Over the past few months, I have found myself scrolling through Facebook Reels that surface fragments of 1990s television, shows like Step by Step, Saved by the Bell, and Beverly Hills, 90210, programs that quietly shaped the moral and emotional imagination of a generation.
Cody Lambert, played by Sasha Mitchell, the surfer-kickboxer nephew in the show’s blended Lambert-Foster household who lives in a van parked in the driveway, is played for laughs and often mistaken for being scatterbrained. However, he acts as a moral mentor to the younger children, emerging as one of the most principled figures in the household before being written out in the later seasons.
Cody was the kind of character television rarely produces anymore. He was innocent without being naïve, strong without being cruel, and humorous without being cynical. Beneath his easygoing “dude” persona was a quiet but strong moral center, the type that could expose the pretensions and moral confusion of those who surrounded him. The character raises a deeper question about what kinds of heroes popular culture now finds plausible. This experience raises an inescapable question: what changed?
Part of the answer lies not only in shifting social norms but in what Catholics have long called the moral imagination, the faculty shaped by stories, images, and exemplars long before abstract principles are learned. Thinkers as diverse as Jacques Maritain, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and John Paul II emphasized that culture forms desire before it forms arguments, training the heart to recognize what is admirable, lovable, and worthy of imitation. Popular entertainment once participated, however imperfectly, in that work of formation. Characters like Cody Lambert mattered not because they preached, but because they embodied a vision of the good that could be grasped even by children.
An Extinct Moral Baseline
While it’s true that the late 1980s and 1990s were far from morally pristine, they occupied a space where there was a shared moral understanding that now appears to be largely lost. The period still assumed shared moral norms about family, sexuality, and human dignity, even when those norms were contested.
This moral baseline mattered. It allowed popular culture to portray flawed yet relatable models of virtue. Back then cinema and TV, retained vestiges of moral truth, goodness, love, and sacredness. The stories presumed the existence of these realities, despite their imperfect realization. By contrast, the contemporary landscape increasingly celebrates inversion. What was once treated as virtue is now mocked. What was once treated as vice is now considered virtue. This shift did not occur overnight, but it accelerated dramatically in the early 2000s, particularly as identity-based frameworks came to dominate cultural and political discourse. And even here, something endures. The longing for truth and goodness never disappears. In Christian terms, evil remains parasitic on the good. The exposure of inversion is not a triumph but a sign of its ultimate demise.
Scripture frames this task with striking clarity. St. Paul exhorts Christians not to “be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Cultural renewal begins not with outrage but with formation. Figures like Cody endure because they approximate this pattern. He resists mockery, remains steady amid confusion, and embodies a moral rootedness that once seemed ordinary but now feels rare. What audiences ultimately long for is not provocation but examples of lives that make goodness appear credible again..
Cody Lambert and the Archetype of the Good Man
Literature and psychology long recognized this type of figure. Cody Lambert emerges from this earlier moral landscape as an archetypal figure whose simplicity conceals moral integration. In psychological terms, Jung notes in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious that certain archetypal forms unite what appears to be wisdom and folly, observing that “in elfin nature wisdom and folly appear as one and the same.” Jung’s use of “elfin” deliberately draws on folklore, where such figures are playful and marginal, yet often bear a hidden wisdom that unsettles those who mistake seriousness for insight.
This psychological insight finds one of its most compelling literary expressions in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, a novel written deliberately to portray a genuinely good man within a morally disordered society. Its protagonist, Prince Myshkin, is innocent without being foolish, and his moral clarity exposes the vanity, corruption, and pretension of those around him. He is described as “simple and innocent as a knight of the golden age,” yet capable of reading “a man’s soul like a psychologist.” Like Myshkin, Cody is underestimated, mocked, and dismissed, yet consistently proves himself more coherent and integrated than those who pride themselves on sophistication rooted in cynicism.
To be sure, his goodness is not ideological. He acts instead and does not just talk. He has an unfaltering loyalty to his family, extraordinary patience with children, respect for elders, and an uncanny gentleness juxtaposed to a world that confuses aggression with strength. He embodies a form of masculinity that is difficult to categorize today because it is neither domineering nor superficial. It is oriented toward the transcendent.
Scripture describes this paradoxical strength with remarkable economy. Christ blesses not the aggressive but the meek, promising that “they shall inherit the earth” (Matt 5:5). Cody’s posture repeatedly reflects this logic. He does not posture or dominate. He intervenes only to protect, restrains his power rather than advertising it, and treats women and children with a patience that would today be misread as weakness. In an age that increasingly equates virtue with assertion, such restraint appears countercultural precisely because it is ordered toward selfless love.
This is where contemporary discussions of archetypes, including those popularized by Jordan Peterson, can bring forth clarity. Jung’s archetypes are descriptive, not theological. They identify recurring patterns of meaning and action rather than serving as substitutes for God. Peterson, in his first book, Maps of Meaning, for all his theological limitations, correctly diagnoses a crisis of meaning in modern culture, noting that when shared symbolic frameworks fall apart, “knowledge itself loses context, and the known reverts to the unknown.” His project is an attempt to retrieve symbolic structures capable of bearing moral weight, recognizing that mythic narrative offers a “dramatic presentation of morality” rather than abstract doctrine. Christianity does not compete with these insights; it fulfills what they move toward. Cody Lambert does not inhabit the abstract realm of archetypes, but rather, he is an embodied archetype, graspable even by children.
Courtship, Chastity, and the Honour of Women
At its heart, Step by Step is also a love story, and Cody’s unrequited affection for Dana Foster (one of his younger step-cousins) becomes one of the show’s most revealing moral threads. His attraction is not reducible to desire but in recognition of who she really is. He sees her intelligence, her strength, and her goodness, even when she masks them with defensiveness or disdain.
Again and again, Cody honours women while defending his own chastity and theirs. In one episode, he rescues Karen Foster (another one of his step-cousins) from fraternity boys who attempt to exploit her. These same men use Cody’s looks and charisma to attract women to parties, yet mock Karen’s virginity publicly. Cody publicly rebukes them, affirms his own chastity, and physically defends her when necessary. His restraint is not presented as repression but as uprightness.
Other episodes reinforce the same pattern. When Dana is aggressively pursued by a biker in a bar, Cody intervenes decisively, using martial arts to protect her. His strength is always defensive, never predatory. Notably, Sasha Mitchell was himself a professional martial artist, known for his role in Kickboxer 2–4, lending credibility to this portrayal.
That inversion surfaced recently when Piers Morgan mocked Nick Fuentes for his chastity, a posture that would have been unintelligible in the moral world of Step by Step.
The Surfer Sage and Hidden Wisdom
Cody’s language plays a crucial role in this dynamic. His surfer dialect disarms others. It lowers defenses. It signals that he is not competing for dominance. Still, beneath the “dudes,” the non sequiturs, and the moments of blank reflection, lies not only a notable moral intelligence but also a deep intellect. In one episode, he outperforms Dana on the SATs, exposing the superficiality of academic stereotypes.
One especially revealing moment occurs when Cody appears poised to explain the meaning of life, only to trail off mid sentence. The scene is played for comedy, but it has deeper implications upon reflection. He seems on the verge of articulating a simple truth, but the world around him cannot quite bear its clarity. This follows the logic of the Innocent, long recognized in Christian tradition and literature, whose wisdom is dismissed as naïveté precisely because it refuses unnecessary complexity. As St. Paul states: “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27). Christian culture has long understood that simplicity, restraint, and humility form souls more effectively than irony or spectacle. These are precisely the traits Catholic storytelling must recover.
Hollywood, Inversion, and the Banishing of the Good
It would not be controversial to say that, although Hollywood, much like Disney, has always been morally suspect, at one point in time it preserved a functional, if imperfect, distinction between good and evil. Today, that distinction is increasingly blurred, or even erased, and in many instances deliberately inverted. Sacred narratives are recast not to illuminate, but to shock. Moral archetypes are emptied and replaced with ideological proxies.
I have addressed this dynamic elsewhere in my analysis of the sacrilegious version of Jesus Christ Superstar as performed at the Hollywood Bowl, where the figure of Christ is not merely inverted and stripped of transcendence but also openly blasphemed against.
Blatant evil cannot hide itself indefinitely. Its increasing visibility is not a sign of confidence, but of desperation. As the Book of Revelation emphasizes, “the devil has gone down… filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short” (Revelation 12:12). Divine providence does not require Machiavellian manipulation. God’s nature is goodness itself, and even rebellion becomes, paradoxically, a witness to the truth it denies. In essence, you cannot acknowledge evil without affirming the truth of good.
The question, then, is not merely what Hollywood has lost, but what Catholics might build. Catholic writers, filmmakers, podcasters, and studios already exist, yet too often operate in isolation. What is needed is not imitation of secular media, but confident storytelling that assumes goodness is real, virtue is attractive, and sacrifice meaningful. Catholic platforms could play a central role in gathering these voices and giving them wider reach.
Why Cody Could Not Be Written Today
It is difficult to imagine Cody Lambert being written into a contemporary sitcom without irony or subversion. His masculinity would be treated as something worthy of mockery. His chastity would be ridiculed. His goodness would require explanation, if not apology. Undoubtedly, the cultural conditions that allowed such a character to exist have largely disappeared.
Nonetheless, the persistence of Cody in collective memory, evident in countless online comments and tributes, suggests something important. Archetypes do not perish. They dwindle, only to re-emerge when cultures sense their absence. The longing for goodness does not vanish; it waits patiently for those who are ready to receive it.
Remembering the Good
Cody Lambert was never scripted to be a great philosopher or theologian. Instead, he stands as a quiet witness to a form of goodness that once seemed so commonplace. Reflecting upon him is not merely an exercise in nostalgia but an act of remembrance of a time not so long ago, a time when good and evil were not often reduced to preferences or emotions.
For this reason, the figure embodied in Cody Lambert still conveys a simple truth: that goodness is real and worth living out, even in a culture tempted by nihilism. Remembering Cody Lambert is therefore not merely an act of nostalgia but an invitation to creative responsibility within the broader Catholic culture.
