Fallout season 2 impresses, but penultimate episode creates a Star Wars-style problem
A GamesRadar+ reviewer says Fallout season 2 builds on a brilliant first season but its penultimate episode introduces the Vault 32 Overseer Steph Harper’s backstory in a way that creates a Star Wars–style overconnection problem. The review praises Season 2 as something “S.P.E.C.I.A.L,” noting it expertly fuses a serious backdrop of nuclear-laced political tensions with the franchise’s gaudy, retrofuturist humor.
But the penultimate episode’s focus on eyepatch-wearing Steph Harper’s history, the reviewer argues, shifts the series from exploring a disparate set of characters to a tighter, more intimate story that “squishes” the cast’s histories together to less-than-thrilling effect. The piece coins “Six Degrees of Cooper Howard” to describe how often the show’s major players cross paths, and compares that narrowing to Star Wars’ tendency to pull many stories back toward the same familiar figures and events—even if series like The Clone Wars and Andor have broadened the franchise’s scope.
The reviewer warns Fallout doesn’t have to follow that route: the RPG world offers coast-to-coast corners begging to be explored, and reducing the show to a Vault-Tec and Enclave-led conspiracy where almost everyone has a personal pre-war stake “rings a little hollow.” Steph, the article says, could have stood as a more human, tragic maniacle overseer—and tying her history to Coop might be one corporate bombshell too far.
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