The 10 BIGGEST Changes In The Fallout TV Series

10 Biggest Changes in the Fallout TV Series

Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we’re looking at what the “Fallout” TV series switched up, left out, or plain got wrong about the series.

We’re also throwing up a huge spoiler warning for the show and all eight of its episodes.

War Never Changes…

Fans of the games will be familiar with “war, war never changes”. Every game opens with this maxim, along with a cutscene showing what’s happened to the world, as a way to quickly bring everybody up to speed on the setting and the themes. The TV show doesn’t have one of these. It doesn’t necessarily need one, but it still would’ve been nice to see the Great War and its belligerents explained in a few minutes. But there are plenty of “Fallout” concepts that aren’t really explained in the show, too, like something as simple as the Pip-Boys. This is fine for gamers, but it might leave newcomers a little confused.

Vault-Tec Savings Plan

We see in early episodes that Vault-Tec also provided people with poison so that they could take their own lives in the event of a nuclear apocalypse. It’s grisly, but Lucy comes across a family of skeletons who did just that, and Wilzig also takes a cyanide pill, courtesy of Vault-Tec. This is the first we’ve seen of Vault-Tec providing people with lower-level “plans” for how to endure – or not endure – a nuclear apocalypse, and it’s certainly an interesting addition to the lore, showing just how nefarious Vault-Tec really was. Like the human experimentation wasn’t bad enough.

Squires

This is an almost entirely new concept the show adds to the Brotherhood of Steel. We see that Brotherhood initiates can be promoted to the rank of “squire”, which means they’re partnered with an established knight, becoming their manservant and calling them “my lord.” This is a little odd since, in the games, the Brotherhood just use the language of Medieval knights, they don’t actually behave like them. In the games, “squire” is a title given to the children that work, in a limited capacity, in Brotherhood bases and aboard the Prydwyn. And though trainees are partnered with their seniors so that they can learn from them, Brotherhood Knights don’t have servants who clean their armor. They’re actually meant to be responsible for maintaining their OWN armor, to show responsibility.

Brotherhood Initiation

Still on the topic of the squires, they’re initiated into this role in a very bizarre way. Near the beginning, Maximus is made the squire of Knight Titus in place of his friend Dane, who’s been injured. As part of this, Titus brands Maximus with the letter “T” between his shoulder blades, marking him forever. Later, while disguising himself as Titus, Maximus brands Thaddeus in the same way. Not only is the Brotherhood branding themselves very strange, but they have custom brands so that people are permanently shown to have served a specific knight. Even at their most cult-like, the Brotherhood in the games stop short of branding their fellow soldiers.

Super Mutants

If you’re a fan of the Super Mutants, particularly the many, intelligent Super Mutants who appear throughout the games, you’re going to be disappointed, because they don’t appear in the series at all. Despite being quintessential to the world of “Fallout”, they’re just not there. Perhaps the showrunners didn’t want to get into the weeds of the Forced Evolutionary Virus lore, or wanted to say that the Super Mutants have all been eradicated following the Master’s uprising back in “Fallout 1”. But the Master is never mentioned, either - despite the show taking place in LA. It’s definitely a shame to not see even one Super Mutant, and they easily could’ve had a friendly mutant hanging around Filly, like Fawkes or Marcus. Not ALL the mutants are dangerous, after all.

The Enclave

The Super Mutants aren’t here, but bizarrely, the Enclave is. Despite being set in 2296, the Enclave seems to be thriving and doing plenty of research – largely into dogs and nuclear fusion – somewhere in the Wasteland. Obviously, if you’re familiar with the west coast lore, this is baffling, since the Enclave was meant to have been all but eradicated during “Fallout 2”, which is set in 2241. Sure, they come back in “Fallout 3”, but this itself is somewhat contradictory. As we see in “New Vegas”, the Enclave ARE gone. You go on a quest to gather the Enclave Remnants, and there’s only a small handful of them, all elderly by now, and they’re certainly not throwing puppies into incinerators.

Ghouls

In the fourth episode, we’re given more information about the ghouls. Though we’ve already spent plenty of time by now with Cooper Howard, Walton Goggins’ ghoul character, they’re not explained in great detail. But in this episode, Lucy meets a ghoul on the cusp of turning feral, and it’s revealed that all ghouls are at risk of turning feral if they don’t take a yellow substance regularly. In the games, sentient ghouls can’t turn into feral ghouls that we know of; this is a major sticking point in ghoul/human relations, as some humans believe they could turn into monsters at a moment’s notice. They definitely don’t need to take Zombrex at regular intervals to stay sane.

Who Started the War

It’s key to the games and the anti-war point they’re all trying to make that nobody actually knows who started the war, whether it was China or America. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because the message is about not repeating the mistakes of the past. But that apparently wasn’t good enough for the show, which decides that not only is it going to tell us in detail how the war started, but it’s going to blame Vault-Tec. While it makes sense to set Vault-Tec up as a big bad like this, all the logic is flawed. They started the war because peace was about to be brokered, meaning they’d have lost money on their fallout shelters. This completely disrupts the anti-jingoist, anti-nationalist stance the games have specifically taken.

Shady Sands

This sticks out like a sore thumb in the sixth episode, while Lucy explores Vault 4. She finds a chalkboard with messages of remembrance for Shady Sands, the shining capital of the New California Republic, saying that it was destroyed by a nuclear bomb in 2277. This is despite the fact that in 2281, when “New Vegas” takes place, Shady Sands seems to be alive and well and definitely hasn’t been devastated by an H-bomb. If you want to wipe Shady Sands from the map, maybe say it was destroyed AFTER the events of “New Vegas”, considering anything else is directly contradictory to the existing lore. It’s also suggested that the series’ supposed villain, Moldaver, is the original founder of Shady Sands, and that Shady Sands is where the Boneyard is supposed to be.

The NCR

Not only has Shady Sands been erased, with its former citizens fleeing into Vault 4, but it seems like the entirety of the NCR has collapsed after that nuclear bomb was dropped. Moldaver leads the last remnants of the NCR as they try to rebuild, which, again, flies in the face of the established canon. How can the events of “New Vegas” happen at all if the NCR no longer existed as a military power by the 2280s? And that’s without getting into the fact that Caesar’s Legion don’t appear to exist at all, and that when we see Vegas itself in the closing shot of the show, it doesn’t look like the shining metropolis Mr House has made it - it looks like it’s already been destroyed. This raises the question many fans have had, which is, why set it in California at all?

Let us know in the comments what YOU thought of the “Fallout” TV show.