Over the past few months, I’ve found myself scrolling through Facebook Reels, watching clips from ‘90s television sitcoms. It’s difficult not to feel nostalgic while doing so, and one cannot help but wonder whether these clips reflect a generational subconscious revisiting fragments of a moral and emotional imagination formed long ago.
One figure in particular has resurfaced with unexpected force: Cody Lambert from Step by Step, played by Sasha Mitchell. Long buried in the recesses of memory, Cody returns not merely as comic relief, but as something more enduring, an archetype of goodness disguised in surfer vernacular and comedic ease.
Cody is a character television rarely produces anymore. He’s innocent without being naïve, strong without being cruel, and humorous without being cynical. Beneath his laid-back persona is a quiet moral center capable of exposing the pretensions and confusions of those around him.
Thus, revisiting these scenes provokes a deeper question: what changed?
An Extinct Moral Baseline
The late 1980s and 1990s were far from morally pristine, but they inhabited a cultural space in which a shared moral understanding still existed. Racism, while never eradicated, was culturally stigmatized rather than weaponized as a totalizing explanation of social life. Feminism existed, but it had not yet hardened into an adversarial ideology that treated masculinity itself as suspect. Radical positions remained on the periphery and were often the subject of satire rather than admiration.
This moral baseline mattered. It allowed popular culture to portray flawed but relatable models of virtue. Even Hollywood, always compromised, retained vestiges of moral truth, goodness, love, and sacredness. Stories assumed these realities existed, even when they were imperfectly lived out.
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 praised. This shift did not occur overnight, but it accelerated sharply in the early twenty-first century as identity-based frameworks came to dominate moral discourse.
We can’t help but notice that something here endures. The longing for truth and goodness never disappears. In Christian terms, evil remains parasitic on the good. What lacks coherence cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Such inversions unravel morally once they are exposed.
Cody Lambert and the Good Man
Cody emerges from this earlier moral landscape as an archetypal figure whose apparent simplicity conceals a deeper moral integration. Carl Jung observed that certain archetypal forms unite what appears to be wisdom and folly, noting 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 in a morally disordered society. Its protagonist, Prince Myshkin, is innocent without being foolish, and his moral clarity exposes the corruption, vanity, and pretension of those around him. 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 or disillusionment.
His goodness is not ideological. He acts rather than lectures. He demonstrates loyalty to family, patience with children, respect for elders, and a gentleness that stands in stark contrast to a culture that confuses aggression with strength. His masculinity resists modern categorization because it is neither domineering nor “virtue signalling.” It is ordered beyond itself.
Contemporary discussions of archetypes, including those popularized by Jordan Peterson, help clarify this point. Jung’s archetypes are descriptive rather than theological. They identify recurring patterns of meaning rather than substitutes for God. Peterson, for all his theological limitations, correctly diagnoses a crisis of meaning in modern culture. When shared symbolic frameworks fall apart, “knowledge itself loses context, and the known reverts to the unknown.” Christianity does not compete with such insights. It fulfills what they gesture toward. Cody Lambert is not an abstraction. He is an embodied archetype, understandable especially to children.
Courtship, Chastity, and Honor
At its heart, Step by Step is also a love story. Cody’s unrequited affection for Dana Foster (a step-cousin) becomes one of the show’s most revealing moral threads. His attraction is not reducible to desire but is grounded in recognition of her intelligence and goodness, even when she masks them with defensiveness.
Again and again, Cody honors women while defending his own chastity and theirs. In one episode, he rescues Karen Foster (another step-cousin) from fraternity boys attempting to exploit her. When they mock her virginity, Cody publicly rebukes them, affirms his own chastity, and defends her physically when necessary. His restraint is not portrayed as repression but as uprightness.
Other episodes reinforce the pattern. When Dana is aggressively pursued by a biker, Cody intervenes decisively. When she is threatened at a train station, he does the same. His strength is always defensive, never predatory. That this portrayal was made credible by Mitchell’s real martial arts background only strengthens the point.
Such masculinity now appears almost unintelligible. Even among Christians, chastity and celibacy are often treated as defects to be mocked or corrected. That inverted moral logic would have been unintelligible in the moral world of Step by Step. Cody’s chastity is not a lack, but a form of self-mastery ordered toward love.
The Surfer Sage
Cody’s language plays a crucial role in this dynamic. His surfer dialect disarms others. It signals that he is not competing for dominance. Beneath the “dudes,” non sequiturs, and moments of blank reflection, lies not only moral intelligence, but genuine intellect. In one episode, he outperforms Dana on the SATs, quietly dismantling academic stereotypes.
One of the show’s most symbolically rich moments occurs when Cody appears poised to articulate a profound insight about life, only to lose his train of thought. The scene is played for comedy, yet it carries deeper resonance. This reflects the logic of the Innocent, long recognized in Christian tradition and literature, whose wisdom is mistaken for naïveté because it refuses unnecessary complexity. As St. Paul reminds us, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27).
Why Cody Could Not Be Written Today
It is difficult to imagine Cody Lambert appearing in a contemporary sitcom without irony or subversion. His masculinity and chastity would be ridiculed. His goodness would demand explanation. The cultural conditions that allowed such a character to exist have largely disappeared.
His persistence in collective memory suggests something important. Archetypes do not vanish. They recede, only to return when cultures sense their absence. The longing for goodness waits patiently to be rediscovered.
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 commonplace. Reflecting upon him is not a mere act of nostalgia, but a commemoration. He embodies a simple truth: that goodness is real and worth living out, even in a society unable to endure it.
Photo by eliza petrovska on Unsplash
