Lucy MacLean wants to believe in a few things: right and wrong, human dignity, and the Golden Rule, for example. What she doesn’t want is to be fooled or manipulated. You might say that Lucy MacLean wants the truth, but she also wants the truth to be good news.
That’s a difficult line to walk in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. As it turns out, it may not be much easier in our pre-apocalyptic world.
Fallout speaks to the core longings and fears of the metamodern age: the deep desire for a story that is true and good, and the fear that such a story may not exist.
Lucy MacLean is the primary protagonist of Amazon-MGM’s new series Fallout, based on the long-running series of video games. Fallout tells the story of individuals and factions scrabbling for power and purpose in a world ravaged by nuclear war. Perhaps by virtue of their very nature as role-playing games, most entries in the Fallout series have stood squarely in the tradition of postmodern storytelling. Individual characters have their motives and values, but all the “metanarratives” which drove the old world—political, philosophical, religious, or otherwise—have been turned to dust in the nuclear winds.
The Fallout TV series (2024) tells a different kind of story. The differences are subtle, but deeply important: Fallout is a quintessentially metamodern story. It is not just one more existentialist romp through a meaningless universe. On the contrary, Fallout speaks to the core longings and fears of the metamodern age: the deep desire for a story that is true and good, and the fear that such a story may not exist.
I recently wrote a piece for Christianity Today on the rise of metamodernism, a new cultural mood which has arisen in response to the longstanding influence of postmodernism. It is crucial for the Church to identify, understand, and engage with metamodern impulses as we seek to present the person and work of Jesus to a changing culture.
The story of Fallout can help us do that. By carefully following some of the major characters and storylines from the show, we can watch in real time as metamodern impulses take root and grow.
Before we get into it, though, a brief disclaimer is in order. This piece will include major narrative spoilers for the Fallout series, so you may want to watch it before reading. That said, the series itself contains very graphic and gratuitous violence throughout, and I do not recommend or endorse some of its content. If you would prefer to get the ideological drift of the show without watching it, you will be perfectly capable of following the argument of this piece without having seen the show.
With that out of the way, let’s return to Lucy MacLean. At the beginning of the series, Lucy is what we might call a perfect modernist. Modernism is, broadly speaking, a set of feelings, assumptions, and expectations about reality that took root during the Enlightenment and carried on through the early 20th century. At its root, modernism is a mood of humanistic optimism fueled by scientific and technological advancement and rationalist philosophy. Put simply, modernism is the belief that humanity can and will steadily improve ourselves over time through responsible application of our growing intelligence and self-understanding. It is a confident, humanistic, optimistic view of reality.
Watching Lucy’s story, we see the “pretty lie” of modernism exposed.
Lucy has been raised in just such a modernist framework. Optimistic humanism may be surprising in a world shattered by nuclear war, but Lucy is a “vault-dweller,” raised in borderline-utopian isolation in Vault 33, far beneath the war-ravaged surface of Earth. Lucy and her community are driven by a strong sense of purpose: they are waiting for “Reclamation Day,” when the surface will be safe enough for human settlement and the vault-dwellers will emerge to repopulate the Earth.
Tragically, over the course of the series, Lucy discovers that this story which has given meaning and purpose to her life is built on a series of lies and cover-ups. When her vault is attacked by savage “raiders” from the surface who kidnap her father, Lucy pursues them. On the surface, Lucy does not find an empty, healing planet waiting for human reclamation. Instead, she finds a barren wasteland populated by human survivors living in desperate poverty, deeply distrustful of strangers and beset on all sides by natural and unnatural horrors.
Lucy is appalled to discover that surface-dwellers consistently lie, cheat, steal, and murder, and immediately begins inserting herself into dangerous situations to educate surface-dwellers on simple moral law. “You can’t treat people like this!” Lucy declares confidently to a bounty hunter who kills several innocents in pursuit of his target. When he responds with a touch of amusement, “Why’s that?” Lucy answers, “Because of the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do to you.”
This same attitude is retained by Lucy’s vault-dwelling neighbors as they debate the best way to treat the raiders they have imprisoned after the attack. Despite a desire to see justice done against the killers, the majority votes to pursue ethical rehabilitation. In the words of one vault-dweller, “They didn’t know any better. How could they, without a formal education?” This is modernism at work: an unfailing confidence in the essential goodness of the human spirit.
Unfortunately for Lucy, this worldview does not appear to match the reality of the wasteland on the surface. Time and again, Lucy’s attempts at rational conflict-resolution are scorned by suspicious and desperate people. This growing confusion and frustration comes to a head when Lucy’s friend Maximus is needlessly shot by suspicious strangers and Lucy cries out in anguish, “Why?! I hate it up here!”
Watching Lucy’s story, we see the “pretty lie” of modernism exposed. Humanity, it turns out, is not fundamentally and essentially good, and progress toward peace and cooperation is far from inevitable. Even worse for Lucy, the entire story which had anchored her values was proving to be a sham. “The entire purpose of my Vault,” Lucy explains to Maximus, “was to come up to the surface and restart civilization. It’s Reclamation Day. It’s what keeps us all going, and… it already happened without us.” Maximus, attempting to console Lucy, responds, “If it makes you feel any better, it didn’t work out.” Human civilization still exists without the Vault-Dwellers and their Reclamation, but it’s far from the utopia that Lucy and her people have been envisioning.
Lucy is not the only character in Fallout to become disillusioned with modernist optimism. The show’s secondary protagonist, Cooper Howard, saw his confidence in humanity shattered long before Lucy was born. Howard was a famous actor in Western films in the pre-war era, over two hundred years before the show’s primary timeline. He was a good old-fashioned American man of principle, committed to the story of the American Dream.
In Howard’s eyes, postmodern cynicism is an inevitable fallout from the death of modernist idealism.
It is tragic and ironic, then, that Howard is exposed to dangerous, mutating radiation when the bombs fall and is turned into a Ghoul—a mutated human cursed to extraordinarily long life with near-constant suffering. For over two hundred years, Howard lives as “The Ghoul,” becoming an infamous bounty hunter with no moral scruples and a reputation for brutality. He appears to have no principles, no purpose, no grand plans at all—he is just a man cursed to go on living in a world he hates, having lost everyone he once loved. His former idealism is long dead, and as The Ghoul, Howard becomes a perfect foil to Lucy’s modernist confidence. He sees in her a naïve foolishness which he associates with his own past. He is the bounty hunter who questions Lucy’s moral certainty, and he seems to delight in watching her illusions crumble.
With his cynical, skeptical outlook on life and his abandonment of principle, Howard provides a great picture of postmodernism. In the wake of the first World War, the humanistic optimism of the Modernists appeared to be foolish at best and dangerous at worst. Postmodernism reacted against this by rejecting all attempts to make sense of reality through large-scale narrative. All the stories which seemed to give meaning to reality—religious beliefs, political movements, and so on—were discarded as so many dangerous lies. Postmodernism embraces cynical skepticism and encourages individuals to make their own way in a world emptied of real meaning.
Crucially, the true postmodern feels that this attitude is an honest response to reality. In the postmodern way of thinking, any intellectually honest person will eventually embrace the skeptical, individualist outlook of postmodernism. Howard betrays precisely this expectation. When Lucy, appalled at his apparent lack of principles, asks Howard, “What are you?” His response is telling: “Oh, I’m you, sweetie. You just give it a little time.” In Howard’s eyes, postmodern cynicism is an inevitable fallout from the death of modernist idealism.
This is where the story of Fallout takes a very important turn. Lucy’s modernist optimism is shattered by the chaotic and dangerous world of the surface. Howard thinks it only a matter of time before Lucy embraces the cynical postmodern nihilism which has become his own attitude. But that is not where the story goes. Instead, it shows us the birth of metamodernism, a synthesis of the impulses of modernism and postmodernism which is also becoming a powerful influence in our own world.
[Lucy] is not content with a descent into meaninglessness, but neither is she willing to feel simplistic or naïve. She has deconstructed a false narrative and is trying to rebuild.
In Fallout, Lucy repeatedly discovers that major parts of her worldview were built on lies. The Vaults, it turns out, were not built by altruists to preserve humanity for an eventual heroic Reclamation Day, but were built by the very company which dropped the first nuclear bombs in order to sell expensive homes in the Vaults. Lucy’s own father is revealed to be an executive from the Vault-Tec who killed his own wife—Lucy’s mother—when she discovered the truth about life on the surface.
Yet even as the story which justified Lucy’s ethical convictions is ripped away, Lucy remains stalwart in her commitment to certain beliefs: the Golden Rule, for example, and the importance of treating other human beings with dignity. These convictions are, for the moment, set adrift without any anchor. They float untethered in the air without a narrative to justify them. Why care about others? What’s the point of treating people well? Why not make your own way, embrace postmodern cynicism like Howard? Frankly, Lucy isn’t completely sure. She doesn’t want to cling to a lie—by the end of the first season, she has no intention of returning to the Vaults, and decides to accompany Howard on a search for the executives behind the Vault-Tec project and the nuclear war itself. She wants answers. She wants the truth.
In our world, a similar shattering has taken place. The 20th century showed the optimistic humanism of the modernists to be out of step with reality, but so far, postmodern cynicism has fared no better. We can feel in our bones that it just doesn’t fit.
Lucy deeply hopes that the truth she discovers will provide new grounding for her commitment to certain beliefs. She wants the Golden Rule to be not only good, but true. But for now, Lucy is willing to hold the tension. This is a key characteristic of metamodernism: oscillation. Lucy is hanging in the pendulum between modernist optimism and postmodern cynicism, refusing to land in either place. This is the metamodern age: people in oscillation, caught between stories of human progress which turned out to be lies and a wearisome cynicism which produced nothing but moral bankruptcy.
Lucy is an idealist in search of a story; she is a believer desperately seeking something worthy of belief. She is not content with a descent into meaninglessness, but neither is she willing to feel simplistic or naïve. She has deconstructed a false narrative and is trying to rebuild. She has the intellectual courage to seek the truth and the heartfelt hope that the truth may be more than a tragedy. She is one of us: the metamodern generation, wandering a world haunted by dead stories and hoping against hope to find one that still has life in it, something both true and good, something capable of producing beauty.
Hoping, perhaps, for the gospel.
