By now, you’ve probably heard that the Amazon Fallout show is accurate to the video games, down to the last detail. In fact, Fallout: New Vegas happened in this universe, and they’re all part of one big Fallout continuity.
But if you think about it, maintaining continuity is a real hassle, especially on a creative level. Trying to maintain continuity has arguably ruined many a film franchise, including Marvel, DC, and Ghostbusters. Mad Max producer George Miller has famously expressed his flippancy at it, stating he just wants to tell the best story he can with each new movie.
Miller clearly has a point, but Jonathan Nolan, who also produced many of his brother’s films, and Westworld, decided to go the canonical route for his Fallout show. Why? He explained his line of thinking in a recent interview in IGN, alongside Bethesda’s Todd Howard.
To start things off, Howard says what we’re all thinking:
“Well, it definitely is harder to do, right? We just felt, as fans of Fallout, that would be the kind of show we’d want to watch and the things where we think the world of Fallout is going in the future. Look, for me, I can’t say enough about the job Jonah and the whole team did on this in terms of…
I love to work with other creatives that are going to bring a lot of new things to it. And as Jonah was referencing, what they were able to do in the past and Vault-Tec, and there’s even more, I just thought, look, as a fan of Fallout, it’s an absolute delight.”
Nolan then shares his perspective, where he does make that comparison to other movies and shows that struggled with continuity:
“I think from our end, we had seen the care with which Todd and the team at Bethesda had made sure that all of these games connect together, unlike the MCU or when I worked on Batman, where you have so many different stories, and long, long ago they abandoned any attempt to connect them all together.
Everyone who worked on Fallout, all the games, were so respectful and so careful to keep this consistent universe. If we’d gone a different direction, the show would be the only thing that doesn’t fit with that universe.”
Nolan then talks about dealing with the challenge of maintaining that continuity, and why he felt it was worth it:
“I think it definitely more of an asset. It is a challenge. As Todd said, it’d be much easier for us to just, kind of like a bull in a China shop, just go in here and pick whatever we wanted. And in fact, I’ve worked on adaptations before where they’re defined by the degrees of difference from the source material, where you’re adapting a book, where you’re adapting, for instance, Westworld, the original brilliant film by Michael Crichton. The series shares the ethos of that film, but very few of the story moments.
Sometimes it’s about making changes, and it’s always more difficult to thread that needle of respecting all of the lore, respecting all the great storytelling that’s come before you, and trying to find a way to not only play nicely with that, but also add to it if you can.”
Finally, let’s just circle back to the question of Fallout: New Vegas. The controversy around this revolves around an event called The Fall of Shady Sands, which happens in 2277. It’s heavily suggested that Shady Sands is the setting for the game, but the timeline also shows that Fallout: New Vegas happened four years later, in 2281. So what’s going on here?
Howard’s answer:
“All I can say is we’re threading it tighter there, but the bomb falls just after the events of New Vegas. That’s when Shady Sands blows.”
Howard also clarifies that The Fall of Shady Sands did not happen because of a nuke. So, there’s still some elements of Fallout lore that we don’t know about, but the people over at Bethesda do. And the reason they’re not telling? Either it will be answered in a second season of the show, or Bethesda is saving this for a future Fallout video game.
And that’s the sort of thing you can do when you make the Fallout TV show in the same continuity as all the video games.
