Amazon’s Fallout TV show has – a few minor controversies aside – been a hit with fans since arriving last week; but while it’s covered plenty of the video games’ post-apocalyptic basics across its eight episodes – from Pip-Boys and Power Armour to Vaults and Vault-Tec – not everything’s made the cut. And its creators have now explained they deliberately held some “iconic” stuff back, including deathclaws, to better do them justice in a potential Season 2.
“We wanted to get Deathclaws, but we didn’t want to just throw it away,” co-showrunner Graham Wagner told the The Wrap. “It’s such a monumental piece [of the Fallout mythology].” That’s despite the team’s initial instinct to, as co-showrunner Geneve Robertson-Dworet put it, take a “kitchen sink approach” to incorporating the games’ most recognisable elements for TV.
“There’s all the greatest hit things…that people who aren’t even gamers know about Fallout,” she explained, “like Nuka, deathclaws, whatever. There are these things that are just so prevalent and we were tempted to do all of them in Season 1. But on the other hand, we didn’t want…the show to seem like it was written by people who just spent 10 seconds reading the Wikipedia page for Fallout…So it was important to us to also bring deeper cuts into Season 1”.
“We want to save something for Season 2 to be able to do it properly,” Wagner elaborated when discussing deathclaws specifically, “not just added on to the massive world building we had to do already in Season 1. So Season 2, we’re very excited to finally tackle one of the most iconic elements of the games.”
Executive producer Jonathan Nolan, also in conversation The Wrap, noted the team has been “talking from the beginning about how [the story] would develop and evolve in subsequent seasons, if we should be so lucky”, enigmatically adding there’s “one locale in particular that is closed to my heart that I’d be excited to explore if we got a chance to.”
While Amazon hasn’t officially announced a second season of its live-action Fallout TV show, a Season 2 was recently spotted in a tax incentive breakdown shared by the California Film Commission. Between that and the overwhelmingly positive response to Season 1 – which is having a very notably knock-on effect for the games – it seems like a renewal is all but guaranteed. Perhaps we’ll get a formal announcement in 33 weeks time.
Until then, Eurogamer’s Christian Donlan has some thoughts on Pip-Boy and the weird future of wearables, while Victoria has been looking at some of the easter eggs spotted in the show.