(Ed. remark: This post contains spoilers for Fallout season 1 show, specifically around the NCR.)
The ghosts of nations haunt the Amazon wasteland Fallout. The ruins of once mighty American cities provide the backdrop for the series, but we also see destroyed Soviet satellites, failed farms, vaults filled with the corpses of those who hoped to survive the apocalypse. However, there is one spirit that stands out to me, one that I and other Fallout fans will particularly mourn in the long run: the spirit of the New California Republic. Killing off one of Fallout’s most beloved factions is a heavy blow to die-hard fans, even though it may be for the best.
Now I have to admit something right away: I’ve never been a big fan of the NCR. When I first met them Fallout: New Vegas, it seemed to me that they were very much the standard good guys. It is a centrist, pluralistic democracy that has become a stabilizing force in the Wasteland. The country has paper money, an organized bureaucracy and of course a standing army. Unlike the ruthless authoritarian primitivists of Caesar’s Legion or the xenophobic, pseudo-religious technophiles of the Brotherhood of Steel, the NCR is quite 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 as best they can. You even get to vote for your leader, instead of letting the local giant psychopath in a skull mask take over!
But over time I lost my dismissive attitude towards the NCR. They are complex, nuanced people: they dealt the death blow to the fascist enclave (or so they thought), abolished slavery, created a tolerant society, and revived the best systems of the old world. But they are also inefficient and prone to corruption, and they struggle to care for their soldiers on the most dangerous front lines. They are also complicit in genocide, and at one point they brutalized the Brotherhood so brutally that they had to hide in a single bunker in the Mojave.
Image: Primevideo
We see the NCR in Prime’s Fallout series most dramatically, like a crater. Shady Sands, once a young settlement and the first capital of the NCR at the time, has been reduced to rubble by a bomb dropped long after the Great War. This is quite shocking for long-term fans of the game series, as Shady Sands was one of the first locations a player would likely visit, all the way back in the early years. Fallout. Fans watched it grow from a small mud-walled settlement to a fortified city and eventually the capital of a great nation.
Clearly, some were not happy when a place they had protected and grown to love was destroyed off-screen. Equally disturbing was the implication from a date on a blackboard lesson that Shady Sands “fell” in 2277, suggesting that the events of the respected Fallout: New Vegas were non-canon, as the game starts in 2281 and features a powerful NCR, without any reference to the destruction of the old capital. Fallout writers subsequently clarified this That New Vegas is still canon, although the exact nature of Shady Sands’ “fall” remains uncertain. While I love the show, I can’t say I’m unsympathetic to the panic fans felt at the possible removal of New Vegas. After all, it’s the game that gave such enormous nuance to the larger world of Fallout, and the NCR in particular.
In New VegasDespite the NCR facing the ruthless brutality of Caesar’s Legion, we are repeatedly told about something called the Bitter Springs Massacre. The short version: NCR forces attacked what they thought was the main fortress of a tribe of raiders called the Great Khans, but soon realized they were not attacking warriors, but mothers, children and the elderly. Poor information and miscommunication led to NCR soldiers being ordered to “shoot until they run out of ammunition.” And NCR troops, unfortunately, follow orders. A post-battle effort to rescue as many wounded Khans as possible did little to wipe away the stain on the NCR’s reputation.
I bring up this story because, as Caesar of the Legion points out, the NCR is repeating all the mistakes that led to the end of the world in the first place. It’s a democracy that has elected the same woman (who also happened to be the daughter of the first president) for decades. It is already dominated by special interest groups and proto-corporate cartels, which have far more influence over foreign policy than frontline commanders. The NCR is generally tolerant, but capable of brutality on par with the Wasteland’s most brutal factions, out of sheer ignorance if not outright pragmatism. I found the NCR fascinating because I think it is a reflection of the modern world in its own way. The ambitions are noble and the failures are monstrous. With his death comes the hope that something truly from the old world could survive in the Wasteland.
Image: Primevideo
Image: Primevideo
Fallout writer Chris Avellone The famous idea of destroying the NCR was put forward in the past. In his words, he worried that the NCR was “making things too civilized”; at some point, the The story is no longer post-apocalyptic. You can make prequels set in a more violent time, but the tension is gone when we know everything will be okay. Fallout is a series where a happy ending is not guaranteed. After all, we’ve already been to one end of the world.
There’s a scene in Prime Videos Fallout that almost brought me to tears. Episode 7 opens with the somber leitmotif Fallout: New Vegas, and two characters wearing armored gas masks searching through the desert. Die-hard Fallout fans will immediately recognize this armor as that of the Elite Rangers of the NCR, some of the Wasteland’s greatest warriors. It’s hard to see that power reduced to an old man and his son, struggling to survive. A brief encounter with the Ghoul (played incomparably by Walton Goggins) ends with the old man cradling his mortally wounded son as the Ghoul heartlessly strides past. Will this former ranger get revenge? I do not think so. The war is over. His side lost. All people like him can do now is survive and remember. As a fan, I felt a bit like him when I thought about the NCR. The fight is over; the NCR fell. What did I actually expect? War never changes, and the wasteful always wins.
There is 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 probably don’t understand. Wastelanders sometimes become trapped in this feeling and become so fixated on it that 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 you can’t really keep the Wasteland apocalyptic if it survives as a dominant force. But I still miss it. The wasteland now belongs to the raiders, the mutants, the Brotherhood, the Enclave, the Legion. Children of the Apocalypse, monstrously shaped to survive in a monstrous world.
There is a chance that the NCR will return. We’ve seen plenty of remnants, soldiers and civilians longing for their fallen republic, and the Ghoul hints at Philadelphia holding out as an NCR settlement. After all, they’ve built a nation from the ashes of a fallen world before. Maybe they can do it again.
Maybe.