The following article contains major spoilers for season one of Fallout.
At 9.30 a.m. Los Angeles time, the day after Fallout has been renewed for a second season by Prime Video, co-showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet log on to Zoom to chat through the finale with GQ. They're obviously pumped about the renewal, signed and confirmed at this point as of something like 18 hours ago. But it's the zeitgeistiest video game adaptation this side of The Last of Us, and one of the most talked-about shows since that premiered in January last year. In their position, you'd be forgiven for presuming that a second season was a given as soon as the raves poured in.
“I feel like we're in an era of TV where you never really know what's going to happen,” says Wagner. “There's so much thing as expected good news for us. So we're very stoked.”
Not that they have much time to celebrate. They have another season of Fallout to get off the ground, after all. In the meantime, fans in Fallout superfan enclaves like the Fallout subreddit are debating a number of story decisions from season one that have major implications for the broader Fallout universe, including the choice to destroy Shady Sands, the home city of the New California Republic, a fan-favorite faction from the games. On that subject, Wagner gently calls for patience.
“One thing I wanted to say in terms of the season one, season two stuff, watching the discourse about Shady Sands, and the NCR—I really want to caution people [that] the story isn't over yet, and we really bet on that,” he says. “There's more to tell.”
Wagner and Robertson-Dworet talked to GQ about the rampant chatter and fan theories the series has generated, their thought process behind some of Fallout's biggest twists, and their big plans for season two… while doing everything they can not to spoil the whole thing.
GQ: The show is so reverent to the games—there are a ton of references. The pistol Lucy and Maximus use in the early episodes, for example, is from the original Fallout. Who wanted to include those little hat-tips?
Wagner: It was a given from the jump. We'll take all the praise people want to dole out, but just to talk nuts and bolts with you, you've got this huge staff working on the show, and you have meetings and meetings on every little detail: “How wide is the door? How high is the door?” Everything is a question mark and justifies a meeting. The things that the fans love also let us think about other things. We don't have to personally craft every weapon – that's been done for us before we arrive. So we have this great arsenal of stuff to choose from.
Robertson-Dworet: I feel like I spent less time than I expected looking at different iterations of weapons, just because the props department so often immediately nailed what was in the game. Whereas, for example, we had to look at seemingly hundreds of fabric swatches for the right blue of the vault suit. [Laughs.] And I would've been like, “That's not gonna be hard.” But it turned out being a really big deal, and Bethesda had to get involved about, like, [whether] it was the exact right color.
Did you consciously try to structure the first season like a Fallout game? You've got your vault tutorial, there's your main quest with Wilzig's head, and as The Ghoul says in episode three: “Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time.” The guy clearly doesn't love side quests.
Wagner: I was always advocating for side quests, to the point that maybe the show was in danger of being boring, where they were literally just doing donuts, and it's like, “What's even happening? This isn't a sitcom, Graham!” [We had] pages and pages of useless digressions that were a lot of fun, but truly just did not advance the story. [Laughs.]
Robertson-Dworet: But hopefully we'll find a place in season two for some of those, because some of them were really fun, and it was tragic to lose them.
Wagner: I don't know, I'm pretty glad we lost some of them… The cannibal encounter, and so-forth. Remember that guy? Anyway. It truly was like, we didn't know how they got there, or why they're there, we just had this image that we really liked.
Robertson-Dworet: That's how it works sometimes!
Wagner: Let's say the water farmer scene [from episode two], we just joked every time it survived another draft that it was certainly gonna get cut. And it made it all the way. You just never know.
Have you guys been reading any of the rampant speculation online?
Wagner: I kind of graze it. I try to be aware of it, through osmosis, but not be all about it, because the volume of commentary is too high, and the collective intelligence of the internet is also too high, and daunting. For me, I think we've gotta stay goofy, stay light, and have fun. There's amazing theories though.
Robertson-Dworet: I give it an even lighter graze, and then I just assume if there's something really juicy, Graham will tell me.
I think you have to have some level of insulation from the really granular Fallout nerds like myself, who are picking through, like, every single minor detail.
Wagner: I did send a screengrab of a Reddit thread of people desperate for something not to happen in season two, and to Geneva, I was like: “I think we gotta do it.”
On the subject of controversial but hugely consequential moments in the show, I've got to raise one of the biggest: the decision to nuke Shady Sands. Talk me through it.
Wagner: We're trying to mind our words after watching poor Emil [Pagliarulo] from Bethesda make a few comments online, and suddenly he's viral, and he's like, “How do I get this back in the bottle?”
I will say that it was very, very early in the decision [making process], once we decided to put the show in L.A. That was the very next thought, because it's a post-apocalyptic show. And if you study the Western, which has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic genre, ‘civilization is not around’ is a big part of it. A lot of them end with the railroad coming through, or a house being built, or they put a church up in the town, or a motorcar appears. And you're like, ‘Well, the wild wild west is over.’
I think it would have been a mistake to go from the retro-futuristic America to another America that has been fully civilized and the NCR is doing everything great. We love Deadwood. I think if there was a fourth season of Deadwood, there'd be insurance companies, there'd be traffic, and it wouldn't be a Western anymore. We wanted to live in that first-season-of-Deadwood space, of like, “What's going to happen? Where is everything?”
It really was our belief, also, that though there are the events of the games, it's not frozen after that. History is not static. It keeps going, and entropy is a constant. Which is a less flashy way of saying “War never changes.”
Robertson-Dworet: It seems inevitably the message of the Fallout games is that we will veer towards destruction of some kind, and our best efforts to restart civilization may be doomed.
Let's talk about the finale. For starters, reinterpreting that famous line, “War never changes.”
Wagner: We passed that line around possibly in every episode in the show. So by the time is actually appeared, we'd juggled it like a jawbreaker that had been melted down into something completely new. [Laughs.] But yeah, we really did want to express it through Barb's point of view first, and then see the A-side and the B-side of it, and the gap between the two.
Robertson-Dworet: Barb is someone who is rationalizing maybe the hardest thing that a person possibly could get themselves to rationalize in that moment, right. So for her to have such a deeply tragic understanding of human history, and the human condition, felt like it humanized her in a way, for us to understand that that is her philosophy.
Walton Goggins repeats it later as The Ghoul, and wasn't aware of the line's significance. Did it just never come up?
Robertson-Dworet: We tried to avoid talking to [the actors] where possible about the show as an adaptation of the games. We didn't ask them to play the games. We felt like their responsibility as actors is to bring truth to their characters and the story that their character is inhabiting, and as Graham always points out rightly, it's not like their characters are aware of the games, or the larger narrative they're in; they're aware of their own story.
For him to say “War never changes” and to know that it was the most pivotal line from the games may have distracted him, in my mind. Suddenly he knows he's doing something iconic rather than just saying something that feels true as he looks out as this fuckin' anarchistic wasteland, and is just like: “Ugh, this place is so fucked.”
Whose idea was it to include a Mr. House cameo?
Robertson-Dworet: Probably Graham's.
Wagner: I try not to keep score as to who came up with what. One of us will have an idea, the other will like it, the other person will try to kill their own idea, it goes back and forth.
In that Vault-Tec meeting scene where we see Mr. House, we also spy some shady figures in the foreground watching the meeting unfold. Will who they are come into play in season two, or later down the line?
Wagner: We, err, certainly intend to expand on that. That is an interesting moment to be double-clicked, as they say, in a future story. Sorry, I truly am like a human spoiler machine.
There's also a lot of conversation around whether or not it's now confirmed that Vault-Tec started the Great War. Is that your take, or is it deliberately more open-ended than that?
Wagner: Well, we have more story to tell. I would just not treat anything as definitive because, again, everything that we see is very subjective. That scene occurred. But what occurs between then and the actual bombs falling… there's more exciting stuff planned between that moment and the last moment, I guess I should say.
Robertson-Dworet: Yeah. It might be definitive, it might not be.
You never know. That's TV for you.
Wagner: There's no such thing as spoilers when you're working on Portlandia, you know what I mean? Like, “Oh my god, you're doing high-end bubblegum this season!?” This is like a new space for me. I feel the urge to spoil stuff.
Well, let me take my foot off the spoiler gas for a second, and not make you sweat so much. Let's talk about Lucy and The Ghoul — their dynamic throughout the show is so fascinating, and they're central to some of my favorite scenes, like the finger exchange in episode four. By the finale, he invites her to join him in tracking down her dad. She chooses to follow. Why?
Robertson-Dworet: I would hope the audiences would have different interpretations of why. It's almost like I don't want to answer that.
Wagner: We hope that the story unfolds in a way that is interesting and explains it, and guides us through it. I think people's intentions are — especially on the wasteland, but also in the pre-war world — are all worth second-guessing, is what I'd say about that.
Robertson-Dworet: What exactly her precise motive is is something we're very excited to dive into more in season two, but I wouldn't ever underestimate Lucy's curiosity as something that's motivating her deep down. As much as she leaves to find her father in the pilot, she also wants to fuckin' know what's out that door. Similarly, over the course of the season, she's learned that everything she thought about the world, in her vault, was wrong, right? She was misled. And she's just learned that in a deeply emotional way in the final moments of the finale.
The Ghoul seems to know a hell of a lot more about this world than she does. There's a certain amount of ‘I want to understand, I want to leave the cave again.’ In a way, it's a mirror image to the pilot.
Wagner: I wouldn't underestimate Lucy's curiosity as a driver, nor The Ghoul's cynicism for the decisions he makes.
Robertson-Dworet: “War never changes” was always like that ultimate symbol of cynicism for him in the finale. Back when he hears Barb say it, when he was Cooper Howard, it's not a philosophical idea he agrees with. But by the time he's The Ghoul, and he looks out at that wasteland, he does, so he has changed tremendously. We're excited to track that change even more in season two.
On which subject, I'm conscious you can probably answer next to nothing about your plans for season two…
Wagner: It just doesn't feel like a good idea, you know what I mean? [Laughs.]
Even so, there are obviously open questions that the fans are speculating about online, and I'd like to put some to you. Firstly, it's very clearly indicated with the final shot of the show that it may go to New Vegas. Has that always been an ambition at some point?
Wagner: The idea that more stuff has happened, and that we're not leaving worlds as we left them, was sort of the philosophy of approaching the first season being set in Los Angeles. We do hope to continue that, and create story on top of story… That's been the entire exercise from the jump, right? 25 years of games, how do you do something on top of it, like a teetering Jenga tower. But that was always the goal. So we are hoping to do that again in another area that is strongly implied by the finale of the first season. [Laughs.] I might as well have said it at that point.
Robertson-Dworet: I'm enjoying watching Graham do verbal jazz hands.
Wagner: It truly is my first rodeo at this kind of like, hiding the eight ball, versus like: “You guys wanna watch the show? Holy shit! I'll tell you anything about it!”
I think if you have a shot of that location right at the end of the show, it's fair game to talk about, to an extent.
Wagner: It sure would be strange if we went off to New York City after that.
Again, more territory you're gonna find difficult, but the post-credits animation takes us on this sweeping tour through New Vegas. It looks like it's seen better days. It's kind of in ruins. Can you speak at all to what might have happened in the 15 years since we last saw it, in Fallout: New Vegas?
Wagner: All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play [Fallout: New Vegas].
With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place [of] constant tragedy, events, horrors—there's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred. Geneva, have I fucked anything up with that?
Robertson-Dworet: No, I thought that was a great dance.