Lucy MacLean: the Vault 33 Dweller at the Heart of the Fallout Series

Lucy MacLean is the main character of the Fallout TV series, a cheerful, rule-following resident of Vault 33 who goes up to the surface in 2296 to rescue her kidnapped father. Over two seasons she learns that he destroyed Shady Sands, follows him across the wasteland to New Vegas, and comes out the other side a much harder person. She is played by Ella Purnell. (Fallout, "The End"; Fallout, "The Strip")

Who is Lucy MacLean?#

Lucy is the daughter of Hank MacLean, overseer of Vault 33, one of three linked vaults under Los Angeles. Her life there is busy and happy: she's in the Young Pipefitter's Association, the fencing team and the riflery club, teaches the vault's children American history and ethics, and spends her free time with her dad. She has grown up believing her mother Rose is dead. (Fallout, "The End")

The series opens with her marriage to Monty, supposedly from Vault 32. The wedding guests are raiders from the surface. Lucy fights off Monty, but the raiders' leader, posing as Vault 32's overseer, takes Hank. When the vault council refuses to send a rescue party, Lucy tranquilises her cousin Chet and walks out of the vault door alone. (Fallout, "The End")

Lucy in season 1#

Her ideals take a beating straight away. In the town of Filly she meets Siggi Wilzig, an Enclave defector carrying something valuable, just before the Ghoul arrives to collect the bounty on him. The shopkeeper Ma June lets slip that Wilzig was heading for the woman who kidnapped Hank. Wilzig is wounded, and before he takes a cyanide pill he asks Lucy to cut off his head and take it. She does it with a chainsaw. (Fallout, "The Target")

The Ghoul catches her, uses her as bait for a gulper, cuts off her finger when she bites off his, and sells her to organ harvesters at a Super Duper Mart. She escapes and leaves him the inhaler vial he needs, rather than let him turn feral. Then she frees Maximus from his stalled power armour, and the two travel together through the ruins of Shady Sands and into Vault 4, where she uncovers the vault's genetic experiments. (Fallout, "The Head"; Fallout, "The Ghouls"; Fallout, "The Past"; Fallout, "The Trap"; Fallout, "The Radio")

At Griffith Observatory she hands the head over to Lee Moldaver, the kidnapper, in exchange for her father. Moldaver tells her the truth: Hank is a pre-war Vault-Tec employee, Rose fled Vault 33 with the children and settled in Shady Sands, and Hank destroyed the city with a nuclear bomb to get them back. The ghoul chained beside Moldaver is Rose. Lucy forces Hank to give up the code Moldaver needs, shoots her mother to end her suffering, and leaves Maximus behind to hunt Hank with the Ghoul. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Lucy in season 2#

The road to New Vegas tests her rule of not killing. She and the Ghoul run a scam in which she hands him over for his bounty and then breaks him out. In Novac she tries to talk the Great Khans out of a fight before the shooting starts. In Vault 24 a man with a chip in his brain repeats Hank's pet name for her and tells her to go home, then his head explodes. (Fallout, "The Innovator")

She chooses to give her last stimpak to an escaped Legion slave instead of the Ghoul, and walks straight into a camp of Caesar's Legion. They crucify her. The Ghoul buys her freedom by giving the Legion the location of the last NCR unit in the area, then blows up Caesar's preserved body so the two rival Legion camps fight each other instead. (Fallout, "The Golden Rule"; Fallout, "The Profligate")

NCR Rangers treat her with Buffout and she gets hooked. High on more of it, she cheerfully guns down a pack of feral ghouls at the Strip gate. In Freeside she kills a thief who is posing as a shopkeeper. Then the Ghoul betrays her to Hank in exchange for his family. She punches him out of a window with a power fist before the tranquilliser takes her. (Fallout, "The Demon in the Snow"; Fallout, "The Wrangler")

Lucy and Hank in New Vegas#

She wakes in the Vault under the Strip, where Hank has an office of chipped wastelanders making more chips. She tries to march him out to face justice, but he tricks her into chipping two more people, an NCR soldier and a legionary. She seems to accept his argument that the chips could stop the Legion. At dinner a chipped waiter who once lived in the NCR no longer remembers it, so she handcuffs Hank and goes to destroy his mainframe. Its core is the head of Diane Welch, a pre-war congresswoman, who begs Lucy to kill her. (Fallout, "The Other Player"; Fallout, "The Handoff")

Hank tries to chip her. The Ghoul stops him and gives Lucy the choice. She puts the chip in her father's neck instead and takes him outside, where he tells her the surface was the real experiment and that he has already sent chipped people out with orders written before the war. Then he triggers his own chip. Lucy leaves him there, finds Maximus, and goes up to the Lucky 38 with him as the Legion marches on the city. She tells him the coming war will be her fault. (Fallout, "The Strip")

What kind of person is Lucy?#

She's relentlessly upbeat, polite to a fault, and says "okey-dokey" when she's scared. Vault life left her sheltered, and much of the show is about the surface wearing that away: the Ghoul thinks her kindness is a weakness, and she keeps trying to prove him wrong. By the end of season 2 she has killed, taken drugs and wiped her own father's mind, and she knows it. (Fallout, "The Ghouls"; Fallout, "The Golden Rule"; Fallout, "The Strip")

Test yourself: take the Fallout TV show quiz, twelve questions on Lucy, the Ghoul, Maximus and both seasons of the show. (Fallout, "The End"; Fallout, "The Strip")