The second season of Prime Video’s much-watched Fallout T.V show adaptation is slowly but surely on its way. With shooting reportedly having started in November 2024 and some new cast members announced – including Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin, it would seem that nothing’s stopping the world levelled by nuclear bombs from returning to screens.
News has been picking up around the coming second season, with the focus turning back to its two endearing lead performers, Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins. However, many viewers are also putting up questions and theories as to where the show will go next.
There’s an obvious chase on the cards, but where might it go in the grand scheme of things? After all, the Fallout game series earned its dedicated fan base on the back of a well-thought-out world and its ideas for humanity looking to build back after the fallout of nuclear war. So, where do the writers go from here?
Drawing from Deadwood
In a rather revealing interview found here, one of Fallout’s head show runners, Graham Wagner, gave us an idea of how they intend to use the Fallout setting. In it, he cites Deadwood as a source of inspiration and a lesson in their world-building. For those who don’t know, Deadwood was a celebrated Western show that ran from 2004 to 2006.
Starring Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, Molly Parker, Jim Beaver, and Brad Dourif, the HBO series was very well received by audiences and critics, particularly when it came to the quality of the writing by David Milch. Given its setting (1870s Deadwood in South Dakota), it’s easy to see why the Fallout creators would draw from it.
After all, since its release, Deadwood has inspired a great many, and you can see its fingerprints in similar entertainment pieces. In fact, when you look online for new casinos and land on the one with a perfect rating, Lucky Spins, you’ll find Deadwood xNudge and Deadwood R.I.P., which are clearly inspired by the hit T.V. show.
It’s very influential, but the part that seems to be most telling about its influence on Wagner – bar how Fallout depicts and deploys The Ghoul – is that he thinks it ended just in time. A film came much later, but the third season ended before traffic and insurance companies came in to ruin the Western setting. He says, “We wanted to live in that first season of Deadwood space.”
Ousting Progress to Keep the Setting
Knowing the setting that the Fallout T.V. showrunners wanted does a lot of heavy lifting among those who question one of the main plot beats of the first season. In it, a place called Shady Sands in nuked by a vault overseer, Hank MacLean, because his wife ran off with his kids there to be with someone else.
In the original games, Fallout and Fallout 2, Shady Sands is pivotal to the message of the series. It shows that people can build back after such an apocalyptic event, with the main character playing a part in its faction, the New California Republic, essentially re-establishing society, creating a viable city, and offering a new hope.
Destroying Shady Sands before the series even begins is something that the showrunners ran past the current custodian of the Fallout games and IP, Todd Howard, which he says occurs just after the events of Fallout: New Vegas. Still, what it does is flatten any idea of progress being made in the story, allowing it all to stay in the desired setting.
As such, if a similar approach is followed in the second season of the television show, you’d expect for the world to remain the same around the movements of the characters, and for it to be predominantly driven by the hunt for Hank.
