6 burning questions Fallout Season 2 has to answer

Fallout has set the world on fire, and we can’t wait to find out what happens next; here are five big questions Season 2 has to address. 

All eight episodes of the Fallout TV show have landed on Prime Video, irradiating fans across the globe with joy. Abominable metaphors for fan excitement aside, the show’s remarkable, being both a faithful adaptation of the beloved games and an exciting and entertaining TV series in its own right (Check out our Fallout review). 

Amazon is clearly confident in the series’ success, having moved its premiere date after it received reviews more glowing than nuclear waste, and they’ve even laid the ground for a possible Fallout Season 2. It’s exciting stuff, especially if you’ve sunk as many hours as I have into wandering the wasteland while listening to oldies and gunning down radroaches. 

Still, if we’re lucky enough to get a Fallout Season 2, then there are a couple of loose plot threads that are burning holes in our brains, and even Radaway isn’t going to soothe the pain. So, with that in mind, here are the six questions we need Fallout’s second season to address. Warning: spoilers ahead! 

What’s going to happen to Lucy’s brother, Norm MacLean?

Last we saw Norm, he was trapped in Vault 31 with the disembodied brain of nobody’s favorite capitalist, Bud Larkin. Things looked bleak for Norm, and he basically had two options: starve to death with only Bud for company or get in his father’s empty cryo-pod. 

At the end of Episode 8, it looked as though Norm was going to freeze himself like a TV dinner, but did he really give up that easily? Norm’s been trying to expose the conspiracy at the heart of vaults all season, surely he wouldn’t give up without trying something to escape first? 

How will Maximus escape the Brotherhood?

Prime Video

Maximus began the season at the bottom of the Brotherhood’s pecking order, but he ended it as a fully-fledged knight. Unfortunately for Max, he’d rather be anywhere else on Earth right now than with the Brotherhood, having realized that they’re just as brutal and vicious as any other faction in the wasteland. 

How will Max escape and meet up with his beloved Lucy? He’s a knight now, which means he’ll have some freedom (and he won’t have to rely on stolen power armor), but the Brotherhood leadership is sure to keep him on a short leash, and we can’t see them letting him take a vacation in New Vegas anytime soon. Speaking of which… 

What happened in New Vegas?

Bethesda

The last shot of Fallout Season 1 teased the promise of New Vegas. While we can’t say with 100% certainty that season 2 will be set there, we’d be willing to put a lot of caps on it being central to the show’s future. With that being said it does pose some interesting questions about the canon of New Vegas. You see, the Fallout TV show is set in the year 2296, 15 years after the events of the New Vegas game.

In theory, then we should see the effects of the Courier’s choices in the second season. Will Mr House still be around? Did the Courier destroy Caesar’s Legion? Who rules The Strip? We’ve no way of knowing, and neither Bethesda nor Obsidian has ever canonized any of New Vegas’s many potential endings. It’s going to be interesting to see what route the showrunners go — and potentially a bit disappointing for those of us whose endings get consigned to the dustbin of non-canonicity.

Who’s really in charge of Vault-Tec?

Prime Video

The Fallout show revealed that Vault-Tec, along with the world’s other biggest companies, were the ones responsible for the Great War and the destruction of humanity. While that’s pretty shocking, it raises certain implications about who’s actually behind all of this. It seemed as though the plan was the brainchild of Bud Larkin, but Coop’s wife, Barb, definitely had a hand in things. 

Were Bud and Barb simply middle managers executing the vision of someone else, or was the apocalypse really all their doing? Neither Barb nor Bud was the Vault-Tec CEO, and we know from the Fallout 3 expansion Mothership Zeta that such a position does exist. Might we see the person behind the bombs in Season 2? We’re hoping we do. 

What’s happened to the rest of the NCR?

Prime Video

Fallout revealed that Shady Sands, the NCR capital, had been destroyed by the Brotherhood of Steel and that the new republic had collapsed soon after. While this may shock long-term Fallout fans, we do wonder how the loss of one city, even the capital, destabilized what’s supposed to be the most populous and stable nation in The Wasteland. We know some remnants survived the Brotherhood’s bomb, so it’s possible there are other NCR enclaves out there, and we’re keen to see what happened to the NCR citizens outside of the capital.

Where is Cooper Howard’s family?

Prime Video

The Fallout finale revealed that under his gruff and murderous facade, the Ghoul is actually an irradiated corpse on a mission. He’s hunting his missing family, and he doesn’t care how many shotgun shells he has to use to find them. 

The implication was that Barb and their daughter were hiding somewhere in New Vegas, having ridden out the apocalypse inside a cryo-tube, but that’s speculation. We expect Season 2 will delve deeper into Coop’s backstory — potentially showing us what happened in the immediate aftermath of the bombs falling and his ghoulification — and reveal exactly what happened to the Howard family. 

If you loved Fallout, we’ve got an article explaining how you can watch the first episode for free, and we’ve put together a list of all the oldies from the Fallout soundtrack. If that’s not enough, we’ve also been through the Vault-Tec logs to bring you the most fiendish vault experiments in the history of Fallout. If you’re feeling a bit of radiation sickness, though, and need some time away from The Wasteland, why not check out our guide breaking down the best new shows on streaming this month?