Like video games before it, To fall is a success. The Prime Video series becomes a second seasonwhich means we will see and after for Lucy by Ella Purnell. After leaving the artificial confines of Vault 33, she received a crash course in surface life in the post-apocalyptic world, as well as the sinister truth about its history.
Talk to GQPurnell admitted that she felt a lot of pressure, knowing that To fall already had a devoted fan base and Prime Video’s huge platform meant the series would be seen by even more eyeballs. “I am fair To fall-centric at the moment. I eat, breathe, live, shit To fall, all the time,” she joked. But the interview – which, yes, includes a discussion of that horrible finger scene with Walton Goggins; Purnell said it was “so much fun” to film – he’s also interested in how Lucy feels at the end of the season.
She has just learned that her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), a former Vault-Tec executive, whom she is desperately trying to save, is complicit in the nuclear destruction that derailed civilization hundreds of years ago. Worse still, he directly participated in the more recent bombings ordered by Vault-Tec to break humanity’s irritating and persistent instinct for survival. Even worseher mother, MIA for years, is no longer human, but an irradiated ghoul – and Lucy ends up shooting her, to end what is clearly a miserable existence.
“I asked myself: what is the opposite of Lucy?” Purnell remembers calibrating his performance during the season finale. “What is the opposite of the woman we have learned and loved? She is relentlessly optimistic…so the opposite is seeing the light go out of that glimmer of hope; seeing the light escape from his eyes. And see her catatonic. To see her numb. And there is no more fight in her.
Purnell continued. “I think there’s a part of her that says, ‘I just don’t know where to draw from.’ The center of her comes out of her body. This light which exists in his solar plexus, which truly believes in the Golden Rule, her cold fusion has just disappeared. It’s just dissipating… I want the audience at the end of the show to wonder if their hero is still a good person. I don’t know who she’ll be in season two, (but) that’s what happens when you break the unbreakable. I don’t know who she’s about to become.
As for that “Okey-dokey” line at the end, Purnell said she channeled the feeling of “just knowing that everything is completely out of your control…I think that’s how Lucy feels about her hope. She recognizes that something is irreversibly lost or broken within her. Maybe she still keeps it going in season two, but it will never be the same. It is not possible.
Read the full interview on GQand look To fallthe first season on Prime Video.
Want more io9 news? Find out when to expect the latest news wonder, Star WarsAnd Star Trek exits, what is the next step for the DC Universe in cinema and televisionand everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
