Fallout's Big Shady Sands Change & How That Will Impact Season 2 Explained By Co-Showrunners

Fallout showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet explain the big change to Shady Sands and how that will impact season 2.

During a recent interview with GQ, Wagner and Robertson-Dworet explained the choice to destroy Shady Sands:

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, "civilisation 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 civilised 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 civilisation may be doomed.