Amazon Prime’s Fallout series has been out in its entirety for almost two weeks. In that time, the incredible adaptation has sparked endless conversations and theory-crafting from everybody who watched it. That includes Tim Cain, best known as the creator of Fallout. Cain took to YouTube to talk about what he thought worked and what didn’t but also threw in some fan theories of his own. He even touched on the big New Vegas canon question fans are still fighting about.
Cain starts his video with a definitive “I like it.” So for fans who just want to get the thumbs up from the father of Fallout, you have the go-ahead. With that out of the way, he then dives further into the why. “It feels like Fallout,” he says, “That is hard to do, trust me. I know how hard that is to do. It’s easy to write post-apocalyptic stuff that doesn’t fit in the Fallout mould.” However, according to Cain, the show avoids that pitfall by adhering so well to the established world and tone of the games.
Much of Cain’s praise is also placed on the show’s main characters: Lucy (Ella Purnell), Maximus (Aaron Clifton Moten), and Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins). They feel like “different ways that a player-character could be approaching the game,” says Cain. It’s an expertly done piece of adaptation from game to TV, as the games allow for player morality on a shifting scale. The show manages to recreate this by giving audiences good, neutral, and chaotic perspective characters in Lucy, Maximus, and Howard respectively.
Cain did weigh in on the New Vegas issue. Fans have been concerned the show retcons the beloved game out of existence by introducing the nuking of Shady Sands in 2277, which would hypothetically stop the New California Republic from becoming a major power player in the wasteland and instigating the events of New Vegas. But Cain isn’t that worried about those dates. “Fallout has a history in a lot of the games of having people tell you something that isn’t true,” Cain says, “Maybe they were lying to the kids. They lied to the kids in Vault 33 about other things, why not lie about that? Or, maybe they’re off, but they don’t know they’re off?” It could just be a case of unreliable information. Not to mention that Todd Howard has already confirmed New Vegas is still canon, so we can all stop worrying about that.
Beyond the New Vegas issue, Cain is more interested in another potential misdirect from the show, but beware, this has to do with a major reveal in the finale of season 1. In the last episode, it is heavily suggested that Vault-Tec is responsible for starting the nuclear apocalypse by dropping its own bombs on America. We see a board room discuss the plan and eventually see nukes dropped, but the show doesn’t explicitly say those were the Vault-Tec bombs, though at least one major character (Cooper Howard) believes that to be the case. Cain thinks it’s a misdirect and that we still don’t know the whole truth of what happened. He points out that Howard and his daughter are out at a birthday party when the first nukes go off, but that Cooper’s wife Barabra is a high-up Vault-Tec employee who participated in the planning for Vault-Tec’s grand nuking plan. Why would she not make sure her husband and daughter were safe? It’s something Cain doesn’t think adds up.
After sharing his fan theories, Cain reiterates that they are just theories and his opinion doesn’t matter. “I’m not in charge of this anymore, and neither are you.” It’s all up to Bethesda to decide what is and isn’t canon going forward. What we do know for sure is that we can look forward to season 2 of Fallout in the future.
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