How 'Fallout' built New Vegas

In the postapocalyptic show's second season, the action reaches a place fans know well.

- BY TRACY BROWN

LUCY and the Ghoul (Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins) reach the remnants of Sin City, the setting of the popular 2010 installment of the video game franchise.

(LORENZO SISTI Prime Video)

On a sunny afternoon in late February 2025, members of the "Fallout" crew are setting up a suspended rig along a dusty road on their Santa Clarita set that will be used to film a scene where Walton Goggins’ character — a long-lived mutated survivor of the nuclear apocalypse known simply as the Ghoul — will get punched out a window.

A short walk away on an indoor stage, Ella Purnell and Kyle MacLachlan have been filming their characters’ long-anticipated reunion.

The cameras are on Purnell’s Lucy MacLean, a sheltered former Vault dweller who's traveled from the California coast to New Vegas in pursuit of her father.

“My little Sugarbomb,” says MacLachlan as Hank MacLean to a woozy Lucy just before she passes out. Among those observing the takes on the monitors are “Fallout” showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.

Both moments take place within the final minutes of “The Wrangler,” the fifth episode of the Prime Video series’ second season, which sees Lucy and the Ghoul finally make their way through the streets of the post-apocalyptic remnants of Sin City after trekking through the Mojave Desert together.

An adaptation of the popular video game franchise, “Fallout” is set in an alternate future around 200 years after much of the world was decimated by nuclear bombs. Some Americans, including Lucy's father Hank, survived by moving into a network of underground bunkers called Vaults, while others were left to fend for themselves in the Wasteland.

Unlike many of the locations featured in the series so far, New Vegas is one that fans of the franchise are very familiar with because it’s the setting of the 2010 game “Fallout: New Vegas.”