Fallout Season 3’s New Setting Will Be A Franchise First After Shock Season 2 Ending

Warning: Major SPOILERS lie ahead for Fallout season 2, episode 8, “The Strip”!After spending two seasons in the American Southwest, Fallout season 3 is about to head to a new location that will shake things up for the franchise.

While much of season 1 of the Prime Video game adaptation followed Ella Purnell’s Lucy MacLean and Walton Goggins’ The Ghoul through the apocalyptic remnants of California, season 2 largely saw them in the desert region of Nevada as they looked for her father and his family in New Vegas. The Fallout season 2 ending saw the latter discover his family’s cryotubes to be empty with a postcard pointing to them having headed to Colorado, leading him to venture to the mountain state in the hopes of finding them.

In honor of the episode’s premiere, ScreenRant‘s Grant Hermanns interviewed Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Todd Howard to discuss the Fallout season 2 finale. When asked about the decision to take season 3 to Colorado, the showrunner acknowledged it is “definitely partially” to maintain the Western genre aesthetic of the franchise as a whole, while also hoping audiences get “really excited to go to some fresh snow.”

However, she went on to denote that the finale only has “The Ghoul heading to Colorado,” with Lucy and Maximus still in New Vegas as Caesar’s Legion and the New California Republic descend on the town with a battle about to ensue. Further pointing out that the nature of the Wasteland is “you get T-boned by so many side quests,” the showrunner further previewed the various hurdles Goggins’ gunslinger will face in the search for his family:

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: He has a number of problems, which is that what he’s looking for right now is a needle in a haystack. All he’s got right now is Colorado to find who he’s looking for. So, he needs to figure out more specifically where he is going, and that might take him a beat and lead him somewhere else. And Lucy and Max, we haven’t quite teased where they are heading yet…but what exactly it is for each character we are still not committing to yet.

For Howard, who directed both Fallout 3 and 4 and is a key figure at the franchise’s studio, Bethesda, he said that because the “geography is such a part” of the post-apocalyptic world of the games, he, Robertson-Dworet and co-showrunner Graham Wagner “talk a lot about” how best to expand the map of the show. Teasing that season 2 is “hinting on things that are coming,” Howard went on to point out that both the games and the show have the “ability to jump geographies through time,” thus giving them the ability to experiment with various settings:

Todd Howard: As Jonah [Nolan] says, there’s a lot of fresh snow out there. I think what’s exciting, if we view each season as a chapter of Fallout, where can we go? What kind of new things can we show as well that potentially the games really haven’t touched on? And that’s an exciting opportunity.

In addition to The Ghoul searching for Frances Turner’s Barb and Teagan Meredith’s Janey, one of the other ways Fallout season 2’s ending set up Colorado as being a key location is it being the apparent headquarters of the Enclave. In a moment of desperation as she loses control of Vault 32’s populace, Annabel O’Hagan’s Steph can be seen using the Pip-Boy in Hank’s keepsake box to call for assistance, having been vaguely told about them by her Pre-War husband.

While the Fallout games have been set in multiple areas of the country, season 3 going to Colorado would technically be a major first for the franchise by heading to the region. The mountain state was previously included in 2001’s Fallout Tactics, appearing in the latter half of the role-playing spinoff. However, the game has since been de-canonized from the franchise, with Howard having confirmed in the past that the events of both it and 2004’s Brotherhood of Steel didn’t happen.

Entire Fallout Timeline Explained: When Every Fallout Game Takes Place In Canon

Although each game in the Fallout series functions as a mostly standalone story, they each have their place in the franchises’ canon timeline.

In addition to being an overall first for the franchise, should Fallout season 3 confirm the Enclave being headquartered in Colorado, this would also be a major retcon to the faction in the game. The source material has seen the group located on an oil rig in the Pacific Ocean off the Californian coast, a bunker in the Appalachian mountains, a shelter in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and an Air Force base outside of Washington D.C.

Both seasons of Fallout have not been afraid to make changes to the games to fit its creative vision, whether it’s shifting the timeline of the Great War or offering definitive answers to questions the games haven’t, making the chances of the Enclave’s headquarters change very possible. However, with the show yet to touch on the Northeast US setting of some of the games, there’s also the chance that Colorado is just another stepping stone to this further expansion.

All eight episodes of Fallout season 2 are available to stream on Prime Video now.