High atop my list of most anticipated upcoming video game adaptations is the second season of Fallout. The sci-fi drama, which premiered on Prime Video earlier this year, not only paid homage to its source material but managed to expand upon it in interesting ways. Much of that success can be attributed to the efforts of EP Jonathan Nolan and his team of collaborators, who are currently starting their work on the second season. Speaking of which, Nolan just compared his experience working on the new season to both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. And seriously, as if I needed another reason to be excited about the new episodes.
Before creating Westworld and Person of Interest, Jonathan Nolan collaborated with his brother, Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan, on The Dark Knight Trilogy. Nolan recently reflected on his time helping to craft some of the best Batman movies while discussing his work on Fallout Season 2. The producer specifically explained that following Season 1, he now has a mindset that can be likened to the way he felt amid Batman Begins’ release and the start of work on its sequel (which is one of the best movies of the 2000s):
It’s the same feeling I had when Batman Begins went into the world. I had worked on that for a little while with my brother and then written the script for The Dark Knight for him. And I just thought, ‘We built this thing. Let’s see what it can do.’ And that’s the same feeling we have right now. We’ve built this thing, and in Season 2, we’re going to find out what it could do.
These comments, which the Interstellar scribe shared with TheWrap, are very exciting to me, because they suggest that the EP is feeling good from a creative standpoint. After having a successful debut season, some creatives may be tempted to become lax and rest on their laurels. But it sounds like the Prestige writer is ready to really push this show to its limits. During his recent interview, he also explained what he and his team learned from working on those first eight episodes and teased how that’ll inform what’s to come:
We learned an awful lot about the characters and the way they interact and talk with each other and the exciting possibilities for different encounters between characters who maybe haven’t met each other yet. But we also figured out how to make all the monsters, and there are more monsters, more environments, more factions that we are currently designing and building right now to begin production quite soon. So we’re really excited.
Fallout Season 1 ended on an eventful note and, as a result, its characters were left in intriguing positions. Ex-Vault dweller Lucy McClean and the Ghoul team up to pursue the latter’s murderous father, Hank, who’s on his way to the iconic New Vegas. Another notable development involves squire Maximus being dubbed a knight by the Brotherhood of Steel after (falsey) being credited with killing New California Republic commander Lee Moldaver. And let’s not forget that Lucy’s younger brother, Norm, learns that Vault-Tec employees have been kept in stasis in Vault 31.
Given these storylines, Jonathan Nolan and co. have a lot of ground to cover from a narrative standpoint moving forward. The fact that Nolan sounds as creatively invigorated as he was when he worked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight could bode well for Season 2. And, if the finale was any indication, the new episodes could murky up the waters even more, as Dark Knight did for its own trilogy – which is a notion that really excites me.
While you wait for Fallout Season 2, binge the first batch of episodes with a Prime Video subscription now. You can also check out the 2024 TV schedule if you’re looking to tune in for some of the fresh series that are headed your way this fall.
