The first season of Fallout, adapted from the Bethesda video game series, has become a monster hit, beloved by critics and fans alike. Amazon Prime Video renewed it for a second season pretty much immediately.
And what will that second season entail? The first season ended with a shot of Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) approaching the city of New Vegas, a rebuilt version of Las Vegas that is thriving in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's also the setting of Fallout: New Vegas, one of the most popular games in the series. And we got a credits cinematic teasing how the location has changed in the years since the end of Fallout: New Vegas. Obviously this is the next big setting for season 2, right?
Well, showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet are so sensitive about not giving away spoilers that they're loathe to even confirm this, although Wagner did tell GQ that, "It sure would be strange if we went off to New York City after that."
"The idea that more stuff has happened, and that we're not leaving worlds as we left them, was sort of the philosophy of approaching the first season being set in Los Angeles," Wagner said. "We do hope to continue that, and create story on top of story… That's been the entire exercise from the jump, right? 25 years of games, how do you do something on top of it, like a teetering Jenga tower. But that was always the goal. So we are hoping to do that again in another area that is strongly implied by the finale of the first season."
"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."
Now that we needed it after the end of the first season, but we're taking this as confirmation that we'll spend a lot of time in New Vegas in Fallout season 2, although we don't know which "the myriad canon endings" for Fallout: New Vegas the show will follow up on. We do know that Mr. House, a key character from Fallout: New Vegas, appears briefly in the TV show, so Wagner and Robertson-Dworet are clearly laying track.
Did Vault-Tec begin the Great War?
While we're talking about Fallout lore, the show dropped a huge bomb when it revealed that Vault-Tec, the company the makes the luxery vaults where characters like Lucy (Ella Purnell) grew up, was responsible for dropping bombs on Los Angeles, triggering an escalation of a world-wide war in a way that would ensure that the vaults they'd spent so much money building would actually be used. But does the conspiracy go even deeper than that? Might Vault-Tec have begun the Great War in the first place all so it could make a buck?
"Well, we have more story to tell," Wagner said, ever careful. "I would just not treat anything as definitive because, again, everything that we see is very subjective. 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."
We'll also learn more about the destruction of Shady Sands, a wasteland city that was thriving the last time players left it in the Fallout games, but is a hole in the ground by the time of the show. “One thing I wanted to say in terms of the season one, season two stuff — watching the discourse about Shady Sands, and the NCR — I really want to caution people the story isn't over yet, and we really bet on that,” Wagner said. “There's more to tell.”
What's next for Lucy and the Ghoul?
Let's leave all the lore behind for a minute. Fallout is based on the video games, but it tells a new story with new characters, played by actors who are may or may not be familar with the games. "We tried to avoid talking to where possible about the show as an adaptation of the games," said Robertson-Dworet. "We didn't ask them to play the games. We felt like their responsibility as actors is to bring truth to their characters and the story that their character is inhabiting, and as Graham always points out rightly, it's not like their characters are aware of the games, or the larger narrative they're in; they're aware of their own story."
At the end of the first season, hardended wasteland survivor the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) invites naive Vault Dweller Lucy to join him in tracking down her father, and she accepts, despite the fact that he once tried to sell her for her organs. Why is she willing to accompany the Ghoul on a new adventure?
"What exactly her precise motive is is something we're very excited to dive into more in season two, but I wouldn't ever underestimate Lucy's curiosity as something that's motivating her deep down," Robertson-Dworet said. "As much as she leaves to find her father in the pilot, she also wants to fuckin' know what's out that door. Similarly, over the course of the season, she's learned that everything she thought about the world, in her vault, was wrong, right? She was misled. And she's just learned that in a deeply emotional way in the final moments of the finale."
The Ghoul may also have an ulterior motive for inviting Lucy to accompany him. "I wouldn't underestimate Lucy's curiosity as a driver, nor The Ghoul's cynicism for the decisions he makes," Wagner hinted.
We'll have to wait for the second season for the details. There's no release date yet, but considering how popular the first season has been, it's in Amazon's best interest to get rolling on the second as soon as possible.
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