The following article contains major spoilers for season one of Fallout.
It's less than 300 miles north and east of Los Angeles, so was there anywhere else, really, where Fallout season 2 could be set? Well, after the finale, it's a dead cert: rack up the roulette wheels and stick on your jingly, jangliest spurs, we're headed to New Vegas.
It's the final mic-drop in a finale full of them, as the last shot of Fallout's first season—with a second season all but confirmed by recent reports that it will be shot in California with state tax incentives—sees Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) overlooking Nevada's oasis of hedonism from the vantage point of a sand dune. An ominous crescendo of strings on the soundtrack tells us everything else we need to know. Our story has only just begun, and the next chapter will be in the Mojave wasteland.
This all comes with the caveat that a second season is yet to be officially announced by Prime Video, but… come on. Placing those aforementioned reports to one side, it's a hit with the critics, the fans (mostly) think it's a blast, and it's even making converts of audiences who had never played the Fallout games, just days after it began streaming. They're never not making a second season, are they?
But wait, I've never played Fallout. What's a New Vegas?
So, you'll know having watched the show that Fallout is set in an alternative timeline which diverged from our own some time following World War II. It's a world in which America never evolved, culturally, from the ‘50s, so The Ink Spots and Elvis still top the charts, and cars still have tail fins. (They’re also nuclear-powered.)
In 2077, years of conflict over dwindling global resources lead to a nuclear war between the U.S. and China—as we now know, apropos of the show, ultimately triggered by Vault-Tec. The Fallout games pick up hundreds of years later: Fallout 1 is set in 2161, Fallout 2 in 2241, Fallout 3 in 2277, etc. The show is set in 2296. There are also flashbacks to just before the war in the Fallout show — those scenes with Walton Goggins' Cooper Howard, who later becomes The Ghoul.
Fallout: New Vegas, set in 2281, is one of the fan-favorite instalments of the modern games. Released in 2010, it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, whose development staff were partially made up of designers and programmers who worked on the original Fallout games, before the Fallout IP was bought by Bethesda Softworks in the mid-2000s.
Classic Fallout zealots see New Vegas as a “true” sequel to the original RPGs, after Fallout 3 moved the action from California to Washington, D.C. and controversially retconned elements of the Fallout canon. It also directly picks up from some of the characters, factions and storylines in Fallout 2.
As the subtitle suggests, it's set in New Vegas. In the Fallout universe, the city of Las Vegas played host to the Lucky 38 casino — that huge tower we see in the shot of New Vegas in the show — essentially the home and headquarters of an immensely powerful businessman called Robert House. He's kind of like Fallout's Elon Musk. (We see him in the Fallout finale in the pre-war flashback to the Vault-Tec meeting which sees in the end of the world — he's the guy who looks like Walt Disney, representing his company RobCo.)
In the New Vegas canon, House saw the nuclear writing on the wall some decades before the bombs dropped, and set to work setting up elaborate missile defenses around the city. Hence why it's still mostly intact: while his defenses didn't stop all of the bombs, it did prevent the sort of damage we see to other major cities in the Fallout world, like L.A., D.C. and Boston.
By 2281, it has become New Vegas, and is the setting for a war between the New California Republic, a sprawling military democracy based out of California, and Caesar's Legion, a group of Roman Empire wannabes led by a guy called… well, Caesar.
Hence why it's such a huge fucking deal that New Vegas is introduced in the final shot of the show, and will be where season two seemingly takes place — it's a fan-favorite location from the games. We also know that the show is deemed canonical by Bethesda, and is basically Fallout 5, so by moving the action to New Vegas, the series will give us a canon ending to Fallout: New Vegas, which is currently open-ended and changes based on the decisions of the player.
A post-credits animation in the finale takes us on a tour of New Vegas in 2296, and it's looking much worse for wear than the last time we saw it in Fallout: New Vegas. While it was once a safe and secure hedonistic playground that drew in tourists from the New California Republic, it now looks like it sits in ruins, suggesting something drastically terrible has happened in the 15 years since the events of New Vegas. We'll have to wait until season two to find out, exactly, what that was.
Why is Fallout headed to New Vegas?
That's the million-bottlecap question. We now know that Hank has been secretly affiliated with Vault-Tec the entire time, and was even born before the Great War, catching a ride to the present in a Vault 31 cryopod. It looks like his boss is hanging out in New Vegas, where he's heading to report, but all bets are off as to who that person actually is. Is it Robert House? Is it Cooper's wife, Barb (Frances Turner), who headed up Vault-Tec's evil conspiracy to destroy the world, and recolonize it in their image?
The Ghoul and Lucy (Ella Purnell) are looking for answers, too, which is why they're following Hank on the long road to Nevada. Maybe New Vegas is where The Ghoul can hope to find his family, after all these years. And what will Lucy do when she catches up with Hank, after the revelation that he destroyed the settlement of Shady Sands, and with it, all but killed her mom?
God, I can't wait for season 2.
New Vegas this, New Vegas that — what about Shady Sands? What even was Shady Sands?
Shady Sands is now a crater in the middle of Los Angeles, but it was the capital of the New California Republic, as we see in the show. There's even a helpful timeline for Shady Sands' rise and fall in episode six, “The Trap.”
The town was founded in 2142, as we see in the events of Fallout 1. In 2189, the New California Republic was created; nine years later, Shady Sands was incorporated as its capital. By 2241, the NCR is the largest economic and political power in California. Then, less than forty years later, Shady Sands falls — and at some point in the years following, is destroyed by Hank in nuclear blast.
The events of Fallout: New Vegas, in which the NCR is a main faction and depicted as a still-functioning state, took place in 2281, leading many fans to believe that the destruction of Shady Sands occurred after this date.
Canonically, the NCR had a bunch of settlements dispersed throughout the California wasteland, from the coast to New Vegas. We'd put money on Fallout's second season fleshing out the state of the NCR following the fall of Shady Sands.
And what happened to Fallout's Moldaver, Lucy, and Maximus?
Sarita Choudhury's Moldaver, assumed to be the series' big baddie after the massacre at Vault 33 in Fallout's first episode, is revealed in the finale to have virtuous intentions at heart.
It turns out she, like Hank, the inhabitants of Vault 31, and The Ghoul, was around before the war. A renowned scientist, she was locked in a battle with Vault-Tec to reacquire the cold fusion technology that she developed, and they put on a shelf to prevent being used. It would've offered a source of endless renewable energy, ending the resource wars and (probably) preventing the conflict between America and China from spiralling into nuclear conflagration.
Her wish is finally fulfilled in the finale, when her cold fusion tech is finally activated, providing clean energy across the Los Angeles wasteland for the first time in over 200 years. Mortally wounded in the battle at Griffith Observatory, she dies soon after. Bye, Moldaver!
As for Lucy? Well, it seems she's on her way to New Vegas with The Ghoul to track down Hank. The last we see of Maximus is him being anointed as a Knight for the Brotherhood of Steel — whether he likes it or not.
When will season 2 of Fallout be out?
Well, it's still to be officially announced, as we say. But give it a couple of years. 2026, maybe? Sometime around then.
Fallout is now streaming on Prime Video.
