Why Is Lucy MacLean's Finger Black?

Lucy MacLean's finger looks black because it belongs to somebody else. In season 1's "The Ghouls", the Ghoul cuts off one of her fingers, and a few scenes later a robot surgeon sews a replacement onto her hand from a drawer of spare fingers. It's dark, withered-looking and nothing like the rest of her hand, and the show never explains whose it was. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

How Lucy got it#

Lucy is the Ghoul's prisoner by "The Ghouls". When he tries to tie her up, she bites off one of his fingers, and he cuts off one of hers with a knife. "Now, that right there is the closest thing we've had to an honest exchange so far," he tells her. He sews his finger back on; she's left with a stump. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

He then trades her to organ harvesters in a ruined Super Duper Mart for a two-month supply of his vials. Their robot surgeon greets her with "I say, you've lost a finger." It sits her on a gurney, sorts through a drawer of fingers, rejecting one as too fat and another as too withered, then picks one and attaches it. It even tells her she's lucky it didn't have to use a thumb, because its finger inventory is in a sorry state. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

The whole story is on how Lucy lost her finger. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

Why it's dark#

The simple answer is that it's a dead stranger's finger. The show never says where Snip Snip's stock came from, though the clinic exists to harvest organs from the people brought to it. The finger it picks is visibly darker than the rest of Lucy's hand, and it stays that way. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

The show plays the swap as grim comedy and never comments on the colour again. Nobody in either season asks about it. Interpretation: that silence is part of the joke. The wasteland has stitched a bit of itself onto the vault girl, and she just has to get on with it. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

Is it a ghoul's finger?#

That's the popular theory, and it's mostly about the colour. Fans saw a dark, decayed-looking finger and wondered if Snip Snip had given her a ghoul's, and whether it might turn her. Nothing on screen supports either idea. The finger's owner is never named, and Lucy shows no sign of becoming a ghoul in either season. The details are on is Lucy turning into a ghoul? (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

How they do it#

The black finger is make-up. At a FAN EXPO panel reported by VG247, Purnell joked that she'd hate to be typecast as an actor who loses fingers, "purely because do you have any idea how annoying it is to have that finger painted on me every single day". (Ella Purnell on her "poop finger")

"This finger is the bane of my life," she said. It's the one she uses most, it has to be taken off and put back on, and she has it with her off set too. "I just have this poop finger all the time," she said, joking that shoppers at the supermarket stare at her touching the vegetables with it. VG247 reports that the nickname came from one of the show's make-up designers. (Ella Purnell on her "poop finger")

A detail that's there from the start#

The show sets up Lucy's fingers before she loses one. In "The Target", a woman in Filly sizes her up as a vault dweller from her clean hair, her nice teeth and her "all ten fingers". Two episodes later she's down to nine of her own. (Fallout, "The Target"; Fallout, "The Ghouls")

Read more#

How Lucy lost her finger has the full scene, Lucy MacLean her story across both seasons, and the Ghoul the man who took it. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")