Fallout showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet explain the big change to Shady Sands and the impact it will have on season 2. Prime Video’s series, based on the best-selling Bethesda video game franchise, follows three strangers on separate quests as they converge in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Los Angeles. The three main Fallout cast members and characters are Ella Purnell as the young Vault Dweller Lucy, Walton Goggins as the Ghoul, and Aaron Moten as Maximus, a member of the Brotherhood of Steel.

During a recent interview with GQ, Wagner and Robertson-Dworet explained the decision to destroy Shady Sands, the capital of the New California Republic, and how it will impact Fallout season 2. The showrunners say they wanted there to be fewer remnants of civilization in the show to help it feel more in line with the post-apocalyptic genre. Read their full comments below:

Wagner : We’re trying to mind our words after watching poor Emil [Pagliarulo] from Bethesda make a few comments online, and suddenly he’s viral, and he’s like, “How do I get this back in the bottle?”

I will say that it was very, very early in the decision [making process], once we decided to put the show in L.A. That was the very next thought, because it’s a post-apocalyptic show. And if you study the Western, which has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic genre, “civilisation is not around” is a big part of it. A lot of them end with the railroad coming through, or a house being built, or they put a church up in the town, or a motorcar appears. And you’re like, ‘Well, the wild wild west is over.’

I think it would have been a mistake to go from the retro-futuristic America to another America that has been fully civilised and the NCR is doing everything great. We love Deadwood. I think if there was a fourth season of Deadwood, there’d be insurance companies, there’d be traffic, and it wouldn’t be a Western anymore. We wanted to live in that first season of Deadwood space, of like, “What’s going to happen? Where is everything?”

It really was our belief, also, that though there are the events of the games, it’s not frozen after that. History is not static. It keeps going, and entropy is a constant. Which is a less flashy way of saying “war never changes.”

Robertson-Dworet : It seems inevitably the message of the Fallout games is that we will veer towards destruction of some kind, and our best efforts to restart civilisation may be doomed.

The Fallout Show’s Shady Sands Change Explained (& What It Means For Season 2)

Shady Sands is one of the biggest changes the Fallout show makes to the game canon. In the games, Shady Sands was the capital of the New California Republic that grew into one of the biggest cities built after the Great War, housing nearly 35,000 residents by the year 2281. With the show taking place in 2296, after the games, the Fallout season 1 ending reveals that Lucy’s father Hank MacLean, a Vault-Tec executive and overseer of Vault 33, ordered the destruction of Shady Sands with a nuclear bomb.

The Fallout season 1 finale revealed the surprising truth about the fate of Shady Sands, a pre-existing community in the canon of the games.

Lee Moldaver, who leads a military division of the NCR, reveals that Hank nuked Shady Sands after his wife, Rose, tried to flee there from Vault 33 with Lucy and her older brother, Norm. As a thriving community on the surface, Shady Sands posed a great threat to the Bud’s Buds initiative and Hank wanted to ensure that they outlived and overpowered all other factions and reshaped the world based on Vault Tec’s vision. With Shady Sands wiped out, Moldaver and her remaining forces established a new regional headquarters at the Griffith Observatory.

Shady Sands was also the original home of Maximus and, after its destruction, he was orphaned, which is what led him to join the Brotherhood of Steel. Since Maximus is believed to have killed Moldaver, he moves up from the rank of squire to knight. As he finds out that Hank was responsible for the destruction of Shady Sands, he will surely be seeking revenge against him in Fallout season 2.