Fallout Season 2 on Prime Video (currently the most popular show on the streaming site) has come to an end, and as many questions were answered, we also have a lot more curiosity about where these characters could go in the future. A core element of the entire season was how the Wasteland would impact Lucy MacLean’s (Ella Purnell) moral compass.
With that comes the question of how far someone will go to get what they want. And for Lucy, that was linked to her quest to find her father, Hank, played by Kyle MacLachlan.
“There’s a line early on in Season 2 where the Ghoul says, ‘When you find your father, what are you going to do?’ And she says, ‘I’m going to bring justice.’ And we played a lot with that line. Like, has she just made that up? How long has she been thinking about this? Or is she sort of doubling down with this sort of moral righteousness in rebellion to the Ghoul and his mentality that she so strongly disagrees with, and she so adamantly believes she’s not going to be like him,” Purnell told Yahoo Canada. “And also, by the time she finds her dad, how much has her definition of justice changed? Because she spent so much time on the Wasteland. She’s been forced to make choices that Season 1 Lucy would not have made.”
“It’s very easy for Season 1 Lucy to judge Season 2 Lucy, because she hasn’t had the experience that she’s had … in Season 2, where it is life or death, it is survival. You have to do the things that you have to do. What does the right thing to do really mean? Is it the most loving thing, the most kind thing, the most effective thing? And right for who? For which faction, for which character, for which person, for which cause?”
In one of the most memorable moments in the Season 2 finale, the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) gives Lucy a gun, leaving her with a choice about what justice, or holding her father accountable, looks like. But the ultimate conclusion is that, while Lucy implanted him with the mind-control chip, Hank wiped his memories, no longer even recognizing Lucy, and stayed loyal to the Enclave, which has possessed the real power all along.
‘Welcome to the Wasteland’
Aaron Moten’s Maximus and Lucy reunite in the season finale, after Maximum has spent much of his time fighting the Deathclaws. But ultimately, the New California Republic (NCR) arrives to take them down, and the expectation is that a war between the NCR and Caesar’s Legion will occur.
As Lucy and Maximum look out at the landscape from Lucky 38, as an image of House (Justin Theroux) flashes on a screen behind them, Lucy says, “I could have prevented this. There’s going to be a war and it’s all my fault.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to the Wasteland,” Maximus says in response.
“The way that [co-creators Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet] are telling a story, I love what they’re doing with it,” Moten said. “I think it’s extremely elegant. … Getting into the second season, and … you see how Lucy as a person could have affected Maximus.”
“When you see what that life was like, that most people in the Wasteland don’t get, but then it was all stripped away from him. He’s, by no fault of their own, abandoned by his family, abused by every person he’s ever met or encountered. And you start to understand, I think, a little bit of why he keeps everything so close to his chest, why he’s so wary of people.”
As the Prime Video series will continue to expand the game’s lore in Season 3, there are a number of different directions the show could be taken, all of which are set to excite fans.