lucy maclean

This story contains spoilers for the fifth episode of “Fallout” Season 2.

On a sunny afternoon in late February 2025, members of the “Fallout” crew are setting up a suspended rig along a dusty road on their Santa Clarita set that will be used to film a scene where Walton Goggins’ character — a long-lived mutated survivor of the nuclear apocalypse known simply as the Ghoul — will get punched out a window.

A short walk away on an indoor stage, Ella Purnell and Kyle MacLachlan have been filming their characters’ long-anticipated reunion. The cameras are on Purnell’s Lucy MacLean, a sheltered former Vault dweller who’s traveled from the California coast to New Vegas in pursuit of her father.

“My little Sugarbomb,” says MacLachlan as Hank MacLean to a woozy Lucy just before she passes out. Among those observing the takes on the monitors are “Fallout” showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.

Both moments take place within the final minutes of “The Wrangler,” the fifth episode of the Prime Video series’ second season, which sees Lucy and the Ghoul finally make their way through the streets of the post-apocalyptic remnants of Sin City after trekking through the Mojave Desert together.

An adaptation of the popular video game franchise, “Fallout” is set in an alternate future around 200 years after much of the world was decimated by nuclear bombs. Some Americans, including Lucy’s father Hank, survived by moving into a network of underground bunkers called Vaults, while others were left to fend for themselves in the Wasteland.

In a flashback, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) visits Las Vegas in “Fallout” Season 2.

(Lorenzo Sisti / Prime Video)

Unlike many of the locations featured in the series so far, New Vegas is one that fans of the franchise are very familiar with because it’s the setting of the 2010 game “Fallout: New Vegas.”

Although incorporating such an iconic setting came with its own challenges, the allure of taking the story to New Vegas was too irresistible for the show’s creative team.

“When Lucy left the Vault, she was very innocent, very naive,” says Robertson-Dworet. By the end of the first season, “she’s had a couple of weeks in the Wasteland and she’s certainly had her eyes opened a fair amount. But she is on a journey to follow her father and uncover even darker secrets. So the idea of taking her to the actual City of Sin was incredibly appealing at a metaphorical or character level.”

Audiences have seen how Lucy’s time on the surface world has been affecting her. And her first day in New Vegas has been a doozy: She encountered terrifying mutated reptilian creatures known as Deathclaws, has been dealing with a drug addiction, committed some theft and even killed a man.

“As we get closer to Vegas … you really start to get to see how much [the Ghoul has] rubbed off on her,” executive producer Jonathan Nolan says. “That fundamental question of ‘Is she willing to to break some of the same rules that he is?’ is one of the driving questions of the narrative. How far is too far and … how many of her carefully fostered beliefs … will survive the journey through the Wasteland?”

The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) sitting alone inside the Atomic Wrangler Hotel room in “Fallout.”

(Prime Video)

Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard, who serves as an executive producer of the “Fallout” series, acknowledges that bringing New Vegas into the show for Season 2 added “an element of difficulty above and beyond that of Season 1.”

“It’s exciting because you’re going to an iconic ‘Fallout’ location, but it’s also tricky because players know it,” Howard explains. “It’s easier, creatively, to go someplace [players] don’t know, but to take the show to a place that they know and love so much, you really have to be extra careful.”

The dilemma for the show’s creative team involved the balance between video game accuracy and the realities of building practical sets. While using a digital background would enable the show to recreate the precise geography of the games, the team’s aim is to try to build and use as many real sets, props and effects as possible.

“Our feeling was always … that we can make it more cinematic, more tactile, if we actually build [New Vegas],” Robertson-Dworet says. “The trade off is going to be [that] maybe we are not going to get it right down to the pixel the way fans remember it. [But] the level of commitment to the games and [to] honoring the games as much as we possibly can is very real.”

Understandably, the “Fallout” crew was not able to build an entire city from the ground up. So instead of incorporating every building on the New Vegas map, they aimed to include some favorites along with ones that best served the story.

The “Fallout” cast and crew on the Freeside set in Santa Clarita.

(Lorenzo Sisti/Prime Video)

Freeside, which is the district that exists in the remnants of Las Vegas’ Fremont Street, was built on a lot in Santa Clarita previously used by shows like “Westworld” and “Deadwood,” while a defunct shopping mall was transformed into the New Vegas Strip.

“Because I’m dealing with real buildings that exist in the real world, it’s not laid out exactly the same as it is in the game,” says Howard Cummings, the show’s production designer. “I put some greatest hits of Freeside, essentially, in a three-block radius on one street. They are laid out progressively similar to the game, but not the [exact] relationship in the actual game.”

One of the focal points in Freeside is the Atomic Wrangler, a multi-story casino and bar with lodging that was featured in “Fallout: New Vegas.”

“The Atomic Wrangler was so specific in the game,” says Cummings. “It has specific architecture and has this terrific neon sign that I love with the cowboy … There’s no way to take [a building that] already existed [on set] and have it look like the Atomic Wrangler … so I put a facade in front of a facade.”

Some of that wizardry went into the interior of the Atomic Wrangler as well. The first floor bar area, for instance, is actually housed in a different building across the dirt street.

“It was the old saloon in ‘Westworld,’” says Cummings, who was also the production designer on Nolan’s sci-fi western that aired for four seasons on HBO. “Turning that into a ‘50s nightclub was really fun. What used to be the stage in the old saloon got shifted to the other side.”

Lucy (Ella Purnell) browses the merchandise in Sonny’s Sundries.

(Prime Video)

The “Fallout” series marks the first television project for Howard, who is known for his work on the “Fallout” and “Elder Scrolls” series of video games. Besides the scale of the production, what has surprised him the most has been just how much the show does utilize practical designs and effects.

“I thought more of it would be fake,” Howard says. But “they really wanted to make everything as practical as possible. … It’s not just the scale of it, but the level of detail and the small things — I was pretty blown away. I thought there’d be more ‘movie magic,’ fakery, but no.”

He recalls visiting the Vault set for the first time during the show’s first season and being amazed that not only had the crew built a full Vault people could walk through, but how even the smallest detail — like a multi-page report on an official’s desk — was fully fabricated.

This attention to detail is apparent within New Vegas as well, from the various goods sold at Sonny’s Sundries (at marked-up prices) to the working monitors of all sizes seen in a certain executive penthouse.

For Nolan, walking onto New Vegas for the first time came with a unique sense of familiarity thanks to having played the games.

“The Germans haven’t come up with a phrase for it yet, but there’s the form of deja vu that you get when you enter a physical version of a space that you’ve come to know virtually,” says Nolan, who explains he felt that sense for the first time when he visited Miami after coming to know the city in a “Grand Theft Auto” video game.

But what he especially delighted in was being able to feature a Deathclaw outside the Strip.

“Fallout” executive producers James Altman, left, and Jonathan Nolan and co-executive producer Noreen O’Toole at the video village.

(Lorenzo Sisti / Prime Video)

“The Deathclaw [is] such a hallmark of that of that game,” says Nolan. “Everyone begins ‘Fallout: New Vegas’ by looking at Vegas and going, ‘Oh, I’ll walk to Vegas.’ The reason you can’t just do that is the Deathclaw, you find that out very quickly, so bringing that to life and spending time on set with the amazing artists of Legacy [Effects] and [Industrial Light & Magic] … was just an extraordinary collaboration.”

While the first season of “Fallout” was filmed in New York (and other locations), the team moved the production to California for Season 2. The move involved disassembling the Vault sets and transporting them across the country in 77 semitrucks to be rebuilt again — this time all connected on one sound stage — in L.A.

Nolan says “Fallout’s” move back to California was “largely for creative reasons” and to reconnect with his former “Westworld” crew members, but he has also been outspoken about the importance of getting Hollywood productions back to California. He even invited state lawmakers on set while filming Season 2 to show them the importance of California’s film and TV tax credit program to reverse the exodus of Hollywood productions.

“We’re hopeful,” says Nolan. “We’re going to keep shooting ‘Fallout’ here. Season 3 [is] heading into production, hopefully, later this year and we’re going to do our part. But hopefully other people will be pushing hard to bring as much production back to California as possible.”