Even before the first season of Fallout debuted and became an instant hit, I knew Amazon was planning a spin-off. If there’s one thing you can count on with Amazon Prime, it’s the platform’s ability to milk its successes for everything they’re worth. If it manages to land a hit, you can be sure a spin-off isn’t far behind. The Boys already has two, Gen V and Diabolical, with a third spin-off set in Mexico on the way. Invincible got an Atom Eve special and creator Robert Kirkman recently teased more spin-offs to come.
Bosch has a spin-off called Bosch: Legacy and a second one in development, and there’s rumors that Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is getting a spin-off starring Michael Peña’s character Domingo Chavez. I’d bet my last Nuka-Cola cap that we’ll see a Fallout spin-off, special, or animated series, and we might even see it before season two drops.
Which Fallout Is The Best One To Play After Watching Amazon’s Fallout Series?
With deep discounts and hype around the Amazon series, it’s a great time to get back into Fallout.
I’m not complaining, either. The Wasteland is ripe for storytelling, and there’s so much more Amazon can do with Fallout. While the first season tells an important, fateful story about how the Wasteland came to be, it still only shows us a small slice of the world that Interplay created and Bethesda has shepherded over the last 27 years. A spin-off could fill in the gaps, expand the lore, or tell a completely different story with virtually no connection to the first season at all. Just for fun, here’s five predictions for what Fallout’s inevitable spin-off could be.
New Vegas’ Lost Years And The Story Of Robert House
Ever since Todd Howard revealed that the Fallout series is canon, fans have been looking for ways to poke holes in the timeline. There’s been a lot of concern that certain story beats de-canonize Fallout: New Vegas, and Howard had to come out and settle the discussion by explaining exactly how the timeline all makes sense.
The lore of New Vegas is clearly very important to people, and it seems like the city will play an important role in season two. Not only was the Strip revealed at the end of the season finale, but Robert House appears in Cooper’s flashback scenes. One potential spin-off could use the same dual timeline structure as the first season and follow House’s rise to power as RobCo’s eccentric CEO, while also revealing what happened in New Vegas during the 15-year gap between the game and Fallout’s first season.
The Snake Oil Salesman
There’s a weird little guy that crosses paths with our heroes a couple of times throughout the first season. The first time we see him, Maximus rescues him from being assaulted by an angry farmer. As he scampers away, the farmer reveals that the Snake Oil Salesman – as the credits call him – was having sex with his chickens. The next time we see him, he’s trading Thaddeus a potion that turns him into a ghoul for the fusion core from Maximus’ power armor.
It’s likely we’ll see ghoul Thaddeus and/or the rogue fusion core pop up again in future seasons, but in the meantime, the Snake Oil Salesman could make a fun protagonist for a mini-series or short. I’d love to see what other antics this little freak is getting into, and who else he’s crossed paths with in the wasteland. Maybe he used to be someone important and we can watch his descent into his current state. Or maybe he’s just a weird guy that likes banging chickens. Either way, it could be fun to watch.
The Ghoul And The Wasteland
The Ghoul has been around since the bomb dropped in 2077, so there’s 219 years of history to catch up on. There’s a lot of Ghoul stories you could tell that would help us get a better understanding of how Cooper Howard became such a vicious, deadly monster.
It probably wouldn’t be easy to get Walton Goggins back for a second series (especially with all that makeup) so this spin-off would be better suited for an animated series. That also opens up the budget a lot, since they could tell a story that spans all across the Wasteland in different time periods. Graphic, extreme violence is easier and cheaper in animation too, which is another reason the Ghoul is a great fit for an animated series.
Walton Goggins has some experience with voice over work. He played Hendricks in 2021’s Spirit Untamed and Aaron Ingram in Arkane’s criminally underrated Prey.
The Fall Of The NCR
Speaking of the 15 year gap between Fallout: New Vegas and the TV show, the biggest discrepancy we see between the lore of the games and the show is the total destruction of the New California Republic. We know the destruction of Shady Sands signaled the NCR’s downfall, but there must be a lot more to the story than what we know right now.
Considering it is such an important and powerful faction in the games, it’s strange that it’s not part of the show at all. A spin-off series could explore some of the key figures in the NCR before Shady Sands blew up, and help close the gap in the timeline by showing us the sequence of events that led to its destruction.
Nick Valentine, A Noir Story
Of course, there’s no reason we need to stay on the west coast at all. Fallout is an anthology series, and it would be fitting for a spin-off to take us to a totally different part of the Wasteland to show us characters and stories that aren’t related to Lucy, Maximus, and the Ghoul at all. We could go somewhere we’ve never been in the game, or we could revisit some of our favorite characters and places. Fallout 4’s Commonwealth isn’t my favorite setting, but I’d love a spin-off all about everyone’s favorite synth detective, Nick Valentine.
Nick is a great character in Fallout 4, but a story told from his perspective would allow the unique combination of noir sensibilities and Fallout’s atompunk aesthetic to synthesize in a compelling way. A detective story that follows Nick on a missing person investigation into the seedy criminal underbelly of the Commonwealth would be a totally novel style of storytelling within Fallout’s world. There’s a lot of Fallout stories you could tell in a lot of different places, but if you want to make something visually and stylistically unique from the show, Nick Valentine is the perfect vehicle.
