Ever since we knew that Fallout's second season would be taking us to New Vegas (so, uh, since the end of Fallout's first season), the internet has reverberated with just one question: which ending will it be, Todd?
Fallout: New Vegas had plenty of ending slides that could go in plenty of directions, but the biggest question at the end of the game was this: who won the Second Battle of Hoover Dam?
Does the New California Republic bring Vegas under its control? Does Caesar's Legion turn it into a new Rome? Does Mr House outplay them both and secure his own, autocratic rule? Or (the correct answer) do the people of New Vegas shake off all these encroaching bureaucrats and tyrants in the Independent, or Yes Man, ending?
We have our answer: none of the above. In an interview with IGN, Fallout season 2 executive producer Jonathan Nolan said that the show had deliberately taken "the fog of war approach" to picking a canon ending for the original game. He seems quite pleased with the choice, calling it "an absolutely brilliant way to make a bit of an end run around that whole question."
In other words, 15 years after the end of New Vegas—when Fallout's second season takes place—everyone is kind of convinced they won. "We had the delicious idea that at the end of a conflict, 15 years down the line, every faction might think they won, which I think has a bit of a poetic quality to it," said Nolan.
"We wanted to try, as much as possible in our show, to honor all gamers' experiences and all the choices they might make as they play the game," added co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet. "So we always wanted to avoid trying to make one canonical ending [into] the ending that led to the events of the show."
I'll be honest, had I not enjoyed Fallout's first season so much, I'd be sucking air through my teeth right about now. It's not that I'm desperate to have my ending validated (I don't need that; Yes Man is obviously the objectively correct pick), but rather that these vast factions apparently forgetting who won a war after 15 years seems a little… odd. But I suspect it'll work a fair bit better in the show and not in a quick interview.
