Summary
Amazon’sFalloutseries is set tointroduce deathclaws next season, infamously tough monsters capable of ripping limbs from sockets as easily as pulling fusion cores from power armour. Everyone’s expecting those same mindless titans who humbled us at the quarry, making another Brotherhood of Steel paladin run for the hills. But what if they were intelligent and civilised instead?
The image most fans have of deathclaws is enormous reptilians with claws the length of knives, ready to rip into our stomachs for a tasty internal organ snack. But all the way back in 1998, we met a vault full of friendly, talking deathclaws, shattering that notion.
In Fallout 2, it was revealed that these deathclaws were experimented on by the Enclave, remnants of the pre-war US government. Much like super mutants, they were exposed to FEV in the hopes of creating super soldiers who could fight in their ranks, obeying orders without question, but they instead became peaceful creatures hoping to live side-by-side with humanity.
Unfortunately, an Enclave soldier called Frank Horrigan - a super mutant in power armour in denial of who he had become - attacked the vault and wiped out most of the intelligent deathclaws. Only one survived, joining us in our quest to save the people of Arroyo. But that doesn’t mean the idea should die with them.
Fallout 2 game designer and Obsidian co-founder Chris Avellone isn’t a huge fan of the concept, and neither isFallout creator Timothy Cain, as they believed the premise to be too silly. But the idea of talking deathclaws is a clever subversion of our expectations that perfectly aligns with Fallout’s core ethos, war never changes.
Humanity constantly plunges itself into the abyss, through nuclear war and its desperation to cling to the past. The New California Republic and Enclave may not see eye-to-eye, but both seek to restore the status quo of the same government that unleashed the apocalypse they’re now living in, while corporations such as Vault-Tec are so blinded by their own greed, they can’t see that the world they’ve created renders their monopoly meaningless.
Time and time again, civilisations in Fallout desperately try to restore the same past that brought about the wasteland as we know it. They’ve created a world they cannot feasibly live in, continuing to wage war with one another as they wait for their inevitable extinction, plunging down the evolutionary ladder with each misstep.
New species have risen in their place; super mutants, growing more intelligent and accepting as the years go by, have erected towns dedicated to selflessly helping one another. Ghouls, the future of mankind, are able to withstand the harsh radioactive atmosphere of the wasteland, and live for so long that they are all too aware of how easily history can repeat itself.
These new species, born of humanity’s mistakes, will surpass them and render their ideas of civilisation meaningless. Ghouls and super mutants are better suited to inherit the radioactive world we created, and as we continue to fight the same wars century after century, that only rings more and more true.
Talking deathclaws were an extension of that idea, and they were far from silly. They were a civilisation in its infancy who were slaughtered out of fear and bigotry. Their story is one that so much of mankind in Fallout hopes to see repeated with the super mutants and ghouls, a cautionary tale of human cruelty and its hatred of all things different.
It’s the perfect distillation of some of the series’ key themes. To once again subvert expectations for a new audience with talking deathclaws in the show would be to encapsulate what Fallout is all about, rather than thrusting a mindless monster in front of us just because it’s a recognisable staple.
As Fallout 2 showed, deathclaws can be so much more than tough boss fights designed to ward us away from the wrong path, they can be as evocative and tragic as the super mutants and ghouls who are constantly shunned and pushed to the wayside. For the show to sidestep that in favour of an action spectacle would be a huge wasted opportunity.
Fallout
Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.
