Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout series which stars Ella Purnell has been receiving positive responses from all around. Based on the popular video game series by Bethesda Softworks has been considered to be one of the best video game adaptations. The show also stars Walton Goggins as the Ghoul and features Kyle MacLachlan.
The positive responses received by the show from critics and audiences have also carried over to memes. Purnell’s Lucy MacLean has become the subject of a ‘Before and After’ meme that has gone viral on the Internet. The meme template shows MacLean’s state before she leaves the Vault to explore the outside and after she does.
Ella Purnell Before And After Fallout Memes Go Viral
The Prime video series Fallout has been receiving rave reviews since it began streaming earlier this month. The show is not a direct adaptation of the games but is an original story taking place in the same post-apocalyptic setting. The show follows Ella Purnell’s Lucy MacLean as a Vault Dweller who explores the wasteland outside to find her missing father.
The show is set in 2296 after a nuclear explosion renders the world uninhabitable, leading to Vaults being built underground for survival. The residents of the Vaults, which is a more protected space than the wasteland, are called the Vault Dwellers. Lucy MacLean encounters the ‘real world’ and her optimism is tested when she goes out into the radiation-filled wasteland.
This difference in her state has led to the Internet using Purnell’s behind-the-scenes pictures and screengrabs from the show for a meme template. Showing the character’s state before she was exposed to the outside and after, many memes have popped up with references to real life as well as the Fallout games themselves.
Reading Talking about
— Wednesday Pull (@WednesdayPull) April 21, 2024
Comic Books them on Xwitter pic.twitter.com/BWfayrE8Sr
Enjoying a new New Vegas
— ☢️Fallout Films (@FilmsFallout) April 21, 2024
Fallout game Fan finds you pic.twitter.com/dvfZKVk4mO
The memes seem to have gone viral as it also brings out a true coming-of-age moment for the character in the show as she deals with reality, something that every person relates to.
Ella Purnell Called Lucy MacLean the ‘Ned Flanders of the Apocalypse’
Post-apocalyptic dramas are usually survival stories that follow particular tropes with their protagonists. Shows like The Last of Us have Pedro Pascal’s Joel, a resourceful and traditionally heroic character who has the capacity to survive an apocalypse. However, Fallout seems to have gone the other route where the protagonist is sheltered and extremely optimistic for a person venturing out into the wasteland.
Ella Purnell’s Lucy MacLean is described as bubbly, optimistic, and kind. Despite being sheltered in the Vault, she is still strong enough to tackle the wasteland and The Ghoul with an ‘oki dokie’. Purnell had a specific idiom to describe the ever-optimistic Lucy in an interview with Refinery29 Australia,
“As soon as I read the script, I knew I had to be a part of it. I wanted to work with Jonathan [Nolan]. I wanted to play Ned Flanders in the apocalypse!”
While she wanted to play the nerdy The Simpsons character in that sort of a setting, what ultimately drew her to the show and other post-apocalyptic media that she has been a part of is that they were stories of women trying to survive and going to any extent to do so. She said that the desperation drives these characters to shed their image. She said,
“I love seeing women in survival dramas and seeing women sort of explore the very depths and the extent of what they’re capable of in desperation…You’re not this together, pretty picture that films originally depicted women as…Seeing women be violent and gory and not shy away from having to make really brutal decisions… Anything that’s smart and, I suppose, political in a way — and I think Fallout hits on all those points.”
Purnell’s Lucy has a hero’s journey in the show and goes from being manipulated by the ideology of the Vault (propagated by her family in Vault 33) to learning the truth in the wasteland.
