Key Takeaways
- Fallout’s flashbacks enhanced the first season, providing new insights into the game’s world and characters.
- Season 2 of Fallout should focus more on exploring the past, including iconic locations like New Vegas.
- Executive producer Jonathan Nolan confirmed that flashbacks will continue to be a significant narrative device in Season 2.
Fallout blasted onto the scene earlier this year, establishing itself as a frontrunner in the video game adaptation landscape. With a second season of Fallout confirmed by Prime Video, it’s hoped that the next season will continue to bring the elements that made the first season great, particularly its flashback sequences.
Fallout is based on Bethesda’s long-running action RPG game series which takes place in a post-apocalyptic earth destroyed by nuclear bombs. In the wake of this, various surviving communities emerge dictating a new and wild society. One of these communities is the vault dwellers, which Ella Purnell represents as Lucy, a Vault 33 citizen who ventures into the wasteland for the first time to find her kidnapped father. She comes across several strange characters on her journey, including the Brotherhood of Steel squire Maximus, and Walton Goggins’ centuries-old Ghoul, and together they unlock the mysteries of the wasteland.
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Fallout’s Flashbacks Were Its Strength
Fallout was an excellent adaptation of Bethesda’s video games, bringing to life many of the elements of the series’ unique apocalyptic world as well as its satirical tone and quirky character types. However, the series truly excelled when it went off-book and introduced some stories to viewers that hadn’t been given airtime in the games. The series often did this by showing a time before the bombs went off. The very first episode of Fallout opens with Goggins’ Cooper Howard, a big-time actor whose career was fizzling out, entertaining children at a birthday party, before the nuclear bombs hit Los Angeles. Another flashback showed Howard taking on a role as Vault-Tec’s poster boy, where he originated the iconic thumbs-up logo plastered throughout the Fallout world.
While Howard survived the nuclear blast and eventually went on to become the grizzled Ghoul, these flashbacks into the character’s life provided a perspective on the Fallout world that hadn’t been seen before in the games. While pieces of Fallout’s history have been put together throughout the years and in various game releases, the TV show was able to provide more detail, such as why the nuclear bombs went off in 2077 and what really happened to Shady Sands. HBO’s The Last of Us did a similar thing in its first season, using flashbacks to reveal a time before the world had turned into an apocalyptic wasteland and revealing insight into how and why it all happened, which fans appreciated.
Season 2 Should Show More of the Past
Many things make Fallout’s second season exciting, but the biggest one is no doubt the promise of seeing New Vegas. Season 1 of Fallout ended with Lucy disowning her father, Hank, after learning he was responsible for bombing Shady Sands after his wife attempted to take the children and leave him. Hank manages to escape in the power armor and is last seen fleeing toward the ruins of New Vegas, indicating it will be a prominent location in Season 2. The iconic video game location comes from one of the most popular Fallout installments, and fans are looking forward to seeing how it is represented on screen.
Fallout: New Vegas was one of the franchise’s most appealing games thanks to its rich lore and interesting dynamic, which saw the player character caught in the conflict between several governing factions vying for control of the city of New Vegas. This is an area that is ripe for flashbacks in Season 2 of Fallout. The season will have to do a lot of work to set up the backstory of New Vegas in a short amount of time and one of the more interesting ways to do this would be through flashbacks. There’s also room for flashback sequences to cover multiple interesting time periods in New Vegas’ history, such as its early beginnings, as well as explaining what happened in the aftermath of Fallout: New Vegas.
In a show, you can flashback and you can explore that world beforehand. It’s one of the things I love the most about Season 1 and we will be doing more of that in Season 2.
Executive producer Jonathan Nolan has indicated in recent interviews that flashbacks will continue to play a part in Fallout. “For the most part, in games, it’s a little harder grammatically to flashback, right? Some games can do it very well,” Nolan told Inverse in an interview. “…In a show, you can flashback and you can explore that world beforehand. It’s one of the things I love the most about Season 1 and we will be doing more of that in Season 2.” These comments are a positive sign that viewers will continue to learn about new aspects of Fallout’s world in Season 2 of the series, hopefully, some of which will be related to New Vegas.
Fallout Season 1 is streaming on Prime Video.
Created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout is based on the post-apocalyptic RPG gaming franchise that started in the 1990s. Set hundreds of years after the Great War, Lucy leaves her Vault bunker to travel the Wasteland in search of her kidnapped father.
- Release Date
- April 10, 2024
- Cast
- Walton Goggins , Ella Purnell , Kyle MacLachlan , Xelia Mendes-Jones , Aaron Moten
- Main Genre
- Sci-Fi
- Seasons
- 1
- Writers
- Lisa Joy , Jonathan Nolan
- Streaming Service(s)
- Prime Video
- Showrunner
- Lisa Joy , Jonathan Nolan
- Creator(s)
- Graham Wagner , Geneva Robertson-Dworet
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