“Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to one hope at your calling – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the ideas I have set before you fairly often over the years of our doing this together is that the Gospel lies at the heart of all of our stories. That one story is so powerful that we just can’t get away from it. In just nearly every story we tell, you can find echoes of the Gospel in some form or fashion. Sometimes you have to look pretty carefully for it, but it is just nearly always there. That’s why I can keep coming back here on most Fridays to offer a review of something I’ve watched recently and talk about its Gospel implications with you. Well, I finally finished watching through something new this week (really new this time, not just new to me but a year and a half old for everyone else), and today we’re going to talk for just a few minutes about its Gospel implications. This series is based on a video game franchise set in a post-apocalyptic future. And while video game franchises set in a post-apocalyptic future are about a dime a dozen, this one has been around for a pretty long time and has remained pretty popular for most of that time. Let’s talk today about the Amazon Prime series, Fallout.

I remember playing Fallout when I was in junior high. My best friend had it on his computer. I’d go over to his house and we’d spend hours trying to navigate our way safely from our vault to…well, I don’t think we ever actually figured out where we were supposed to go. I remember having a lot of fun hanging out with my best friend while playing the game, but I mostly just remember the game as impossibly difficult and not all that much fun because of it. Also, it was a turn-based game which I don’t usually enjoy. I much prefer skill-based games over strategy-based ones. Besides, we mostly just got killed pretty quickly by a Brotherhood Knight in an attempt to get a set of Brotherhood armor so that we could be invincible. It never worked. And, if none of that paragraph made much sense to you beyond that I was having fun playing with my best friend, don’t worry about it.

The Fallout series is set on Earth a little over 200 years after a nuclear war destroyed pretty much the entire world (at least the entire country). Your character is a Vault Dweller. You are from a group of people who when the bombs started falling entered one of a number of really fancy nuclear fallout shelters designed to be inhabited for hundreds of years. Something has gone wrong, though, and you have to go to the surface in order to bring back something to your Vault in order to save everyone. At least, I think that was the point of the original game. I honestly can’t remember. Yet while life in the Vaults was idyllic, the world on the surface is a nightmare. Besides the radiation that still lingers in many places and the mutated creatures of varying sorts (but especially giant cockroaches), most people have pretty much gone feral. The original game was moderately violent, but future editions cranked up the violence and gore to eleven.

Following this lead, most of the streaming series that have been based on a comic book or video game franchise in recent years have tended to be excessively violent and gory. Fallout is no different. While there are only a few scenes that linger on something gory for long, there’s plenty of blood spilled in spectacularly gory ways throughout the series. And the language is awful. I didn’t try to tabulate the number of times the F-word was used in each episode, but it was a lot. Along with lots of other language as well. And there are a couple of sex scenes worth skipping. Neither are explicit, and in both the women are fully clothed, but they’re unnecessary. There are also a couple of scenes with some nudity, but it’s not sexualized at all and fairly brief. None of those add anything of substance to the plot and can be skipped without worrying that you’ll miss an important bit of dialogue hidden in them. Once you get past all of that, though, the series is great (but not for kids).

While there are all kinds of colorful characters in the series, there are really on three you need to keep up with. The main character is Lucy MacLean, a Vault-dweller on a mission to find her dad after he is kidnapped by raiders in the first episode. Next up is Maximus, a member of the Brotherhood, a clannish group on the surface who believe themselves to have a kind of divine right to rule over the rest of the country. The third of our trio is Cooper Howard. Cooper is a Ghoul. Ghouls are humans who have been mutated to become immortal, but who will gradually become mindless zombies if they don’t get regular access to drugs that created them. Cooper was a Hollywood celebrity before the bombs were dropped, managed to survive the blast, and has been a loner bounty hunter ever since. By the end of the season, we learn that he is looking for his family.

The basic storyline is mostly just lazy anti-capitalist screed, but by the end of the season the writers finally get into some pretty interesting issues. The Vaults that play such an important role in the series were created by Vault-Tech. The pre-apocalypse world is set in a 1950s-style environment, but where Vault-Tech has become the world’s largest corporation with their invention and sales of products designed to help people survive a nuclear holocaust. The trouble is, there is no nuclear holocaust and the United States and the Russians (who fairly recently fought a war for control of Alaska) are working toward a peace treaty that would include disarmament.

If there’s not going to be a nuclear war, then Vault-Tech’s products are all worthless. Not wanting to allow for this, they manipulate global events such that the peace talks break down and nuclear war breaks out. In other words, they drop the bombs themselves. They drop the bombs and select a certain number of the right kinds of people to be preserved for future generations in their special vaults where they aim to create perfect societies. Then, once everyone on the surface has been wiped out and the radiation has subsided, they can emerge and unleash their perfect, happy society on the rest of the world. There’s just one problem: the rest of the world didn’t get wiped out, and in the 200 years since the bombs fell, humanity has rebuilt itself into the same tribal, violent, cynical, untrusting mess that we were before. That is: nothing of substance has changed.

There’s one exception: a city called Shady Sands. Another of the main characters. Moldaver, who starts out as the apparent villain, but who is revealed to be a kind of antihero, discovered a way to create and sustain cold fusion before the bombs, and used it afterwards to create a post-apocalypse city that had become a flourishing society. When this was discovered by one of the leaders of the Vault-Tech community, who also happens to be Lucy’s dad, Hank, he destroys the city, leaving it in ruins. He also somehow hid the plans and means for the recreation of Moldaver’s fusion engine. She kidnaps him at the beginning of the series in order to force him to give it back to her.

Lucy’s discovery that her dad is the real villain comes in the final moments of the season and provides the vehicle for some really interesting dialogue. As Hank, who really does love his daughter, tries to get Lucy to first free him from Moldaver’s clutches, and then to come with him as he escapes to get back to work on rebuilding the perfect society, he makes his argument for why his actions were not only reasonable, but necessary.

People are hopelessly divided and tribal. This was the case before the bombs were dropped, and in the 200 years since they did, we rebuilt ourselves in the exact same way. No one wants to live in a world like that. It’s bad for everybody. No one can really flourish. Nothing of lasting good is contributed to the world when people are so focused on destroying each other. What Vault-Tech did and is still striving to do is to make a better world for everyone. Well, it will be for everyone who has been properly vetted and educated into their more enlightened way of thinking and behaving. People have to be taught classic art and literature and philosophy and science. They have to be given virtuous character formation and a motivation to live out of it. They have to be given a vision for what the world could be as well as the means of achieving it. And in order to be able to really achieve this glorious vision, the rest of the world needs to be eliminated. Once only they remain, the world can be truly at peace. Humanity can truly flourish.

And, on their face, the Vault communities are indeed heavenly havens from the evils of the world on the surface. Once you get beneath the surface, though, all of the same faults and weaknesses still exist. In their efforts to eliminate negative tribalism in the world, the Vaults are just another of the tribes vying for dominance. While they will consider welcoming members of other tribes to join with them, it will only be on their terms. All the other tribes need to be destroyed. In other words, Vault-Tech saw themselves as humanity’s saviors. Unfortunately for them and everyone else, they were just a bunch of humans, afflicted with all of the same flaws as the rest of the population. They were never going to be able to offer any kind of a means of salvation. Sin can’t ultimately save us from sin.

That is the point at which the Gospel connects to this story. We have been trying to save ourselves from the effects of sin since time immemorial. We keep trying over and over again because sin is bad stuff. Even if you don’t want to use that particular word for it, you still understand – because you can’t deny it – that the world is broken. People do the wrong thing over and over and over again on a loop. Yes, we might make some apparent progress here or there, but then we blow things up and find ourselves right back where we started.

There have been three primary places we have sought refuge from the debilitating effects of sin in the world. The first is in ourselves through rigorous moral training. These are folks with strong enough wills that they can practice a kind of self-denial. They often do this through a pursuit of simplicity in their lives. The less we have, the less there will be to fight or worry about. When we can disconnect from the world around us and just focus on being good and doing good, the world will be a better place. The trouble here is that this really only ever deals with the surface of sin. It never does and indeed can’t get at its heart. As a result, all the training inevitably breaks down when things get tough enough and we go right back to our home base.

The second place we seek refuge from sin is government. If a government is big enough and strong enough and can operate with the sufficient threat of force for noncompliance with a socially accepted standard of behavior, then people will stay in line. This was how Rome managed to create a “peaceful” empire for so long. Anyone who disturbed the precious Pax Romana was ruthlessly eliminated. This succeeded in convincing most people to toe the line. But not everyone. And the bigger a government gets in order to force more and more compliance from the remaining holdouts, the less freedom everyone has. If you stay in the government’s box, life can be okay, but that box just keeps getting smaller over time as sin keeps popping up and needing to be dealt with.

The third place we go to save ourselves from sin is in science. This approach is often a combination of the first two. Here, we convince ourselves that if we put the right people in charge, the world will be better. The right people, of course, are the scientists because they have data to back up their opinions…which means their opinions aren’t really opinions at all. They’re facts. And you can’t argue with facts. Of course, science is an always-developing affair. What scientists have in the past declared to be obviously right and true complete with all the data to prove their case and thus the primary shaper of government policy has later been proven false by the accumulation of more and better data. Before that new data was discovered, though, many, many people became victims of bad policy that was driven by bad data.

The truth is that none of these things will ultimately save us. All of these and other attempts to deal with sin ultimately rely on ourselves. The problem here, though, is that we are at the root of the problem. Sin is not an external problem, but an internal one. If we only look to ourselves, the solutions we find are always going to fail. If we only look to other people, the only solutions we find are always going to fail. This is because we are the problem. We need a Savior who is external to us. We need a Savior who is unaffected by sin. We need a Savior who can actually do the job.

What Fallout helps us see is that we understand the problem we are facing. We experience it each and every day. We don’t even have to walk out of our doors to find it. It will come and seek us out. It will start from inside of us because that’s where it lies. But Fallout doesn’t offer any real answers to the problem. And, if my guess is correct, all they are ultimately going to offer is some version of “look inside yourself for the solution.” This is where we as followers of Jesus can gently point out the problems with that solution and offer the one that will really do the job: Jesus. When we trust in Him, we will finally find the hope and help we need to get things right. Let’s be sharing the news. There’s a whole world that needs to hear it.