News Fallout How Fallout Season 2 Avoided Making a New Vegas Ending Canon Fallout Season 2 avoided committing to one of New Vegas’ optional endings (at least for now) By Matthew Byrd | Published on February 4, 2026 Photo: Prime Video Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Prime Video Note: This article contains spoilers for Fallout Season 2. Fallout Season 2’s showrunners did indeed fulfill their promise of not canonizing one of Fallout: New Vegas’ optional endings, though the season’s final episode raises some new questions about how long they can keep dancing around the series’ canon.  As we’ve previously discussed, Prime Video’s Fallout series is considered to be a canonical entry in the greater Fallout video game franchise. The show is set about 10 years after the most recent Fallout game (Fallout 4), which theoretically affords the showrunners plenty of space to tell their own story without having to connect quite so many dots along the way.  In reality, the situation has never been quite so clean. The Fallout franchise is not only notorious for refusing to clearly answer certain questions about the events that transpired before and between its various entries, but some of the games allow players to essentially pick their own endings based on the choices they make along the way.  Because many of the Fallout games take place in different regions across a fairly long timeline, those optional endings are rarely an issue. However, Fallout Season 2 is set in and around the New Vegas area, which means that it seemingly had to address what actually happened in the 2010 game, Fallout: New Vegas. Specifically, the show seemingly had to commit to one of Fallout: New Vegas’ four major optional endings: Ending 1 – The player sides with the Caesar’s Legion faction. The Legion conquers the area and forces the New California Republic to retreat.  Ending 2 – The player sides with the New California Republic. The NCR reclaims New Vegas and the surrounding wasteland.  Ending 3 – The player goes their own way and essentially rules over New Vegas with the help of a Securitron robot known as Yes Man.  Ending 4 – The player helps Mr. House take control of New Vegas and drive both the NCR and Caesar’s Legion from the wasteland.  There are further optional variations between those endings, but ultimately, only one faction could rule over New Vegas at the end of the day. Because Fallout Season 2 is set about 15 years after the events of Fallout: New Vegas, surely the show would have to tell us what actually happened at the end of that game, right? Right? Well, not exactly. At first, it felt like Fallout Season 2 was going to canonize the Mr. House ending. After all, Robert House is one of the season’s biggest villains, and his continued existence (even if he’s only shown via a TV screen in the “present” timeline) suggests that he must have survived long enough to retain control over New Vegas. The fact that the Legion and NCR are a shadow of their former selves in that region also supports the idea that neither took control over the New Vegas area at the end of the game.  However, the final episode of Fallout Season 2 sees The Ghoul finally confront the digitized version of Mr. House in New Vegas. House informs The Ghoul that it’s “good to be alive again” and notes that “wandering travellers” have tried to assassinate him in various ways over the years. The Ghoul cuts House off before he can elaborate on that fascinating tidbit, but House’s point is made all the same. There is at least the suggestion that he did not survive and thrive following the events of New Vegas’ ending but rather rebooted himself as some kind of fail safe sometime after.  For their part, the Prime Video Fallout creative team not only refuses to commit to a clear answer but suggests that the ambiguity of that scenario is very much the point.  “Oftentimes, it’s intentional that things are up for interpretation, and we have our own view of things that, you know, this series is gonna go on for a while yet,” says Fallout producer Todd Howard in a recent interview. “But I think it’s good to open up those conversations, and you may get history, you may get conflicting reports on how some things went.” Ah, the old “Eh, who can say?” explanation that sometimes seems to have become increasingly popular since The Force Awakens suggested that people conveniently forgot about the events of the original Star Wars trilogy in a record amount of time. Though the suggetion that we’re simply only getting one (possibly inaccurate) side of the story is designed to be hard to dispute, it has already started arguments among fans about whether a non-answer is really an answer at all. Said arguments are fuelled by the ways the show otherwise seemingly alters other parts of the Fallout canon or teases answers to previously intentionally ambiguous questions. For instance, Fallout Season 2 introduces the former President of the United States as a character, and the season finale suggests that he and the Enclave may have been the ones who started the Great War. Showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet suggests she doesn’t see things “that way” and that they really only want to “open the question” about the Enclave and the President’s involvement. Such plot points are, perhaps, red herrings disguised as revelations. Continuously playing with fire regarding what did and did not happen prior to the events of the Fallout TV series is undoubtedly a dangerous game. Along with the risk of providing the “wrong” answers in the minds of some (which can sometimes mean providing any answers at all), there is the risk of continuously teasing reveals that can never really be delivered. But with Fallout Season 3 already in pre-production, it seems that the series will have plenty of time to see where it fits into the greater Fallout universe while telling its own (so far largely compelling) stories. Ultimately, perhaps there is no greater constant in the Fallout universe than ambiguity. [end-mark] The post How <i>Fallout</i> Season 2 Avoided Making a <i>New Vegas</i> Ending Canon appeared first on Reactor.