Fallout season 2 is over, but the show still has a lot of gas in the tank. Amazon has changed the hit video game adaptation for the third season ahead of the premiere of the finale episode, which dropped on Prime Video tonight, leaving a set of breadcrumbs of narrative speculation.

The eighth and final episode closes the loop on the season’s major storylines with Maximus (Aaron Moten), Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) all finding what they’ve been looking for all season. But, when I went down, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

Radroaches and Death Claws are out in full force in this episode, reminding viewers that this place isn’t called The Wasteland for nothing. But, as with many things, the real threat lies in people vying for control. Let’s take a look at the biggest moments of the Fallout season 2 finale.

Before you continue, let this be your warning: there is major story spoilers below.

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Maximus

Season 2 of Fallout finds Maximus straying from the Brotherhood of Steel because the heavily armored faction’s version of justice doesn’t sit right with him. Instead, he’s focused on finding Lucy, who he broke up with in the season 1 finale.

Maximus has come into his power this season. This is not the same Maximus that was introduced in the first season. He’s battle-tested, and that trait was on full display during his fight with the Death Claws in New Vegas. In the end, among all the story lines tied in this episode, Maximus feels the most hopeful – his mission of honor and love. And he accomplished both.

Lucy

For more than half of the season, Lucy travels to New Vegas with the Ghoul. They both share the same mission: to find Lucy’s father, Hank, and stop him from hurting people. However, Lucy finds Hank before the Ghoul, and, until this episode, she discovers firsthand the perverse experiments he performs on humans. More on that in a bit.

Like Maximus, the Wasteland changed Lucy. He is no longer an easy​​​​​​​​mark to believe in any and every lie that Hank throws his way. His desire to complete this work and reprogram the various savages found roaming the desert did not sit well with Lucy. In the end, he didn’t get the resolution he was looking for. However, his last moment with his father foreshadowed a bigger game he had been preparing for all his life: war.

Hank

As shocking as Hank’s actions are, I’ve always found Kyle MacLachlan’s performance absolutely compelling. Is Hank a villain? I believe. But the character is always rooted in all his decisions in his love for his daughter and the so-called idea of ​​the greater good.

Hank’s work to miniaturize the technology that turns humans into docile vegetables is a small part of a bigger picture that Fallout has yet to fully reveal. The Enclave has been talked about several times in these episodes, but it wasn’t until the last episode that we saw the compound.

The Ghoul

Watching Walton Goggins take pride in the Wasteland as a Ghoul is something I will never tire of. However, one of the more compelling aspects of the season is the spy-filled backstory of his pre-mutant character, Hollywood actor and Vault-Tec spokesman Cooper Howard.

We all know that the world is suffering from a nuclear apocalypse. However, the stakes in these flashbacks are surprisingly high, offering a deeper understanding of why this is all happening in the first place. It’s a scary thing to type, but the idea here is that a group of wealthy investors and shadowy figures put a plan into action to build Vaults for them to live in while they blow up the world to reshape it to fit their twisted utopian vision.

That group of oligarchs and government power players is also known as The Enclave. Episode 7 finds Howard handing over a small vial of cold fusion to the president (Clancy Brown), because he has no one else to trust, only to realize that he’s going to end up handing that weapon/source of power directly to the aforementioned shadow government agency.

Cooper finishes the fall, and the handcuffs take him out. I keep wondering where exactly we are in the timeline, because we already know that when the bomb drops, he will be at his son’s birthday party. I believe more answers will come next season.

Back to the Ghoul. His journey this time takes him to New Vegas, not to confront Hank, but to find his wife and daughter. He operates on the idea that they are alive and safe in the Vault specifically set aside for management. However, when he finally arrived, he found their cryochambers empty and a postcard from Colorado on the floor.

With renewed hope, he returns to the desert with his dog to continue his mission to find his family.

What’s the deal with Stephanie?

Stephanie Harper confused me as a character. It turns out that, like the Ghoul, he too, is over 200 years old. She appears in Cooper’s flashbacks and ends up marrying Hank, but her whole deal is still shrouded in mystery. However, he seems to be in cahoots with the Enclave, as his last moment in the episode finds him talking to a Pip-Boy to start Phase 2.

The question is, what is this second phase, anyway?

About that post-credit scene

I have mentioned before that war is coming. The final moments of the episode find Maximus and Lucy watching a horde of Legion soldiers make their way to New Vegas. I’m not a fan of the Legion storyline, to be honest, but ending the episode with a war on the horizon opens up all sorts of story possibilities for season 3.

This brings me to the post-credit scene. In it, Dane rushes the remains to Elder Cleric Quintus, the leader of the Brotherhood of Steel, the faction that Maximus once belonged to. The sounds of battle surround their compound, and we see Quintus bloodied and beaten.

“Out of the virtue of my heart, I tried to unite the Brotherhood,” Quintus told Dane. “Now look where this got me. It doesn’t matter. Quintus, the Unifier, is dead. Quintus, the Destroyer, is born.”

The remains are revealed to be a schematic for Liberty Prime Alpha, a giant and powerful combat robot used by the government before the bomb was dropped. This tease refers to a key plot point in the video game Fallout 3, where the Brotherhood of Steel uses this weapon in its war against the Commonwealth.

Fallout season 2 is streaming in full on Prime Video.