Is Lucy MacLean Turning Into a Ghoul?

No, Lucy MacLean isn't turning into a ghoul. Across both seasons of the Fallout TV series she stays human, and no scene shows her skin, healing or mind starting to change the way ghouls do. The question comes from three things: the dead stranger's finger sewn onto her hand, the irradiated water she drinks in season 1, and the Ghoul telling her she'll end up like him. (Fallout, "The Ghouls"; Fallout, "The Strip")

Where the idea comes from#

Most of it happens in one episode. In "The Ghouls", the Ghoul drags Lucy across the desert on a leash. Parched, she drinks from a puddle as his rad meter peaks. He tells her she's getting it now, then: "Oh, I'm you, sweetie. You just give it a little time." (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

Ella Purnell later summed up Lucy's day in an interview with British GQ: "In the space of one day, she's got radiation poisoning," she said, before listing the rest, including biting off a ghoul's finger. (Ella Purnell on the Fallout finale)

Then comes the finger. The Ghoul cuts off one of Lucy's fingers after she bites off his, and at a ruined Super Duper Mart, the robot surgeon Snip Snip picks a spare from a drawer, rejecting one as "too fat" and another as too withered, and attaches it. On screen it is visibly darker than the rest of her hand. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

So by the end of the episode Lucy has been dosed with radiation, has a mismatched finger, and has been told she'll become what the Ghoul is. Fans put two and two together. The finger has its own page: why Lucy's finger is black. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

What turning into a ghoul looks like in the show#

The series gives two clear examples, and Lucy matches neither.

• Rose MacLean. Lucy's mother survived Hank's nuclear attack on Shady Sands as a ghoul and had turned feral by the time Lucy found her. (Fallout, "The Beginning")
• Thaddeus. The Brotherhood squire drinks a salesman's elixir to heal a crushed foot and starts to turn. When he's hit in the neck by a crossbow bolt and pulls it out, the wound closes on the spot. By season 2 he calls himself a ghoul, and his mutation costs him an arm. (Fallout, "The Head"; Fallout, "The Radio"; Fallout, "The Profligate"; Fallout, "The Handoff")

Lucy gets none of that. In season 2 she is crucified by Caesar's Legion and needs NCR Rangers to patch her up afterwards, recovering like any other human. (Fallout, "The Profligate"; Fallout, "The Demon in the Snow")

Ghouls in the show also live in fear of going feral, which is why the Ghoul depends on his inhaler vials. Lucy never needs one. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

What the Ghoul really meant#

Interpretation: "I'm you, sweetie. You just give it a little time" reads far better as a prediction about Lucy's character than her body. The Ghoul has spent the episode telling her the wasteland's golden rule isn't hers, and he's betting she'll end up as hard as he is. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

By the finale he's partly right. Lucy shoots her own mother to end her suffering, and Purnell told GQ that in doing so she's learned from the Ghoul: "She has turned into him." That's the transformation the show cares about. (Fallout, "The Beginning"; Ella Purnell on the Fallout finale)

Could she still turn?#

Nothing on screen points that way. Season 2 ends with Lucy human, leaving her father on the Strip and going up into the Lucky 38 with Maximus as the Legion marches on New Vegas. Anything beyond that is a guess about future seasons. (Fallout, "The Strip")

Read more#

Ghouls covers how ghoulification works across the games and the show, and why Lucy shot her mother the scene where Lucy really did start to change. (Fallout, "The Beginning")