Summary
- We might finally have an answer to who destroyed New Vegas in the Fallout TV series.
- Scratch marks, graffiti, and an animatronic all point to deathclaws being responsible.
- Some speculate that the tunnelers may have also played a role, but there’s no evidence of them right now.
At the end of the Fallout TV series, the credit sequence showed the New Vegas Strip in complete disarray, with crashed NCR vertibirds littering the streets. The wasteland had finally reclaimed this shining jewel of pre-war civilisation. Well, sort of. If by wasteland you mean a legendary deathclaw who had enough caps to bribe security.
Many speculated about what may have happened following the Courier’s adventures in the Mojave, from Ulysses’ grandiose and terrifying prophecy about the tunnelers to the more mundane and inevitable collapse. After all, the NCR is on the brink, Caesar’s Legion is a personality cult following a terminally ill man, and the gangs running the Strip are unpredictable allies to Mr House at best, and cannibals at worst.
No doubt this all played a factor, leaving the few stragglers of the West Coast fighting over scraps, but the final nail in the coffin might have been an overgrown lizard. That’s according to u/JustBottleDiggin, who has leaked several set photos from Season 2 over the last week.
Amazon Might Be Using Practical Deathclaw Animatronics For The Fallout TV Series
“Last night I was told by someone that they saw a practical deathclaw animatronic on Friday night during filming — probably similar to what they did with the gulper in [Season 1],” u/JustBottleDiggin explained. So, it wasn’t a nuclear bomb that wiped out New Vegas like with Shady Sands, but “a deathclaw — and a legendary one at that.”
They’ve filmed pre-war scenes, post-war scenes, and now some of the deathclaw-damaged post-war scenes. This must be the big fight of the season — or at least some of them.
There’s more evidence than just an animatronic, though. On the Freeside set — and the gate to the Strip itself — there’s deathclaw graffiti, which is typically a warning to forlorn travellers that they need to turn around, run 500 miles in the other direction, and hide. There are even claw marks scratched into the front of the Lucky 38, the iconic mantelpiece of the Strip.
That’s not to mention that in the Season 1 credit sequence, we saw dead deathclaws strewn across the Strip alongside those NCR vertibirds.
Granted, claw marks could be a sign of the tunnelers. And u/JustBottleDiggin even concedes that “both” deathclaws and tunnelers could be responsible for the collapse of New Vegas, but there’s no other evidence for them right now. So, it looks increasingly like the bipedal super-reptiles took advantage of the weakening Strip and laid ruin to what was left, and Ulysses was a bit off the mark.
