Human, After All

The new season of Fallout sees Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, and Walton Goggins tracing fragile hope across wastelands shaped by choice

- Arshia Dhar

The thing about stories of apocalypse, ironically, is that they are inherently infused with hope. For what it's worth, 2025 may just have been the vision of a wasteland for someone in the 1800s, in the same way that Amazon Prime Video's wildly successful show Fallout, in 2025, imagines a post-nuke planet two centuries in the future. But what propels it, like in the real world, is resolution and ultimately, hope.

Based on the eponymous hit video game, Fallout season one (2024) clocked in over 100 million views and then was, unsurprisingly, renewed for a second outing that premiered in December 2025.

Set in the badlands of what once used to be the United States of America, the retro-futuristic series follows the survivors of a nuclear bombing who are forced to wriggle out of their underground vaults to encounter a barbaric new dog-eat-dog world that's fuelled by violence, greed and dark humour.

The series follows Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), one of the more privileged and idealistic Vault dwellers; Maximus (Aaron Moten), a morally fraught soldier of the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel; and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a dubious bounty hunter defaced by radiation.

In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India in Sydney, Purnell, Moten and Goggins explore the emotional landscape occupied by their characters as the unlikely saviours and custodians of a species that has annihilated its own.

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