Where’s Maximus, Anyway? And Other Big Questions From the ‘Fallout’ Season 2 Premiere

Welcome back to the future nuclear wastelands of America, folks! Fallout has returned to Prime Video, and the season two premiere picks up pretty much exactly where the last season left off: with Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) working together to track down Lucy’s father, Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan). The episode also checked in with Lucy’s old friends in Vault 33 and featured some important flashbacks to the days before the world ended. It did not, however, find any time for Maximus (Aaron Moten), but he’s in the trailer for the season, so I’m sure we’ll see him soon.

Oh, and there’s a dangerous new MacGuffin poised to explode a lot of heads this season! How does it all tie together? Let’s dig in.

Why’s everybody chasing Hank?

We found out last season that Hank isn’t just the (now former) Overseer of Vault 33. He’s actually a 200+ year old survivor of the apocalypse and a former Vault-Tec flunky who assisted Barb Howard. Back in those days, The Ghoul was known as Cooper Howard, Barb’s husband and a well-known actor. He’s been wandering the wasteland as a bounty hunter ever since, looking for his wife and child - and he thinks Hank may know where they holed up to wait out the bombs. Lucy, on the other hand, claims she wants to bring her father to justice for, presumably, all of his lying and murdering.

Lucy and The Ghoul follow Hank’s trail straight into the remains of Las Vegas, but the question is: what’s he doing there? And to answer that, we’ve got to talk about a man named Robert House.

You mean Justin Theroux?

Yup! As Mike explained yesterday, you actually met House last season. Rafi Silver played him in flashbacks showing the secret meeting of corporate bigwigs that Cooper bugged, where he heard them discuss the possibility of launching the bombs themselves to end civilization on their terms. Season two reveals that he was actually just the public face of Robert House, and Justin Theroux plays the real House - though he swans around pretending to be his own biggest fan while conducting trial runs of his latest invention: a brain-computer interface (mind-control chip) that has a tendency to explode. Fans of exploding heads (mostly me) will dine well this season!

The Ghoul explains to Lucy that Las Vegas remains largely intact because House protected the city with his own tech when the bombs were launched, and in a flashback, we see why he knows so much about the man. The late Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) asked Cooper to tag along on his wife’s upcoming trip to Vegas and get close to House… to kill him. How that chapter in The Ghoul’s past goes down is shaping up to be the main flashback thread of the season.

Back in the present, Lucy and Ghouly find a message from Hank in the form of a dude wearing that old-timey control chip and, yup, his head explodes. Meanwhile, Hank has settled into a big Vault-Tec corporate office bunker where he checks his old messages (a few hundred thousand or so), drinks some coffee, puts on a suit, and decides to continue R&D on that mind-control chip, to impress House and finally land a big promotion.

Wait, is Robert House still alive?!

Maybe! Hank isn’t sure, but he’s clearly banking on it; he notes that House spent “so much time calculating how to survive all possible contingencies.” We know Hank survived thanks to the cryo-pods in the vaults, and The Ghoul survived because he was mutated by all that radiation into something both noseless and functionally immortal. He became, you know, a ghoul. Point is, there are options for surviving a few hundred years in this show.

So Hank, who spent centuries as a Vault-Tec company man, has apparently become disillusioned with his employer’s grand mission (to, uh, repopulate the Earth with middle managers) and is looking to become a corporate yes-man elsewhere. Managers stay managing, I guess!

Didn’t something else happen with cryo-pods?

Yes! The episode spent some time back in Lucy’s old stomping grounds. Vault 33 is busy trying to re-settle Vault 32, and also get their water supply back online, but the real story is happening over in Vault 31, which Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias) infiltrated last season. Vault 31 is filled with Vault-Tec flunkies, preserved from the before-times in cryo-pods, and whenever the little social experiment in the other vaults needs a nudge, the system can thaw out a manager and throw them in. Vault 31 is guarded by Bud Askins, a Vault-Tec VP - or rather, it’s guarded by Bud’s brain in a robotic jar. Robo-Bud can’t let Norm leave the vault because now he knows the secret of the experiment, so he tries to convince Norm to climb into Hank’s old cryo-pod and sleep. Instead, Norm decides to hit the defrost button on all of the pods, which ought to be interesting. Or at least as interesting as a bunch of confused old-timey managers can be, anyway.

How’s Maximus going to fit into all of this?

Beats me! I imagine he’ll want to find Lucy, because they kissed that one time, and maybe his Brotherhood of Steel bros are going to find out about that mind-control chip and try to steal it or something. Considering Maximus is the third lead of the show, I bet episode two fills us in on what he’s getting up to.

Where’s Rebecca Ferguson? I like her.

Me too! But she’s in Silo, which is AppleTV’s postapocalyptic bunker show.

Any other takeaways?

Mostly just that hiring Kyle MacLachlan to play Ella Purnell’s father was some truly inspired casting, because they have the exact same jawline. That, and I cannot emphasize this enough: I’m really looking forward to watching some more heads explode this season. Like, for plot reasons!