“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light, and there is absolutely no darkness in him. If we say, ‘We have fellowship with him,’ and yet we walk in darkness, we are lying and are not practicing the truth. If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus the Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say, ‘We have no sin,’ we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say, ‘We have not sinned,’ we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The world is broken. People are broken. They do what’s wrong at least as often as they do what is right…sometimes more often. They are selfish. They do what they want and don’t think too much about how getting what they want will affect the people around them. And nobody seems to be able to do much about it. What if there was a way, though, to fix it? What if there was a way to make everybody do the right thing, to make them be decent people? What it be worth it? The second season of Amazon Prime’s, Fallout, ponders that very question. Let’s talk about it.

Fallout has been one of the most enduringly popular video game titles since I was first getting into video games and computer games about 35 years ago. I remember going to my best friend’s house and playing the original Fallout on his computer. We would work together to navigate the Wasteland on the turn-based game. We usually didn’t make it very far out of the vault where the whole thing started. I remember some basic elements about the game, but mostly I remember that it was really, really hard. We definitely never beat the game, but I don’t think we even managed to complete our first major objective.

If you are at all into video games, I don’t need to fill in any plot details for you. If you want a basic summary of the plot of the series, I reviewed the first season a couple of years ago. You can read that here. The first season ended with Lucy’s dad’s escaping in a Brotherhood mech suit to head to Vegas and Lucy’s teaming up with the Ghoul (whose real name in the series is Cooper Howard) to go find him and bring him to justice for nuking the first real post-war thriving city, Shady Sands. Howard really just wants to find his wife and daughter. Maximus wakes from being knocked out to discover that he has become the hero of the Brotherhood for finding the cold fusion relic, the main macguffin for the series.

As the season progresses, Lucy does indeed find her dad in Vegas with Howard’s help. Howard does indeed find where his family should have been only to discover they are almost assuredly alive and now in Colorado, setting up the journey he’ll take in season three. And Maximus accidentally starts a civil war among the various factions of the Brotherhood, essentially neutralizing them as a threat. Meanwhile, in a convenient plot twist, he reunites with Cooper who reunites him with Lucy back in Vegas. Along the way, we are introduced to the Legion (the bad guys), the New California Republic (the good guys…mostly), and the Enclave (the real bad guys behind all the bad guys), all of whom will likely play a much greater role in season three.

Yet while there is plenty of action and story-advancing in the present, other than successfully moving characters into place for the third season, the layers of secrecy surrounding whatever is really going on (i.e., who dropped the bombs in the first place, who is really pulling the strings on things, who is the Enclave and what are their goals, what all did Robert House know exactly, what are the deathclaws and how were they created, and etc.) were only peeled back a tiny amount and even more secrets were discovered underneath those layers. Honestly, as much as I enjoyed this season, I feel like I have more questions now than I did at the end of the first season.

The real focus of this season was filling in some character backstories that will serve to advance the plot into season three and which helped develop their characters a whole lot more. The writers revealed a whole lot more connections between and among the major players than we knew about previously. They especially took us into Howard’s backstory which I found to be immensely enjoyable. And the music. The soundtrack for the series is straight out of the 40s and 50s and 60s is just delightful. In spite of feeling like I know less coming out of this season than I did after watching the first season, I think I enjoyed this season even more than the last. I am very much looking forward to the third season which will hopefully enter production soon so I can find out what happens next.

What most caught my eye this season was Lucy’s dad, Hank MacLean, and the quest he was personally on and which Lucy stopped by the end of the season. Once he gets to Vegas, he goes straight to the super secret Vault that Robert House created for Vault-Tec underneath his club, Lucky 38, on the Vegas Strip. There, he starts back up the research and development of a mind-control chip that Robert House (think Tony Stark, but with a more villainous tilt) created back before the war. There’s someone else MacLean is reporting to who is at a facility in Colorado that we were briefly introduced to last season and which probably houses the Enclave, but we didn’t learn much more about that this season.

In any event, after blowing up the heads of several lab rats and at least one human, MacLean finally perfects the technology and obviously sets about mass producing it and putting the chips on the necks of all sorts of horrible people (the Wasteland is absolutely filled to the brim with horrible people…pretty much every is a horrible person in the series outside of a few exceptions…so his options are manifold) to bring them under his control. Once captured, and using the preserved brain of a woman from the past whose personality and character were just right to create delightful, polite, friendly, helpful people, he makes them all…nice. They can’t remember anything from their past, and are completely under his control.

His goal is to eliminate or at least transform all of the ugliness of the Wasteland to create a new society that is decent in every way. And he’s ultimately doing it for his daughter, Lucy, so that they can have a wonderful world to live in together. No one was willing to do the right thing on their own, so MacLean took the initiative to fix that. Sure, he completely took away any freedom of will they had before the chip was implanted, but look at how much happier they were now. He knew better than they did; he was raised better, trained better, educated better, and so it was right and proper for him to make them better like he was. Oh, and he would kill (or take control of) anyone who got in his way without even blinking.

What so stood out to me was that this is how the world tries to deal with the problem of sin. That sin is a problem really isn’t a matter of debate. It’s simply a matter of honest observation of the world and human cultures. We may not all define sin the same way or even use that word to describe it, but we nonetheless all agree that people do the wrong thing all the time when left to their own devices. Unless there is sufficient external motivation (i.e., threat of punishment or shame) otherwise, we will do the thing that is selfish or ugly or downright evil when given the chance. With apologies to Luke Bryan, the notion that most people are good people is a delightful fantasy that doesn’t play out in reality very often. All people are broken.

The only way to get them to do the right thing is to force them to it somehow. At least, that’s the only solution as far as the world goes. Pass enough laws, enact strict enough punishments for doing the wrong thing, and people will generally toe the line in order to avoid that punishment. At least they’ll give the public appearance of toeing the line. In reality, they’ll find ways to create other outlets for the brokenness to come out that fly under the radar. This is how black markets and underground cultures get created. This is why the Dark Web exists. The brokenness in us is going to come out, and if we can’t do it in the light, then we’ll let it thrive in the dark.

This is why someone like Jeffrey Epstein became as wealthy and powerful as he did. It’s why so many rich and powerful people seemed to be connected to him, and why they are all lying about it now that the world is being made aware of just what a monster he was. These people lived their lives in the public spotlight. They couldn’t afford to let their brokenness out where anyone could see it. It would ruin them. Epstein gave them the opportunity to do it in what they thought was the dark where the public would never find out. The trouble is that what is done in the dark doesn’t stay in the dark. As John wrote, we serve the God who is light. When He comes, all that is done in the dark will be revealed. It’s better to start walking in the light now on our own than to have the light shone on us on terms other than our own. Many public figures are learning this the hard way.

People don’t – we don’t – make the right decisions on our own. Give sin an inch, and it will take 100 miles. It’s not content to be in our lives in a supporting role. It will eventually force its way to center stage. As Jesus and Paul both make abundantly clear, when we are on our own, we are slaves to sin. The question very quickly becomes: How can we overcome this?

Hank MacLean represents one answer to that question. We become slaves to something else that makes us behave. Those people he enslaved with the mind-control chips were happy. They were polite, decent people who were humble and gracious and generous and kind to one another and to everyone else. They put themselves second and did so with a smile. But they weren’t free. They were essentially automatons doing the bidding of another. And if he decided he wanted them to do something else, something more sinister to advance his plans and purposes, they would do that instead.

Lucy recognized this as the slavery that it was and put a stop to it. But the thing is, her dad wasn’t wrong about the morally abhorrent state of the Wasteland. And although she may have put a stop to his equally morally problematic plans to deal with it, she didn’t have an alternative plan. The Wasteland was still awful. People were still violent and greedy and selfish. Theft was rampant. Murder was so commonplace it barely turned any heads. The whole place was one big mess of sin, and no one could get out of it.

The one thing missing from the whole picture of the Fallout world is some good news. Thankfully, our world is not missing that. We live in a world created and sustained by a God who is good. And although His commitment to our freedom means that He allows things to happen that we think He should not, He does have a plan to deal with the problem of sin that will also maintain our freedom. That plan is a person named Jesus. Jesus, God incarnate, paid the price our sin justly deserved with the sacrifice of His own life. When we accept this as efficacious on our behalf, placing our faith in Him, He extends to us the life He earned. When we receive this life, we also receive His Spirit, dwelling in us to begin to transform us from the inside out, breaking the power of sin over our wills so that we are freed to live with the goodness we now newly desire.

But someone might ask how this is really any different from what Hank MacLean did to all those people. The show’s writers and their clear disdain for religion is obviously pointing in that direction. His playing God isn’t any better than God’s being God, or so we are set up to think. If you asked MacLean’s slaves if they wanted to go back to their old life, they would have quickly told you no. Of course, that was itself a programmed response, but that just makes the point. How is the Holy Spirit working in us to transform our desires any different?

Because nothing about that transformation is forced. We freely choose it, and then He helps us to keep freely choosing it as we work with Him to overcome the brokenness in us that we can’t otherwise deal with on our own. MacLean didn’t give those people a choice. God does. He invites us into the freedom of truth – the truth that His ways are best – and enables us by the power of His Spirit in us to live in those ways, to walk in the light as He is in the light. What’s more, when we fall back into the habits of our old selves, when we decide we’re tired of that messiness, and return in repentance, He extends forgiveness to us once again and lets us walk in life once again.

The world really is a mess, but we live in a world in which hope is a real thing. Fallout will never get any better because in that world there’s no redemption possible. There’s no ultimate source of forgiveness. There’s nothing to be restored to. That’s the peril of trying to imagine a world without God. It’s not a pretty one. The Gospel is better. I hope you’ll consider it.