To filmmakers, screenwriters, and showrunners, being allowed to work on an established, deeply fleshed-out fictional universe must feel like a god-sent gift. Rather than constructing a tale from scratch and hoping it charms audiences enough to pay it mind and dollar, using the setting of an existing intellectual property lets creatives skip a hard step and leap ahead in storytelling possibilities.
Already endeared to the public, someone else’s world becomes yours to command and beckons you to expand it – fanfiction with professional production value. You can add extra floors to a gleaming, million-dollar skyscraper you partially own, as opposed to selling a single-story cottage built by hand. If done right, the end result feels grander as well; your work is now part of a continuous, public-facing tapestry that generations of fans will find escapism within.
Fictional realms have always made for good refuges from reality. Ironically, millions of people would rather spend their days engrossed in a bleak dystopian setting like that of the Fallout video game series. The grey Beltway wasteland of Fallout 3, a dilapidated Boston in Fallout 4, the baleful, untamed Southern Oregon of Fallout 2… these are popular tourist destinations, accessible fully remotely.
That’s because Fallout offers a captivating fantasy, despite its milieu of violent, fatalistic despair – as Ron Perlman famously narrates, “War. War never changes.” The post-apocalyptic, retrofuturistic U.S. feels freeing, exciting, and, above all, intriguingly layered and cohesively designed.
The first Fallout game’s release in 1997 broke ground on the fabrication of one of the most ample extended universes in all of modern pop culture. Designed by Tim Cain and Feargus Urquhart’s Interplay Entertainment, its clunky controls and sluggish turn-based combat didn’t stop the CRPG from becoming a sensation, stirring a worldbuilding fascination amongst its international playerbase.
Thirteen years later, Fallout: New Vegas exploded the series further than ever in terms of both storytelling and popularity, despite being laden with glitches upon its very rushed release date. Thanks to lead writer John Gonzalez, project director Josh Sawyer, senior designer Chris Avellone, and countless other hard-working creatives and coders at Obsidian Entertainment, the nuclear neo-Western is so immersive that even the most inconsequential side characters, like small-town Nevada demolition man Easy Pete, have become immortalized by revering fans.
Now, Season 2 of the Amazon Prime Fallout series promises to revisit Obsidian’s hallowed setting of New Vegas. The show’s top executive producers are Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who created Westworld, another cowboy-starring dark sci-fi. Fallout’s showrunners and lead writers are Geneva Robertson-Dworet, who co-wrote Captain Marvel and the 2018 Tomb Raider, and Graham Wagner, who wrote and produced for Portlandia and Silicon Valley.
Todd Howard, the creative director at Bethesda Entertainment, which developed Fallout 3 and 4 and owns the franchise rights, is also listed as an executive producer. Depending on which fan you ask, this could be considered a boon or a calamity. With Fallout 3, Howard’s Bethesda attracted millions of new fans and launched a game-changing software and graphics engine that New Vegas couldn’t exist without, but many longtime players still dismiss the visually stunning Fallout 4 (now a decade old) as a shoot-em-up that strayed from the heavily choice-based, character-driven RPG roots of the series.
So far, Amazon’s Fallout has received critical acclaim and been nominated for 3 Emmy Awards. The first season’s cinematography, costumes and make-up, special effects, and sound design are, by all accounts, excellent, making for an undeniably enjoyable binge-watch. Skillful lead performances from Ella Purnell, David Moten, and Walton Goggins keep things interesting when the writing wavers. When at its best, like in Episode 6, “The Trap”, written by Portlandia alum Karey Dornetto, the show soars like few big-name video game adaptations have before.
But the show has also received praise for sticking to the source material. A feature by the British Film Institute praised its “startlingly forensic level of faithfulness…with 27 years of video game lore packed into a tight eight episodes.”
Before Season 2 premieres, the truth must be said. As it stands, the Fallout show fundamentally breaks the universe that it attempts to expand. It does this by destroying the first story ever told in Fallout – the story that started everything – all while its producers tell the media that they were “careful” to prioritize accuracy.
In a recurring series motif, protagonists step outside of claustrophobic nuclear bunkers called Vaults. Struck by awe and sunlight, they take in the sight of a vast wasteland before them. This intro sequence is present in the show’s pilot episode, when main character Lucy leaves her subterranean home, calling back to Fallout’s original protagonist – the Vault Dweller – who emerged from his own bunker 135 years prior in the timeline.
In Fallout 1, players take the Vault Dweller through a bombed-out Golden State teeming with mutated wildlife and hostile raider gangs. The journey spans Southern California, with flesh-rotting adventures in Bakersfield and radiation poisoning outside San Diego. But the first intended stop is Shady Sands, a fictional village approximately located in the real-world Owens Valley, which is a formerly fertile watershed near Death Valley that was dried up to provide Los Angeles with water.
As decades pass, Shady Sands goes from a backwater to a post-apocalyptic metropolis and capital of the New California Republic, described in the show’s controversial timeline scene as “the largest economic and political power in California.” The NCR is one of the franchise’s most recognizable factions and a major player in the show’s Season 1 finale.
Also within NCR territory is Los Angeles, known throughout Fallout as the Boneyard. In the first game, it’s a cluster of shantytowns where seven-foot tall Super Mutants might dip you into a vat of goo. Like Shady Sands, though, the Boneyard eventually grows and civilizes itself, becoming home to the NCR’s central banking system and the Angel’s Boneyard Medical University by the time of Fallout: New Vegas.
But there’s no Boneyard in the Fallout TV show. There’s no Shady Sands either – at least not one that makes sense. In the show, Shady Sands is located smack-dab in Los Angeles County. Instead of an agricultural community founded in mountainous Eastern California, it’s a society built on the crumbled skyscrapers and urban remnants of LA – just like the Boneyard, a place that already exists in-universe.
So not only is Shady Sands not where it’s supposed to be, this unexplained retcon also invalidates the existence of the Boneyard, another deeply embedded part of Fallout’s world. Nukapedia, a massively popular fan-wiki that even influenced Fallout 3, writes that the change “entirely breaks Fallout [1] and Fallout 2 continuity, due to those games establishing that Los Angeles became a [NCR] state in and of itself… separate from Shady Sands.”
Some critics noticed, but chose indifference. “Why was Shady Sands relocated from the middle of nowhere to downtown LA?” asked Chris Livingston, senior editor of PC Gamer. “Probably so the characters didn’t have to wander a hundred miles out into the desert to look at a hole in the ground and then walk a hundred miles back for the next scene.”
The fault in this logic is that the Boneyard was already a perfectly suitable location for Fallout Hollywood hijinks, with plenty of its own interesting lore to play with (or to drop a plot-advancing nuke on).
In wanting a flashier final product, showrunners slapped the “Shady Sands” label on LA and took a Super Sledge to the structure that the extended universe skyscraper is built on. What’s left is disjointed fiction; broken lore. A show that could have seamlessly weaved into the franchise tapestry burns it down instead.
Dismissively, Livingston wrote, “Something that happens in adaptations is stuff gets shuffled around, tweaked… and yes, removed.” This is true, but in the case of Fallout, the show’s creators publicly promised to do the opposite.
Producers repeatedly stated that loyalty to Fallout’s existing continuity was a chief priority of theirs. “We’re careful about the timeline,” Howard told IGN last year, saying that he wanted the show to “stand up as another entry in the series… and move the timeline forward and do some great things.”
In a 2023 interview with Vanity Fair, Howard made it clear that the show wasn’t a spin-off or a separate work, but an addition to the universe meant to further existing lore. “We view what’s happening in the show as canon,” he stated.
Executive producer Nolan confirmed this decision. “Everyone who worked on Fallout, all the games, were so respectful and so careful to keep this consistent universe,” he said in an IGN interview alongside Howard. “If we’d gone a different direction, the show would be the only thing that doesn’t fit with that universe… I think that would be less meaningful to me watching the series, to know that it was completely divorced from the reality of the games.”
The Fallout show set an entirely optional standard for itself that it flagrantly failed to live up to, instead cutting corners and replacing substance with glittery superficiality.
Perhaps the blame lies on Amazon — their lack of care for the series has become evident. Forbes reported that the trillion-dollar corporation released an AI-generated Season 1 recap “which included a monotonous AI dub spouting off all sorts of incorrect information,” before pulling it due to backlash. “It’s quite extraordinary, the things Amazon can’t be bothered with,” wrote TV critic Erik Kain.
It’s easy to shrug off the Fallout show’s false promise. Just chalk it up to the nature of Hollywood producers and screenwriters, too blinded by dollar signs to put authenticity into their products. But in a conversation with a colleague, it became clear to me how easily avoidable the Boneyard error was. “They could have just hired one single Fallout nerd to fact-check stuff,” he remarked. “For minimum wage. They honestly would have done it for free.”
Smoothly repairing this tear in continuity would require that Season 2 come up with some diegetic explanation. The options are limited: calling the discrepancy unreliable narration or some kind of sci-fi phenomenon could explain it away, if clumsily.
However, even a bare minimum band-aid fix might be too much to ask for from this profitable Amazon Prime production. The odds of the show’s creators acknowledging such a major mistake, let alone putting time and effort into fixing it, seem lower than surviving a bullet to the head.
While Bethesda allows the insatiable thirst of Hollywood to desiccate Fallout, don’t bet on things making much sense. You’d have better luck rolling dice at a New Vegas casino.
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And here we are midway through season 2. The modus operandi for House in FNV has ostensibly been retconned. The platinum chip has been replaced by the Mcguffin of infinite power. New Vegas is destroyed, the legion is a joke, and the NCR is a memory. All in the name of telling the same Bethesda story for a third time. Always with the missing family members.