Fallout’s NCR reveal hurt — even if it was inevitable

The Prime Video show made a big lore leap with Shady Sands

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for season 1 of the Fallout show, specifically around the NCR.]

The ghosts of nations haunt the Wasteland of Amazon’s Fallout. The ruins of once-mighty American cities are the backdrop for the series, but we also see wrecked Soviet satellites, failed homesteads, Vaults filled with the corpses of those who hoped to outlive the apocalypse. There’s one ghost that stands out to me, though, one that I and other long-term Fallout fans in particular will mourn: the ghost of the New California Republic. Killing one of Fallout’s most beloved factions is a tough blow for die-hard fans, even if it might be for the best.

Now, I’ll admit something up front: I was never that big of a fan of the NCR. When I first met them in Fallout: New Vegas, they seemed to me to be very much the default good guys. It’s a centrist, pluralistic democracy that has become a stabilizing force in the Wasteland. It has paper money, an organized bureaucracy, and, naturally, a standing army. Unlike the brutal authoritarian primitivists of Caesar’s Legion or the xenophobic, pseudo-religious technophiles of the Brotherhood of Steel, the NCR is pretty close in attitude to a nation of the modern world. Whether human, ghoul, or super mutant, everyone is welcome in the NCR. Pay your taxes, keep your nose clean, and the NCR will protect you to the best of its ability. You even get to vote for your leader, instead of just letting the local giant psychopath in a skull mask take the job!

But over time I lost my dismissive attitude toward the NCR. They are a complex, nuanced people: They dealt the death blow to the fascistic Enclave (or so they thought), abolished slavery, created a tolerant society, and resurrected the best systems of the old world. But they are also inefficient and susceptible to corruption, and they struggle to provide for their soldiers on the most dangerous front lines. They’re also complicit in genocide, and at one point brutalized the Brotherhood so thoroughly it was reduced to hiding in a single bunker in the Mojave.

Image: Prime Video

We see the NCR in Prime’s Fallout series most dramatically, as a crater. Shady Sands, once a fledgling settlement, then the first capital of the NCR, has been reduced to rubble by a bomb dropped long after the Great War. This is pretty shocking stuff to long-term fans of the game series, as Shady Sands was one of the first locations a player was likely to visit, all the way back in the first Fallout. Fans watched it grow from a tiny settlement of adobe walls to a fortified city and, eventually, the capital of a great nation.

Obviously, some weren’t happy to see a place they had protected and come to love destroyed off screen. Equally concerning was the implication from a date on a chalkboard lesson that Shady Sands “fell” in 2277, suggesting that the events of the revered Fallout: New Vegas were non-canon, as that game begins in 2281 and features a powerful NCR, with no reference to its old capital being destroyed. Fallout writers have subsequently clarified that New Vegas is still canon, though the exact nature of Shady Sands’ “fall” remains uncertain. While I adore the show, I can’t say I’m unsympathetic to the panic fans felt at the potential removal of New Vegas. After all, it’s the game that gave such immense nuance to the greater world of Fallout, and the NCR in particular.

In New Vegas, despite the NCR being juxtaposed against the ruthless brutality of Caesar’s Legion, we are repeatedly told about something called the Bitter Springs Massacre. The short version: NCR troops engaged what they thought was the primary fortress of a tribe of raiders called the Great Khans, but quickly realized they were attacking not warriors but mothers, children, and the elderly. Bad intel and miscommunication led to the NCR’s soldiers being ordered to “fire until they were out of ammo.” And NCR troops follow orders, unfortunately. A post-battle attempt to save as many wounded Khans as they could did little to wipe away the stain on the NCR’s reputation.

I bring this story up because, as Caesar of the Legion points out, the NCR is repeating all of the mistakes that led to the end of the world in the first place. It is a democracy that elected the same woman for decades (who also just so happened to be the daughter of its first president). It is already dominated by special interest groups and proto-corporate cartels, who have far more influence on foreign policy than commanders on the front line. The NCR is broadly tolerant, but capable of brutality on par with the most vicious factions of the Wasteland out of sheer ignorance, if not outright pragmatism. I found the NCR compelling because I think it is, in its own way, a reflection of the modern world. Its aspirations are noble, and its failures are monstrous. With its passing, so too passes the hope that something truly of the old world might survive in the Wasteland.

Fallout writer Chris Avellone famously floated the idea of the destruction of the NCR in the past. In his words, he worried that the NCR was “making things too civilized”; at a certain point, the story is no longer post-apocalyptic. You can do prequels set in a more violent time, but the tension has ebbed away when we know everything works out. Fallout is a series wherein a happy ending is not guaranteed. After all, we’ve already had one end of the world.

There’s a scene in Prime Video’s Fallout that nearly brought me to tears. Episode 7 starts with the somber leitmotif from Fallout: New Vegas, and two characters in armored gas masks scavenging in the desert. Die-hard Fallout fans will instantly recognize this armor as that worn by the NCR’s Elite Rangers, some of the greatest warriors of the Wasteland. It’s hard to see that force reduced to an old man and his son, scrabbling to survive. A brief encounter with the Ghoul (incomparably played by Walton Goggins) ends with the old man cradling his mortally wounded son, as the Ghoul callously strides past. Will this former ranger seek vengeance? I don’t think so. The war is over. His side lost. The only thing people like him can do now is survive, and remember. As a fan, I felt a bit like him when thinking of the NCR. Fight’s over; the NCR fell. What did I expect anyway? War never changes, and the wastes always win.

There’s a saying in the Wasteland: “The Old World Blues.” It refers to the strange nostalgia survivors have for the pre-nuclear world, a society they never experienced and likely don’t understand. Wastelanders sometimes become trapped by this feeling, fixating on it so much they no longer live in the present. Fallout gave me a kind of Old World Blues for the NCR.

I know the NCR wasn’t a perfect place, and I know that you can’t keep the Wasteland truly apocalyptic if it survives as a dominant force. But I still miss it. The wastes now belong to the raiders, the mutants, the Brotherhood, the Enclave, the Legion. Children of the apocalypse, monstrously formed to survive in a monstrous world.

There’s a chance the NCR could return. We’ve seen plenty of remnants, soldiers and citizens who long for their fallen republic, and the Ghoul makes reference to Philadelphia holding on as an NCR settlement. They’ve built a nation from the ashes of a fallen world before, after all. Maybe they can do it again.

Maybe.