthetic humanoids). The reasons why vary: Some of the Institute’s scientists say it’s to spy on the populace, while others see the synths as an advanced workforce that doesn’t need food or sleep. The player character’s interactions with synths range from fighting the less advanced models the Institute no longer needs to freeing them from the Institute’s enslavement, to befriending and even becoming lovers with some of them.
Yet, regardless of the many intentions behind their creation in Fallout 4, the fact remains that, much like Hank’s mind-control device, the synths are being used as tools for the Institute to monitor and control the Commonwealth’s people and beyond. Both the Institute and Hank’s organization see the people as little more than fodder for their experiments.
Much like Lucy, the player character in Fallout 4 has a choice: stop the Institute or accept its plan. Either way, the consequences are exceedingly high. If the player sides with the Institute, it continues replacing Commonwealth citizens with synths, and exterminates the Railroad (a faction dedicated to freeing synths). If the player doesn’t choose the Institute, they lose the confidence of Shaun (their child, whom they spent the entire game looking for) and blow up the entire Institute base, losing decades of research that could have been used to advance the Wasteland in a non-evil way.
That the Fallout TV series can capture the heart and themes present within the world and lore carved out by Bethesda is far from a bad thing. On the contrary, it shows that showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet and the rest of the team are taking their roles in delivering an adaptation that feels recognizable to fans seriously.
On the other hand, it does make some of the shocking reveals lose their dramatic tension when you’ve seen them before (and played a huge part, in the case of Fallout 4). I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Institute was well-written — at times they were almost comically evil, such as using synths to kill whole settlements simply to test soil production — but they had interesting ideas that were fascinating to explore, such as the production of synthetic animals and their pursuit of redefining the future of humanity. In comparison, Hank’s plan to mind-control factions of the Wasteland feels a lot less compelling.
Then again, we still haven’t seen the final step in Hank’s plan. We’ll have to wait until Fallout season 3 to find out whether it can measure up to the absurd evil of The Institute.
All episodes of Fallout season 2 are now streaming on Prime Video.
💸 Earn Instantly With This Task
No fees, no waiting — your earnings could be 1 click away.
Start Earning
