The last episode of Fallout is as action-packed and revelatory as you’d expect a season finale to be. It delivers the payoff for almost all of the show’s big questions that have been lingering throughout the season, while revealing some major plot developments that shake up everything we know about the world of Fallout. This episode represents the series’ first major departure from the loꦡre of the games when it reveals the nuclear event was not caused by the Great War, but rather the machinations of Vault-Tec executives whose ambitions included remaking a nuclear-scarred world in their image. This one change, and the added revelation that the conspirators are still alive, sets the series on its own path moving forward that will take the story in a whole new direction.
But then, just as the credits are about to roll, the final shot brings us back into the familiarity of the games. As Kyle MacLachlan’s Ov🌃erseer Hank escapes across the desert in stolen power armor, we discover his destination is New Vegas. This reveal puts Fallout in an interesting, somewhat precarious position for season two as it inevitably attempts to balance its ambitious new storyline with all the things fans expect from a serie⭕s set in New Vegas.

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That won’t be an easy thing to pull off. Part of what made the first season such a success was how well it managed to capture the aesthetic, iconography, and tone of the games without directly adapting any of their stories. Fallout is better suited for adaptation than most games specifically because its world is so iconic. It's an anthology series that changes settings and characters with each new entry, but the world-building and themes are consistent. As long as you have Nuka-Cola, Pip-Boys, vaults, ghouls, the Brotherhood of Steel, and a cynicism about human nature, you can tell any story in the Fallout universe and it will still feel authentically Fallout.
The first season of Amazon’s Fallout proves this. While taking place in roughly the same region as the first two games, the show doesn’t use any of the characters, locations, or plot lines 🐓from them. It goes so far to distance itself from the storylines of the games tha🔯t the one recognizable city, the New California Republic capital called Shady Sands, has been reduced to a smoldering crater. By the end of the season, when it’s revealed that Vault-Tec dropped the bombs themselves in order to create a true monopoly, the show is unambiguously planting a narrative flag in the Fallout universe. The world belongs to the games, but the story is all its own.
In some ways, that vision feels incompatible with New Vegas. The fan-favorite game has as much of its own iconography as the rest o🍎f the Fallout u🍬niverse put together, but more than that, it has characters, settings, and stories that feel inseparable from the setting. The things that New Vegas contributes to the world of Fallout are what make it so beloved, and if the Amazon series is going to use the setting, it also has to tap into features of that setting more than anything we saw in season one.
There are hints of that in the credits. We see a billboard for The Tops Hotel & Casino, where Benny and Emily created Yes Man and conspired to overthrow Robert House. NCR vertibirds litter the streets, suggesting their presence at Camp McCarran military base. ꦉHouse’s automatons are piled up outside the perimeter of the Strip. The entire credit sequence is packed with references to not just the locations, but the key figures that control the city too.
It’s hard to imagine a sto♒ry set in New Vegas that doesn’t include House, Benny, or many of the characters and factions from the game. Fans will expect to see things like the White Glove Society, The Gomorrah, and King’s School of Impersonation. There’s no point in going to New Vegas without tapping into what makes New Vegas iconic, which means the show will have to sidle up much closer to the games than anything we saw in season one.
How it pulls that off, while forging its own path through the Fallout mythos, will be interesting to see. One could imagine the surviving Vault-Tec execs using the Strip as a way to play out their hedonistic power fantasies much like House and the factions of New Vegas did, we already saw House in the show up as one of Vault-Tec’s coᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ-conspirators in the flashback scene, so it would make sense that the other&r﷽squo;s are still alive and held out in New Vegas too. Now that the series is well-established, it might be time to start introducing characters from the game. You can’t have Caesar’s Legion without Caesar, after all.