Fallout season 2 still sounds like it won’t commit to a New Vegas ending, but for the love of all that’s Housely, I hope it will
Prime Video’s Fallout TV series has been followed around by a buzzing swarm of canon chatter hornets since the moment its first series emerged from the vault. Such a thing’s natural and healthy – people care enough about the games to have thoughts about how this adaptation portrays the world in which they take place. It goes double when when you head to locations which have played host to entries especially beloved for how much say they let the player have in how their stories play out.
Enter Fallout season two, debuting next month and set in (clears throat) NEW VEGAS. Will it set one of Fallout: NEW VEGAS’s endings in stone as the canon option?
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In an interview with The Spill, Aaron Moten – the actor behind Brothehood of Steel bloke Maximus – touched on this having been something he’s had chats with the show’s bigwigs about. Asked whether he thinks fans will be surprised by the version of New Vegas the show’s about to shoot into our skulls after taking us on a nice trip to Goodsprings’ cemetery, Moten said the following:
“Actually, you know what’s really interesting is our storyline, where we are in time, it’s a number of years after the events of New Vegas. An interesting thing, a conversation [co-showrunner] Geneva [Robertson-Dworet] and I have been having, was actually about how history is written in the wasteland by whoever writes it. Different perspectives will have a different perspective on who won and who lost. It’s a really beautiful thing. We see it really early on that you guys [Lucy and The Ghoul] find out who believes themselves to be winning, and The Ghoul offering a different perspective.”
This meshes with what Robertson-Dworet and fellow showrunner Graham Wagner said to GQ last year when asked what’s happened since New Vegas in their New Vegas: “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].
“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.”
Right, so here’s my view on this as someone who hasn’t made a blockbuster TV show, but who has done many New Vegasings, and thus spent plenty of time making choices that whatever scenario the show depicts might well not mesh with. If I was going to take a show to New Vegas after the events of the game, I’d just pick an ending. Probably whichever one I think will fit best with whatever narrative I’m planning to weave. Show off how the events following it might have played out, or fill in some interesting blanks as to what it might mean in terms of immediate consequences for the people of the wasteland.
Odds are, some people will find that take on this optional future intriguing, and reflect on choices they’ve personally made when playing the game. Some people will very probably dislike it, or simply not vibe with it as much. That’s fine – the video game still exists and they can fire it up at any time to run around in the version of the Mojave they’ve shaped. Either way, the show doesn’t have to spend its entire runtime shrugging or leaning on the unreliable narrator whenever someone asks what happened at that big important battle. The one which had very clear, very high stakes that went a long way to making New Vegas’ story as widely beloved as it is.
Then again, I don’t have to live with any of the online vitriol or boardroom frowning Fallout’s showrunners might have to, if they were to go this route. We’ll see which route they’ve gone on December 17th, when No-bark Noonan heroically emerges from the Lucky 38 to negotiate the first Mojave-wide peace agreement, having gotten Mr House to sign off on a clause which dictates all real-life lore-heads won’t be forced to forget every New Vegas thing they’ve ever done.
