Fallout Season 2: The Shocking State of New Vegas Revealed

3 days ago 14

Walton Goggins as The Ghoul nodding with his hat in Fallout season 2

Casey Duby is an avid TV writer, watcher, and reviewer. She graduated from Emerson College in 2021 with a focus in Writing for Film and Television, where she wrote several pilots and watched countless more. She's been working in television ever since.

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Warning: The following article contains SPOILERS for Fallout season 2, episode 4, "The Demon in the Snow."

The first several episodes of Fallout season 2 have largely focused on Lucy and the Ghoul traveling the Mojave Wasteland en route to the New Vegas Strip. They finally arrived in episode 4, "The Demon in the Snow", but the long-awaited city wasn't at all what they — or we — expected to find.

In Fallout: New Vegas, the Strip is the one beacon of light (literally) in the Mojave. Wastelanders wistfully plan their next trip to this comparatively safe and well-developed corner of the world. Given this pre-conceived idea of what it would look like, and the long journey it took to get there, New Vegas was expected to be the visual set piece of this season. Surprisingly, the Fallout series went another direction.

New Vegas Is Deserted In Fallout Season 2

Ella Purnell as Lucy MacLean holding a gun in Fallout.

After Lucy's drug-assisted shootout, she and the Ghoul march into New Vegas to find it in darkness and disrepair. The casino signs are falling apart, there's not a soul in sight, and the area is even a bit radioactive. That last part can be chalked up to the hatched Deathclaw eggs sitting in the street... and the massive Deathclaw that steps out of the Gomorrah casino.

The Strip in the Fallout TV series is a far cry from the bustling, brightly lit haven that it was in New Vegas. And given the state of the casinos and the presence of Deathclaws, it hasn't been for some time. The eggs especially cement the idea that Deathclaw didn't wander in yesterday — the city has been abandoned long enough to become a nest.

What Happened To New Vegas In The Fallout Show?

The landscape of New Vegas from Fallout season 1's ending

It's a bit unclear. The Deathclaw situation is probably not the cause, and more likely a result of the city having already been empty. Within the show and wider Fallout lore, New Vegas is known to be Robert House's domain, and his vast army of Securitrons could certainly have handled some Deathclaws were the Strip in its healthy state.

Yet even the Ghoul seemed surprised by New Vegas' barrenness, appearing visibly disconcerted even before the discovery of the Deathclaw nest. This suggests that while New Vegas didn't fall apart overnight, it is a somewhat recent development — most likely not a result of Fallout season 2's interpretation of the events of New Vegas, but something that happened between then and now.

The fall of New Vegas is especially surprising considering everything else the show has alluded to about a post-Fallout: New Vegas Mojave. A weakened New California Republic was to be expected after the bombing of Shady Sands, though this being at the hands of Hank/Vault-Tec, which has been shown to have ties to House, made it even more likely that New Vegas would still be thriving.

The presence of House creation Victor in NCR's Camp Golf further supported this idea. Caesar's Legion, meanwhile, doesn't seem to have a fully commanding presence over the area either. There's a substantial Legion encampment, but it seems preoccupied with infighting and a singular focus on defeating the NCR.

This all points to the state of New Vegas being a new story for the TV series, rather than a direct consequence of existing lore. The questions remain of what Robert House has been up to in the 15 years between New Vegas and the show, and what exactly happened to the Fallout show's New Vegas.