Fallout season 2 has a "delicious idea" to avoid confirming a canon ending for New Vegas

If you've been following the build up in hype for Fallout season 2, you will have seen a lot of chatter about this question: will the Amazon Prime Video showrunners have to decide a 'canon ending' for the 2010 video game Fallout: New Vegas?

After all, the games and the TV series are all set in the same canonical timeline, and this will be the first time that the main characters in the show have spent any meaningful amount of time in a location that players have already explored and left their stamp on.

And with Fallout: New Vegas being a game with lots of different factions for players to choose between, events can play out very differently from one person's save file to the next.

Ahead of the arrival of Fallout season 2, we were able to put this question to one of its key producers, Jonathan Nolan, at the press junket. Did Nolan and company, as the rumour mill would have you believe, have to decide a canon ending to the game?

"Turns out, no," Nolan told us. "I think [this is] one of the most delicious ideas that [showrunners] Geneva [Robertson-Dworet] and Graham [Wagner] and the rest of the team came up with for season two...

"Knowing that, you know, that game, maybe more than any of the other games in the franchise, is sort of defined by the factionalism, the choices, the way it's all gonna work out... I'm old enough now to have seen that there is no definitive ending to anything in the real world, right?

"You have these factions rise and fall, and all these sorts of things. So this delicious idea that when we're encountering Vegas 10 to 15 years after the events of the game, every faction thinks they won. And that's how the real world works, right? There is no end. There is no definitive happily ever after.

"I think it's one of the things that the whole franchise has to say. It's one of the things that defines Fallout is, it's set after the end of the world. And yet what you're watching is all these different worlds being ushered into existence. You know, for me, from the beginning, it's actually not about the end of the world.

"It's about the beginning of a whole new world. So, we took that ethos and kind of applied it to New Vegas. I think it's done with love, and with respect, and hopefully everyone who played the game will feel that love in the series."

Fallout season 2 will arrive on 17th December on Prime Video. Sign up for a 30-day free trial of Prime Video and pay £8.99 a month after that.

Read more on Fallout:

• Walton Goggins has arrived in Fallout 76: "We don't really explain why he's there"
• Who is Justin Theroux playing in Fallout season 2? Robert House character explained
• Macaulay Culkin announced for mysterious Fallout season 2 role

Check out more of our Sci-fi coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.