Though “Fallout” has not officially been renewed by Prime Video for a second season, executive producer Jonathan Nolan and co-showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner said they already have ideas ready to go for the next installment of the video game adaptation — including a couple of elements game fans will find incredibly exciting.
Nolan, who has experience crafting mythology-dense serialized storytelling across multiple seasons with HBO’s “Westworld,” said they’ve been talking about the future of “Fallout” since their earliest discussions while still focusing on making the best Season 1 they could.
“The challenge, especially with television, is in success, the hope that you get to go again. But I think the reality is your best strategy is to concentrate on making a terrific season and television and if there’s an opportunity to keep going, and there’s sufficient interest, then you get a chance to keep going,” Nolan told TheWrap when asked about a possible “Fallout” Season 2.
“But I think at the same time, you’d be remiss, almost irresponsible to not have started to talk about where your story could take you. So we have been talking from the beginning about how this would develop and evolve in subsequent seasons, if we should be so lucky.”
When pressed about specific plans, Nolan revealed that while he’s been “thrilled” to tell an original story in the “Fallout “universe, there is “one locale in particular that is closed to my heart that I’d be excited to explore if we got a chance to.” Though he declined to reveal that locale, the final moment of the finale sees Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) staring at the outskirts of a cityscape that looks like New Vegas, from the beloved game “Fallout: New Vegas.” Our bet is that’s exactly what Nolan was talking about.
Additionally, in the final moments of the finale, viewers are shown a skeleton of a giant creature with horns and fanged teeth — the first tease of a Deathclaw in the show.
“We wanted to get Deathclaws, but we didn’t want to just throw it away. It’s such a monumental piece,” co-showrunner Graham Wagner told TheWrap of almost including the creature in the first season. “We want to save some something for Season 2 to be able to do it properly, 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.”
When it came to planning out the first season, co-showrunner Geneve Robertson-Dworet admitted their first instinct was to take a “kitchen sink approach,” but they ultimately realized there just wouldn’t be enough room to include 25 years worth of mythology in an eight-hour show.
“There’s all the greatest hit things, like the most obvious things that people who aren’t even gamers know about ‘Fallout,’ 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,” she said.
“But on the other hand, we didn’t want to see the show to seem like it was written by people who just like spent 10 seconds reading the Wikipedia page for ‘Fallout’ and didn’t bother to like bring in some deeper cuts,” Robertson-Dworet continued. “So it was important to us to also bring deeper cuts into Season 1. Hopefully that won’t piss off fans because we didn’t get to every last thing, but hopefully they will bear with us and pray with us that we get a second season to bring these things to the screen.”
While Prime Video hasn’t yet ordered “Fallout” Season 2, a second season has tentatively earned a $25 million tax break to film in California should it come to fruition, which bodes well. The first season’s production was based in New York.
All episodes of “Fallout” are available to stream now on Prime Video.