Highlights
- The Fallout TV show is taking us to New Vegas next season, and the Strip looks to be in ruins.
- The big question fans have is who won the second Battle of Hoover Dam, but it doesn’t sound like it matters all that much.
- Showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet want to avoid the expectation that the show has to follow one of the canon endings.
Spoilers for the Fallout TV series.
At the end of the Fallout show, we see a shot of New Vegas seemingly in ruin, the Strip littered with dead deathclaws, broken down securitrons, and crashed NCR vertibirds. It’s been 15 years since the game, and clearly, the Mojave has struggled, but the big question is what ending led us here?
In New Vegas, you can side with a slew of factions as they fight for control of the Strip. There’s Mr. House himself, the pre-war RobCo CEO who has survived 200 years to reignite his empire, Yes Man who helps you usher in an independent New Vegas, the NCR who wish to expand their reach in the West Coast by taking the Mojave, and Caesar’s Legion, a bloodthirsty clan apeing the style of ancient warriors.
Addressing The Courier-Sized Elephant In The Room
The time jump gives showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet some leeway in avoiding answering who the Courier aligned with. So, while there are plenty of options, they might not matter in the grand scheme of things.
“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,” Wagner said in an interview with GQ Magazine. “With that post-credits stuff, 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 – there’s a constant churn of trauma. We’re definitely implying more has occurred.”
So, as 15 years have passed, who controlled the Strip is a moot point. There were still fights over it after the second Battle of Hoover Dam, which we don’t see in the game. Maybe House has a backup plan and is still alive, maybe Caesar’s Legion disbanded after his inevitable death, and maybe the NCR pulled out of the Mojave as it fell into disarray following the collapse of Shady Sands. Whatever the case, “things have happened”. We’ll probably find out what things next season.
Fallout
Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.
