One of the best sci-fi shows of the decade’s new season is streaming now

The first episode of season two is available to watch now.

Based on the popular video game franchise of the same name, the Prime Video series takes place in a retro-futurist version of Earth ravaged by nuclear war.

Its main character is Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a young woman raised in a luxury fallout bunker who ventures out into the irradiated hellscape on the surface.

There, she finds waiting for her an unfamiliar, strange and violent world populated with eccentric characters.

These include a former Western star that has been transformed into a mutated gunslinging bounty hunter dubbed The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), as well as a young squire of the militaristic cultish group The Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus (Aaron Moten).

Fallout Season 2 review

JOE were big fans of Fallout season one, and having seen three episodes of S2 already, we believe that the show's sophomore outing does not disappoint.

We remain in awe of how dark and violent the sci-fi is, and how hopeless so many of its characters are, yet also how compulsively watchable and funny the series winds up being.

The violent splattery action remains as shocking and darkly comic as ever. The hyper-stylised, absurd and vast world of Fallout feels even bigger and wilder the second time around.

This is because its characters are spread out even further across the apocalypse wasteland, where so many new and warring factions have sprung up.

The focus on these groups and communities has enabled the series to introduce several great cast members, including Justin Theroux (as S2's big bad), Kumail Nanjiani and Macaulay Culkin, all of whom turn in terrific performances.

On top of all this, though, showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner subtly weave in fascinating ideas and themes amidst the chaos and carnage.

These include questions like: How does a person retain their humanity at the end of the world? Is so-called technological progress actually detrimental to humanity? And is war human nature?

Fallout Season 2 interview

Ahead of the release of Fallout season two, JOE interviewed many of its cast and crew.

When asked about what audiences can expect from the new batch of episodes, Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins spoke about the unusual dynamic between their characters.

With Lucy being an optimist and The Ghoul being a nihilist, how will they impact each other now that they've teamed up to achieve a common goal?

On this, Purnell states:

"[Lucy's] a little bit fed up, actually, of The Ghoul. We pick up season two pretty close off where we left season one, but they've been on this road trip. They're travelling through the desert, they're looking for Lucy's father (Kyle MacLachlan)

"The Ghoul and Lucy are very different and also similar, and those differences and those similarities really annoy each other. They're trying to influence each other, and they're trying to both get the other to see their way and their point of view, their way of doing things.

"You can tell that she's not as nice as she once was, but she's still trying.

"I think, as much as she will try to suppress it, deny it, pretend she isn't, she is rocked to her core with what she's learned at the end of season one. That doesn't go away; that hasn't gone anywhere, it's there.

"She's suppressing it, she's hiding it because it's painful. But of course, because we're humans, it's there. You can put it in a box, but it's still there.

"And at some point, you'll see this season, it comes out."

Similarly, Goggins tells JOE:

"In season one.. [The Ghoul] didn't see [Lucy] as a human... He wasn't abusing someone. He wasn't torturing someone. He just thought she was bait. It was as simple as that.

"[Now he] sees her as a human.

"You have to think that one is an optimist, the other is a nihilist. Either I will begin to think like her or she'll begin to think like me, or it'll be something different.

"I think that's what you have to wait to find out, right? Which perspective is going to win out, or do we each rub off on the other?

"So I hope that what you will experience watching it is what I experienced reading it. Where I thought [it] was going to go, isn't where it went at all, and it became something completely different."

On top of this, Fallout producer Jonathan Nolan (who also worked on The Dark Knight trilogy with his brother Christopher) spoke to JOE.

He talked about season two shooting on location in the Mojave Desert, as well as about the show's emphasis on practical effects and sets:

"It's the way I came up with my brother. The way we learned to do it from the very beginning was you make it real, and if you make it real, it's more emotional, right?

"And we have the most talented vis effects team in the business, but we endeavour to try and give them as little to do as possible.

"But I think especially with this project from the beginning, if we're just doing computer graphics, actors standing on blue screens, we're not going to beat the games. The games are some of the most beautiful games ever made.

"So, we have to use a different toolbox. You start from the proposition of: 'What's the point of adapting these games? What is the point of taking these beautiful games in this beautiful world, and adding a lens to it and bringing it into television?'

"The answer for me was: Make it real, make the vault a real place, make the death claw a real terrifying organism that you interact with.

"It's a simple trick, and it requires, in this case, the support of Amazon and their full-throated support of the way that we make the show, which is to say: 'Yeah, we're going to get on a plane, we're going to go to the right place, and we're going do it for real."

The series' other main star, Aaron Moten, told JOE about how these practical sets and effects help aid the actors' performances:

"It's like that weird thing as an actor. All of us, especially if you've been trained, we believe in the method. The method is there whenever you don't feel inspired, though.

"The sets and the world… [and] the wardrobe, it inspires the imagination. It really does so much to allow you to do other things with your imagination rather than holding the thing itself.

"If you were looking at a tennis ball, there are so many other questions you would have to ask, as opposed to looking at the death claws being puppeted by three people. They're so large.

"It's such a different experience for your imagination, and therefore I think you get to fill the world with more detail, as an actor, because you're not having to just hold the thing itself in your mind of like: 'Okay, he said it was about 7, 8, 9 ft, you know what I mean?

"As opposed to having to do that kind of work, it really does help you springboard into this sense of submitting to the imaginary circumstances. Otherwise it'd be really, really challenging."

How to watch Fallout season 2

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The first episode of Fallout season two is streaming on Prime Video right now, with the rest of its eight episodes dropping weekly on Wednesdays.