Amazon’s Fallout has become the new standard for adapting video games into a TV show or a movie. Still, the show held back on the grislier and deeper lore behind the Fallout games. Lots of signature Fallout things are conspicuously missing from the Fallout TV show, which isn’t entirely bad. They’re just reserving some of it for Season 2.
That only means Season 2 is about to be even more absurd and more “Fallout,” so to speak. Hence, I’m here to regale you with some of the missing things from the first season of Fallout TV show that you can expect to make an explosive entrance in Season 2.
Super Mutants
Amazon’s Fallout only mentioned these brutes in passing during Vault-Tec’s shareholder meeting. They were super soldier experiments. Apart from that, they were also absent. While that’s easy to explain after a certain side quest in Fallout 4 which sort of fixed the Super Mutant virus, their getting mentioned in the show is still a telltale sign that they might get featured in the future.
After all, these Super Mutants are some of the most iconic creatures in Fallout‘s wastelands and their existence portrays the post-apocalypse setting’s cruelty where you can’t get a good thing without sacrificing another. While Super Mutants survived radiation and even became tall, big, and strong, their intelligence also degraded and they made life in the wasteland too violent.
Living Deathclaws & Other Wasteland Monsters
Speaking of a chaotic wasteland, there are other big primal creatures apart from the Super Mutants that reiterate the surface’s dangers. Season 1’s ending already gave a teaser– a Deathclaw’s skull in the Mojave desert. Deathclaws, for the uninitiated, were merely animal cocktails that got transformed by the same virus that created Super Mutants, the so-called FEV (Forced Evolution Virus).
Those scientists probably didn’t expect the creature to turn into the T-Rex of Fallout. Deathclaws, on average, are 10-foot-tall solitary predators and are some of the toughest enemies in the games. Apart from the Deathclaws, other freaky monsters were missing in the first season such as the Radscorpion, a huge Ant Queen, and mutated crustaceans. The Yao Guai or the mutant bear in Season 1 was just the beginning.
The Underworld & Other Intelligent Ghouls
Not all mutants in Fallout make the wasteland a living hell. Ghouls, for example, are not all deadset to become feral (at least in the games). Some of them are essentially still human. However, the actual humans on the surface are averse to ghouls; there’s always the fear that they might turn feral. So the kinder Ghouls set up their own community.
They even called it the Underworld. In the Fallout TV show, apart from The Ghoul, his friend who turned feral, and someone else during the ending, there were no other ghouls, which is quite a shame. There were a handful of voluntary pre-war ghouls in the game who offered some insights into the past.
Also, some ghouls who have lived long and retained their knowledge managed to become politically powerful, which makes sense. Season 2 ought to leverage that kind of expansive ghoul lore.
Wasteland Children
Apart from flashbacks, it seems Amazon’s Fallout avoided adding children to its wasteland communities. Whether that’s a homage to the fact that you can’t murder children in the games or not is irrelevant. Because the lack of a younger population somehow adds to the wasteland’s personality.
You either perish as a baby or child or grow up to be an adult. Life expectancy is a luxury in Fallout. However, Fallout 3 utilized children with a dramatic narrative effect. One side quest in Fallout 3 has you stumbling upon a community solely run by children, basically Lord of the Flies. It’s a precious yet bittersweet touch to any Fallout story that the show shouldn’t ignore.
Caesar’s Legion
The NCR had a prominent role in the Fallout TV show and was supposedly one of the few sensible factions in the Fallout mythos. They were non-discriminatory and they valued civil rights. On the other end of the spectrum, however, we have Caesar’s Legion from Fallout: New Vegas. It’s a totalitarian slave society with military conquest as its goal. They’re one of NCR’s most dangerous enemies.
It’s not clear why they’re absent in Season 1 and the NCR is present (sort of). But seeing as Season 2 has set its stage in the city of New Vegas, Caesar’s Legion might just introduce itself. They’re a fitting counterbalance to the democratic or altruistic factions in Fallout and their old-fashioned political beliefs are a potential avenue for exploration to strengthen (or shatter) Lucy’s ideals.
The Institute & Synths
Amazon’s Fallout TV show is the latest in the chronological timeline and takes place nearly a decade after Fallout 4. The thing is, Fallout 4 added some bleeding-edge sci-fi tropes to the canon lore, such as the Institute and its indistinguishable cyborgs, or Synths as they’re called. The Institute wanted to rehabilitate and advance human civilization through Synths.
In hindsight, it’s not so bad considering all the previous efforts of “evolution” or “advancements” that created Super Mutants and ghouls. The Synth program got even too widespread that it caused paranoia among hapless surface humans who didn’t know which among their ranks was a Synth.
It’s reasonable to expect that some Synths survived regardless of which Fallout 4 ending is canon, meaning a lot of them could still be walking around in the Fallout TV show.
Aliens
Of course, these guys would also be absent, and rightfully so. How do you even incorporate this in the first season without confusion? In any case, aliens have been a staple of all Fallout games. They were mostly kept as Easter eggs and secrets initially, but then Fallout 3 dropped an entire DLC dedicated to aliens. You could even fight them and loot their weapons.
This is something that the show might never add in the same boldness as Fallout 3 as it can easily feel out of place and I think I’m fine with that. Needless to say, aliens for a Fallout show is an unnecessary segue– probably not ideal for a Season 2 reveal, which still follows a serious plot about human conspiracy.
The Glowing Sea
Still, you don’t need aliens to introduce an alien environment and atmosphere in Fallout. All you need is the Glowing Sea. In Fallout 4, the Glowing Sea is supposedly ground zero for a nuke detonation in the past. So it makes sense for other states to have their own “Glowing Sea.”
Based on the lore, Glowing Seas should be all over the U.S. in Fallout. And since the radiation levels are extreme here, it’s an imaginative and versatile template for supernatural phenomena. Only the toughest survive here and areas like these put the “waste” in wasteland. At the very least, it’s one of the best scenery options for establishing shots.
The Children of Atom
Odd cults before, during, and after a war are common in fiction. Even the Fallout TV show dabbled into this with its Flame Mother cult– but that one was mild, believe me. The Church of the Children of Atom is on another level of fanaticism. They worship radiation and nuclear bombs. The cult literally prays to unexploded nukes.
The Children of Atom are even some of the most prevalent cults in most Fallout games and they typically provide a new height of bizarreness if players venture too far out into the wasteland. In short, they’re perfect for Lucy and The Ghoul’s new potential direction in Season 2. It’s a great opportunity for Fallout to take its viewers into (even more) uncanny territory.
Nuke Dilemmas for the Main Character
Post-war, there was only one nuke detonation mentioned in Amazon’s Fallout and it was a flashback story. That’s not enough! Seeing as all three main characters in the show were practically modeled after player stereotypes, one of them should at least be presented with a moral and ethical dilemma to nuke a whole city or town. Lots of potential reasons for that in Season 2.
Such a moment would be a nostalgic callback to the Fallout games’ most ridiculous quests where you can change the whole landscape and erase whole populations with the press of a button– or not. That kind of dilemma that’s unique to Fallout reinforces the power of nuclear weapons and the irony of human advancement.
Even better, have all the three main characters in the show fight over the nuke button. Epic stuff awaits in Season 2, hopefully.
