Fallout TV showrunners discuss season two location, and why the series doesn't need to follow a canon ending
As designer Josh Sawyer gives his thoughts on season one.
Amazon's Fallout adaptation was officially renewed for a second season last week, and now its showrunners have given us the briefest of teasers for what is in store next.
Please note, there will be major spoilers for the first season of Fallout below. If you are yet to finish the show, and want to keep as much under wraps as possible, please head elsewhere now.
Speaking with GQ, Fallout showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet addressed the final moments of season one.
As disgraced (at least, in the eyes of many) Vault-Tec executive Hank MacLean flees in his pinched Brotherhood of Steel Power Armor, the camera pans to show New Vegas. Except, this location is not as we have seen it in the game series. The show's version of New Vegas doesn't look in good shape. In fact, it looks to be in ruins.
Joking "it sure would be strange if we went off to New York City after that" teaser, Wagner said the team wanted the audience to know that "things have happened" to New Vegas since the events of New Vegas the game (which, canonically, were 15 years prior to the show). Wagner said this was to make sure 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]".
The showrunner said the Fallout crew "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". Wagner called it a "place [of] constant tragedy, events, horrors" where there is a constant churn of trauma" going on.
"We're definitely implying more has occurred," Wagner concluded.
The duo also implied we would see more flashbacks in the second season of Fallout, and that we may not yet have the full story of what happened - even if things may have been implied. Specifically highlighting that meeting between Vault-Tec executives and various other corporation heads and CEOs (including Mr. House - the ruler of New Vegas in Fallout: New Vegas), Wagner said the team "certainly intend to expand on that" and those characters.
As for whether or not it was indeed Vault-Tec that dropped the first bomb - something that again was heavily implied in the first season - Wagner said there is "more story to tell" there.
"I would just not treat anything as definitive because, again, everything that we see is very subjective," he said. "That scene occurred. But what occurs between then and the actual bombs falling... there's more exciting stuff planned between that moment and the last moment, I guess I should say."
"Yeah. It might be definitive, it might not be," Robertson-Dworet added.
But whatever the Fallout TV crew decides to do with New Vegas in the future, the game's lead designer Josh Sawyer isn't fussed.
Speaking with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Sawyer said it "might sound weird, but whatever happens with it, I don't care". The Obsidian exec said his feelings towards the things he has worked on in the past - be it properties or even characters he has created - is that they aren't his.
"I don't own any of this stuff. It was never mine. And the thing that I made is what I made," the Fallout: New Vegas developer said.
"If later on other people working in the space do new things with it and change it, I'll maybe have opinions on it, but I don't get attached to things in that way," Sawyer continued. "I don't feel like it's healthy for me to be really invested in something I have no control over, frankly.
"There are things that I might watch and say, 'I don't think I would have taken this that way', and then there are other things that I think are really cool. But it's not my space, it was never my thing. I was a guest working in it. So I try to keep a level of distance between myself and the setting."
For more on the show and its relationship with the games, be sure to check out Rick Lane's feature: What is the essence of Fallout, and does the TV show live up to it?
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