‘Fallout’: Walton Goggins, Kyle MacLachlan & More Break Down Emotional, Shocking Season 2 Finale (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Fallout Season 2 finale.]

The fog of war is rolling into New Vegas. The second season of Fallout, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi series based on the popular game franchise, ended with The Legion and the NCR (New California Republic) marching towards a showdown in the once glamorous town. TV Insider talked to the cast and creators about the shock-filled episode (see the full video above).

One spectacular sequence was when Maximus (Aaron Moten) and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) united to fight the Death Claws (hear the actors discuss it in the video), but for Goggins a more emotional scene was where his character finds his wife Barb’s (Frances Turner) cryopod empty after an epic search. “It just happened to coincide with me almost at the end of a two-year run. I’m desperately missing my own family. I try not to infuse or imbue anything in front of a camera with my own life. I don’t believe in that, but it just so happened to dovetail the way that it dovetailed into these moments as the show was coming to its conclusion,” the actor says. “Watching it, I was reminded what I think all of us inherently feel as human beings. And that is hope springs eternal. It got me.” (The cast saw the final cut the evening before our interviews.)

That hope came from a Colorado post card Barb left in the pod. The Ghoul was heading there solo as the season wrapped but exec producer Geneva Robertson-Dworet hints at plenty of detours. She says, “We are excited to go to a place that has been largely unexplored in the games. The Ghoul is aimed at Colorado. Whenever you take a journey in the Wasteland, it’s rarely linear or direct. Often when I’m playing the game and I’m on a quest, by the time I do all my side missions, I’m like, wait — what is my goal that I started with? Similarly, the Ghoul is on a mission to Colorado, but what might stand in his way? What might derail his plans? What might be the new challenges he faces? We are excited to delve into that.”

If the Ghoul and Barb do reunite, will she even recognize him? “I am very curious myself,” Turner says. “But I think you see Cooper’s beautiful eyes still in the Ghoul. She would see his eyes and they would look familiar. I’ve never run into [Walton] in Ghoul makeup, so it would be nice to not do that until if and when they see each other.”

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'Fallout': Walton Goggins & Ella Purnell Break Down Lucy & Ghoul Betrayal (VIDEO)

The most wrenching moment of the season’s final installment came when Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) pushed the button on the mind control chip that he originally intended for his daughter Lucy (Ella Purnell) and wiped his own mind, forgetting everything he’d ever known, including his child. “He took the decision away from Lucy having to make it,” MacLachlan says. “He’s trying to be the best he can be as a father. He did a wonderful job raising her up, preparing her for the ordeal that she had to go through. At the end of Season 1, he felt like, wow, she made it through the Wasteland. So that decision [to wipe his own mind] was one of sacrifice. He’d already set his plan in motion, so his job was done in a way.”

A more lighthearted surprise was discovering that in the pre-bomb-drop-era timeline, Hank and evil vaultie Steph (Annabel O’Hagan) were married. MacLachlan says with a laugh, “Well, I think [Hank’s] a virgin, so there you go. This is [his] first real relationship.”

The union was the start of a powerful climb for Steph. In the vault timeline, her storyline wrapped as she directed ominously over comms, “initiate phase two,” a signal picked up by a massive remote facility run by RobCo. “I really hope I get to explore [the Wasteland] at some point,” O’Hagan says. “She’s been up there, and she’s seen horrors, maybe not since the bombs dropped, but she’s seen her fair share of scary things up there. I think she’d do all right. I think she’d miss her hair products, getting to do her bouffant every day, but I think she’s a pretty tough cookie.”

Exec producer Jonathan Nolan‘s goal in wrapping the season was, he says, “to do justice to these beautiful games and the beautiful world. They are filled with some uncomfortable questions about geopolitics, but also the politics of families and relationships and parents and children — all of the themes, both cosmic and intimate, that the games and now the show get to play with.”

Whatever happens next in the series and in the games will include a shared creative process between the producers of both. Todd Howard, exec producer at Bethesda Studios where he led the development of the game Fallout, says, “We view it as one universe. The games are a lens into it. The show is a lens into it. The show has a lot more opportunity to jump around the world, to jump timelines. What the show has done to show the past — how did the world get the way it is — is particularly awesome. Ultimately though, it’s a backdrop to the journey these characters go on. The hope is you watch the show or you play the game and you think, ‘What would I do in that situation?’ The end of Season 2 with Hank and Lucy is particularly great there.”

With so much in Fallout pulled from real human history, we asked Howard and Nolan what they would call a game based on the world’s current state of affairs. “Whoever’s writing this season of the world is just…those writers have crazy ideas,” Howard says. Nolan jumps in, “I would call it S**tshow.”

Watch the full video above for more.

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