Fallout fans point out canon inconsistency in new TV show

Earlier this week, Amazon dropped all eight episodes of Fallout, its new TV show based on the video game series from Bethesda Softworks. Fallout takes place in the far future, after the world has been destroyed by a nuclear apolcalypse and people must live in the resultant wasteland. Some people have been locked in underground vaults for the past 200 years, unaware of what life is like on the surface. Boy, are they in for a surprise...

By and large, the show has been a blast, pleasing fans and newcomers alike. But the Fallout games have been coming out since 1997. That's a lot of lore built up over the past quarter century, and you know the new TV show is going to get something or other wrong.

And so it came to pass. In the sixth episode of Fallout, "The Trap," we learn that the city of Shady Sands — once the capitol of what came to be known as the New California Republic — was bombed off the map, with a giant crater to mark its grave. This was a bummer for fans of the video games, who had watched it grow from a backwater to what passes for a booming city over the years.

But there's an issue: in the show, we're told that Shady Sands was bombed in the year 2277. The Fallout show takes place in 2296, later in time than any of the video games. However, the video game Fallout: New Vegas takes place in 2281, and in that game, Shady Sands is referenced, which led many players to believe it was still standing. These dates come right from Bethesda studio design director Emil Pagliarulo, so we know they're right.

But they're also irreconcilable. If Shady Sands was bombed off the map in 2277, as we're told on the TV show, then how could it still have been around in 2281, when Fallout: New Vegas takes place? Tell me that, Beshesda. TELL ME THAT. And Bethesda director Todd Howard previously told Vanity Fair that the events of the new show are canon, so the show has gotten the wider franchise in a bit of a bind.

Gamers are famously detail-oriented, so of course they noticed this discrepency. "The events of New Vegas takes place in 2281 where Shady Sands is doing just fine. Isn't this a major retcon?" wrote one fan under Pagliarulo's post, per Eurogamer. Another suggested that the post means that the entirety of Fallout: New Vegas isn't canon, but that's hard to square with the fact that Pagliarulo included New Vegas on his list. A bind, I tell you!

Although it's probably pretty simple; it looks like the Fallout TV show made a whoopsie. Considering how good the show is as a whole, I can let it slide.

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