The Fallout cast discusses morality and survival in the Wasteland

The post-apocalyptic world is filled with hard decisions and rich characters

The Wasteland is a brutal place, pushing all the characters in Prime Video’s Fallout to make hard decisions to survive. Season 2, episode 6, “The Other Player,” emphasizes the consequences of those choices by focusing on the aftermath of The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) betraying Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) by turning her over to her mass murderer father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan).

[Ed. note: This article contains major spoilers for Fallout season 2, episode 6.]

Ever since leaving her sheltered life in Vault 33, Lucy has been confronted with the ugliness of the rest of Fallout’s post-apocalyptic world. She’s always trying to help others or give them the benefit of the doubt, and that’s mostly led to misfortune, like being attacked by cannibals or crucified by Caesar’s Legion. Purnell tells Polygon in an interview that she brings her own sunny outlook to playing the nicest person in the Wasteland.

“I try to be an optimistic person and I retain a sense of childish wonder in my day-to-day life,” she says. “Some call it ADHD. I call it choosing optimism.”

Lucy’s been through a lot this season, like getting hooked on drugs and killing a man while trying to get treatment for her addiction. Her father puts her values to the test again by demonstrating how he’s able to use mind control technology to turn violent people into the sort of friendly citizens he ruled over as the overseer of Vault 33. But even the darker moments of the show don’t get Purnell down.

“Filming Fallout, especially season 2, is just the most wonderful experience,” she says. "You're in a desert, and you're filming with Walton Goggins, and there are dogs on set, and you've got great dialogue. You get to play an optimistic character. You feel good at the end of every day."

MacLachlan has a lot of experience playing twisted dads. On Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, he portrayed a doctor who experimented on himself to be strong enough to protect his superpowered wife and daughter, draining the life force of other people to fuel his wife's regeneration. In “The Other Player,” he dotes on Lucy while also trying to prove how naive she is.

“To really play these characters, to really give them a full life, you have to find justification for what they do that makes sense to you as a person or as an actor,” MacLachlan tells Polygon. “Hank does what he needs to do at any given moment. He can either talk his way out of something or he can muscle his way out of something, and he’s also the type of character that’s two or three steps ahead of what’s going on.”

The Ghoul was rewarded for his treachery by being impaled on a pole, and spends most of the episode desperately clinging to his sanity. In flashbacks, The Ghoul’s idealistic past self Cooper Howard argues with his wife, Barb (Frances Turner), over whether she should go along with Vault-Tec’s plan to cause nuclear war in order to protect their family. It’s the sort of dilemma that’s been a throughline in Goggins’ career, which has included plenty of morally gray characters like the leader of the Global Defense Agency Cecil Stedman in Invincible and Detective Shane Vendrell in The Shield.

“I find complicated people are interesting to me,” Goggins tells Polygon. “Those are the friends that I have, those are the people that I’m attracted to, and these characters have that in common. It’s an opportunity to experience the nuance of humanity, isn’t it?”

Maximus (Aaron Moten) has also had his values tested this season. While he was hailed as a hero by the Brotherhood of Steel for recovering Cold Fusion at the end of season 1, he quickly grew disillusioned with his status, abandoning his ambitions in order to protect ghoul children the Brotherhood views as abominations. Episode 6 ends with Maximus setting off to find The Ghoul with the help of his former squire Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), and the loyal hound Dogmeat. That sort of team-up is exactly how Moten tells Polygon he’d want to handle living through the apocalypse.

“I’m a big fan of friends,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to face anything like this alone. I would really want my crew. I would want to know that someone’s watching my back and I’m watching theirs. I would be the opposite of the solo wanderer like The Ghoul.”

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The first six episodes of Fallout season 2 are available to stream on Prime Video now. New episodes release weekly on Wednesday through Feb. 4.