Why Did Lucy MacLean Shoot Her Mother?

Lucy MacLean shoots her mother to put her out of her misery. In the season 1 finale, "The Beginning", Lucy learns that her mother, Rose, didn't die in a vault plague but survived Hank's nuclear attack on Shady Sands as a ghoul, and has been chained at Lee Moldaver's side ever since. Rose is feral, barely able to say Lucy's name. Lucy ends it with a gun. Ella Purnell, who plays her, calls it a mercy kill. (Fallout, "The Beginning"; Ella Purnell on the Fallout finale)

What Lucy finds at the observatory#

Lucy reaches Griffith Observatory to trade Siggi Wilzig's head for her father. Moldaver, the woman who kidnapped Hank, tells her the story in front of him. "Rose was so clever," she says. Rose noticed something was siphoning the vault's water, guessed that civilisation had returned to the surface, and ran with her children when Hank told her to keep quiet. She found Shady Sands, a city that was everything the vaults had promised to be. Then her husband came after her, took the children, and "burned that city to the ground." (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Lucy turns to the ghoul chained beside Moldaver and asks: "My mother. What happened to her?" Moldaver answers, "I think you know." The ghoul gasps out "Lucy?" (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Lucy makes her choice about Hank first. When he insists Moldaver is lying, she tells him to give her the code for the cold fusion reactor, and he does. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

The full history of Rose, from the vault to the bomb, is on what happened to Lucy MacLean's mother. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Why she pulls the trigger#

The show never puts the reason in Lucy's mouth. It doesn't need to. Rose has been feral for years, a prisoner at a table, and Lucy has just heard what her father did to her. Interpretation: the plainest reading, and the one the series sets up, is that Lucy is ending her mother's suffering the only way left, because nothing else in the wasteland can. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Purnell put it the same way when British GQ asked about the finale: "By killing her mum in a mercy kill, she's doing exactly what the Ghoul did to Roger." (Ella Purnell on the Fallout finale)

The Roger parallel#

That reference goes back to "The Ghouls", four episodes earlier. The Ghoul visits his old friend Roger, a ghoul who has run out of the vials that hold off feralness and keeps repeating his own name as his mind goes. The Ghoul shoots him. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

In the same episode, Lucy refuses to leave the Ghoul to the same fate. Outside the organ harvesters' Super Duper Mart she finds him collapsed and gives him the vial he needs. Interpretation: by the finale she has learned the other half of his lesson: when a ghoul has gone too far to save, the kind thing can be a bullet. (Fallout, "The Ghouls"; Fallout, "The Beginning")

What the shot means for Lucy#

Purnell told GQ the shot "means so many things": that Lucy is going with the Ghoul, that she's going to meet her makers, and that she hates him but has turned into him. "It means she's letting go of her golden centre," she said. (Ella Purnell on the Fallout finale)

The scene nearly played differently. Purnell said they first shot Lucy killing her mother as "a really emotional moment", full of tears and wailing, and it didn't feel right. If Lucy was going to walk into the wasteland, they decided, she had to be a changed woman. Her flat, defeated "okey-dokey" in the finale came out of the same rethink. (Ella Purnell on the Fallout finale)

What happens next#

Lucy leaves with the Ghoul to follow Hank. Season 2's "The Golden Rule" shows the bombing of Shady Sands itself, then cuts to a young Lucy in the vault asking when her mom is coming back. Later in the season Lucy captures Hank and tells him she's taking him back to Vault 33 to face justice for murdering the people of Shady Sands. (Fallout, "The Golden Rule"; Fallout, "The Other Player")

Read more#

Lucy MacLean covers both seasons, Hank MacLean the man who bombed Shady Sands, and ghouls why Rose survived the blast at all. (Fallout, "The Beginning")