Amazon’s Fallout series is phenomenal, but I’ve been online long enough to smell when the gamers are ꦕbrewing up some trouble. Ever since Bethesda boss Todd Howard told that the TV show is considered canon, Fallout aficionados have been picking apart every still and se🐻t photo looking for discrepancies in the lore.
One major point of contention is the fact the show advertised a heavy Brotherhood of Steel presen🙈ce but practically no mention of the New California Republic. If you know the timeline, you’ll know that the Brotherhood in this region was in shambles just 15 years before the events of the show, while the NCR had more or less created a fully functioning so🔯ciety. How can the show be canonical if things out West are so different from what we know in the game?
The show ties up this supposed loose end quite nicely in the fourth episode. Here’s your last chance to dodge spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet: Shady Sands, capital city of the NCR, has been reduced to a smoking crater. We even find out who nuked the city, and why, later on in the series. Based on Maximu🎐s’ age, who was a young boy when Shady Sands blew up, it seems like this event happened within a few months or years of Fallout: New Vegas.
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We can presume then that over the next 15 years, the NCR withered away while th♐e Brotherhood gained power, but we also learn by the end of the season that the Brotherhood isn’t quite as strong as they appear (after all, that’s their whole schtick). The timeline is a little murky and there are still some things left up to interpretation, but the result is pretty easy to understand. The show needed to feature the cool power armor soldiers front and center, and when the established lore got in the way of that, they simply dropped a bomb on it.
If that rubs you the wrong way, wait until you find out about all the retcons the last episode makes. The big reveal in the season finale is that the world didn’t end in a great war between the nuclear powers as we’ve always thought. Instead, a cabal of executives from America’s most powerful corporations, including RobCo’s Robert House, conspired with Vault-Tec to drop the first bomb themselves in order to win the game of capitalism. The plan was to incite a nuclear holocaust, then hide out in their bunkers in cryo-stasis for hundreds of years until everyone on the surface, AKA their economic competitors, died out. Meanwhile, these freak🥀s would run a bunch of weird experiments in the vaults to entertain themselves while waiting to emerge from the vaults and create a new world in their image.
It’s not quite accurate to call this tw🤡ist a retcon. A 1998 treatment for had a version of this plot point as well. It may be the case that this was always something Bethesda had planned to reveal eventually, but the fact that it was revealed in a TV show rather than in a game is going to leave a lot of people with doubts about its legitimacy.
If all of this leaves a bad taste in your 🐼mouth, if you think the show’s big narrative swings somehow compromise the integrity of Fallout’s lore, I have great news for you: you can just ignore it. It’s not canon if you don’t want it to be, no matter what Todd Howard says. If you don’t think the show counts, you’re right, it doesn’t. You can have it whatever wa꧒y you want, I can almost guarantee it.
The show is dealing with a big part of Fallout lore that we don’t know much about, pre-war history. I personally preferred it that way. In the games we never really knew who dropped the first bomb, because i🅰t doesn’t matter. When you’re fighting for your life every moment of the day, there’s not a lot of time to sit around and think about how things got this way.
It’s interesting that the show is revealing that side of the story, but I suspect it’s also going to be inconsequential to the games. Imagine you’re playing Fallout 5 and you stumble into some podunk town one day. You’re here looking for ghoul that’s rumored to be the last person that saw your missing sister alive, but before you can track him down you have to find a the town’s doc, because your radiation levels are out of control and you’re definitely going to die if you can’t get some RadAway. Suddenly, some random ဣtownsperson runs up to you and starts shouting “China didn’t drop the first bomb, it was Barb Howard and her cabal of CEOs!” Your first thought will be “who cares”,💫 and your second thought will be “I should shoot this guy in the face and see if he has any RadAway”.
The lore of the show doesn’t really change anything. The next Fallout game is going to have a unique setting with 🅺its own characters and stories, and there’s almost no chance the story of Lucy, Cooper, and Maximus vs. the Vault-Tec death cult will have any bearing on that story at all. I don’t even think the cold fusion plot line will survive beyond the TV show, it’s just too powerful a force to keep on the board for long.
That’s all assuming we even get anoth❀er Fallout game any time soon. We may have to put ourselves in cryo if we want to survive long enough to see if any♉ of the show’s revelations matter in the grand scheme of things. In the meantime, you’re free to treat the show as non-canon, and no one can stop you.
