It’s surprising that season 1 of the Fallout TV series doesn’t have a deathclaw. They’re the most terrifying foe in the Fallout bestiary; when I think of Fallout I think of Vault Boy and I think of deathclaws. But television producers must practise restraint. They can’t just toss all the series iconography into eight episodes to please nerds, much to the chagrin of Redditors and me.
But season two of the Fallout TV series—if it happens, which it likely will—will almost certainly feature a deathclaw. In an interview with The Wrap, co-showrunner Graham Wagner explains that deathclaws aren’t in the first season due to a fairly fundamental tenet of storytelling: you can’t just front load all the good stuff.
“We wanted to get deathclaws, but we didn’t want to just throw it away. It’s such a monumental piece,” Wagner said, “we want to save something for season 2 to be able to do it properly, not just added onto the massive world building we had to do already in season 1. So season 2, we’re very excited to finally tackle one of the most iconic elements of the games.”
This is related to the team’s resistance to the “kitchen sink approach”, which would have seen the first season riddled with an abundance of references at the expense of being actually interesting to people who have not played Fallout 3 with a terabyte of mods installed. “[W]e didn’t want to see the show to seem like it was written by people who just like spent ten seconds reading the Wikipedia page for ‘Fallout’ and didn’t bother to bring in some deeper cuts,” another co-showrunner, Geneve Roberson-Dworet, said in the same interview. “So it was important to us to also bring deeper cuts into season 1. Hopefully that won’t piss off fans because we didn’t get to every last thing, but hopefully they will bear with us and pray with us that we get a second season to bring these things to the screen.”
Fraser touched upon the topic of weird absences in an article earlier this week: for example, where are the bloody supermutants? (His article is much more nuanced than that, give it a read). But I can sympathise with the showrunners when they imply that just throwing everything into the first season’s script would have had a bit of a “hey kids” vibe to it.
As for that season 2, it’s not yet officially happening—Prime Video hasn’t purchased a follow-up yet—but in the event that it does, the finale of the first season gives some pretty big hints regarding where it will be set.