Fallout showrunners talk about the show's take on New Vegas: 'The idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us'

Movies & TVFallout showrunners talk about the show’s take on New Vegas: ‘The idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Amazon)

Still image from Fallout series on Prime - Maximus out of his power armor

The Fallout series on Amazon is a hit, but not everyone is entirely happy with it. I am of course talking about lore nerds who take issue with the game’s handling of New Vegas.Todd Howardhimself shot down fan theories that Bethesda was attempting to use the show to retcon Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas from official existence, but as Chris Livingston noted in his owndeep-dive debunkificationof those theories, there were still questions left unanswered.

And seriously, this is where the spoilers begin.

The Fallout series ends with a shot of the city of New Vegas in a dire state: No neon lights or flashing signs, debris in the streets, and broken gates at the walls. It’s a startling contrast to the bright, lively city that appeared in Fallout: New Vegas. So if New Vegas isn’t being retconned, then what happened?

Chris’ theory, simply put, is thatshit happened, and apparently that’s pretty much the case.

“All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn’t an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play [Fallout: New Vegas],” showrunner Graham Wagner said in an interview withGQ(viaEurogamer).

“We really wanted to imply, guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place [of] constant tragedy, events, horrors—here’s a constant churn of trauma. We’re definitely implying more has occurred.”

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That’s an interesting perspective, because while I would never think to contradict the people actually making the Fallout show, I feel like to a large extent the opposite is true. More than 100 years separate the events of Fallout and Fallout 4 (Fallout 76 is set even earlier than the first Fallout game) and yet nothing meaningful has changed: The world remains a shattered, irradiated mess, with “civilization” reduced to small pockets of survivors struggling to eke out an existence amidst the twin horrors of mutants and fascism. I’m not a committed follower of the lore so that’s an admittedly casual perspective, but really, what has changed? A century after the first time we stepped outside the vault, everything still sucks and shows no sign of changing.

“I think it would have been a mistake to go from the retro-futuristic America to another America that has been fully civilised and the NCR is doing everything great,” Wagner said in response to a question about the controversial decision to nuke Shady Sands. “We love Deadwood. I think if there was a fourth season of Deadwood, there’d be insurance companies, there’d be traffic, and it wouldn’t be a Western anymore. We wanted to live in that first season of Deadwood space, of like, ‘What’s going to happen? Where is everything?’

“It really was our belief, also, that though there are the events of the games, it’s not frozen after that. History is not static. It keeps going, and entropy is a constant. Which is a less flashy way of saying ‘war never changes’.”

“It seems inevitably the message of the Fallout games is that we will veer towards destruction of some kind, and our best efforts to restart civilization may be doomed,” Robertson-Dworet said.

Ruined or not, it sure sounds like the second season of Fallout will focus at least some of its attention on New Vegas. “The idea that more stuff has happened, and that we’re not leaving worlds as we left them, was sort of the philosophy of approaching the first season being set in Los Angeles,” Wagner said.

In case that wasn’t quite pointed enough, referring to the closing shot of New Vegas at the end of the final episode, he added, “It sure would be strange if we went off to New York City after that.”

Amazon confirmed last week that asecond season of Falloutis on the way. Hopefully then we’ll finally discover what “things” really happened to the jewel of the post-nuclear desert.

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