It’s the episode I
never realised I needed so badly to see - Lucifer, first cast out of Heaven in
2011 with awesome opening text being all dramatic
And then Lucifer
wearing a hopelessly outdated suit and still making it work because he’s
Lucifer and Tom Ellis has just mastered this role beyond compare. He’s also
flaring his wings around with casual comfort. This isn’t apparently his first
holiday and he quickly embarks on some fun with booze, women and whipped cream
Which is when Amenadiel drops in to bring him back home and snark:
Amenadiel: Those poor
humans know not what they do
Lucifer: They all
know they’re doing me.
Amenadiel’s
condescension is heavy back here and it’s clear he knows very little about
humans. He demands Lucifer go back to hell and he menaces him as the strongest
angel - though Lucifer points out Amenadiel has never actually fought Lucifer.
Not that he will because the divine interacting on Earth is against the rules.
He’s also very worried what repeated exposure to the divine will do to humanity. To which Lucifer has a dirty but kind of awesome quip at the amount of divine that has been spilled on the sofa
But Lucifer backs
down when Amenadiel threatens to get dad involved -because back in 2011,
Lucifer still cared what daddy thought. He only begs for time to say goobye
And while he does
that Amenadiel gets shot and mugged (I’m pretty sure bullets didn’t put angels
on the floor before so retcon I guess), his holy necklace is stolen. And
everyone insults his robes - including Lucifer (I have to say in this episode
Lucifer and Amenadiel have an excellent “annoying little brother” vibe)
He hurries back to
Lucifer to steal clothes and go to the police to report the theft. These
clothes involve a Tshirt with “if you’re rich I’m single” written on it and… a
hat and sunglasses combo that will traumatise me forever.
He goes to the police
- to Chloe when she was still a uniformed cop - and knows so little about
humanity that he utterly fails to actually report a crime.
Instead he has to
appeal to Lucifer for help - and Lucifer agrees because he wants to spend more
time with LA and he also manages to extract a favour from Amenadiel.
His actions have also
set Chloe off, eager to prove herself as a detective (hubby Dan is already a
detective) and she begins her own investigations connecting Amendaiel’s mugging
with the shooting of a professional fighter called Aiden in the same area. She
notes that both the victims were very big men and not your most common mugging
victim.
Lucifer takes
Amenadiel for a bar, not for any investigation but for more booze and fun - and
he falls in love with the piano and playing it (there’s no music in Hell,
except Bieber music. He hasn’t heard music since heaven. A small note here is
clearly how little Amenadiel knows about hell and Lucifer’s existence there).
Amenadiel does
realise that Lucifer is stalling but they also see the news story about Aiden
being murdered and realise it’s connected. Lucifer knows where to follow up
there and promptly steals a car (Lucifer can turn anything on. Yes yes yes he
can).
Proving this they end
up at a porn set. No this isn’t Lucifer being Lucifer, he recognised one of the
women in the picture with Aiden (or her breasts anyway). Amenadiel is not
impressed by Lucifer’s fascination with porn stars and assumes he gets a lot of
porn stars in Hell - which Lucifer quickly shuts down - there are very few porn
stars in hell (he puts this down to the good work they do on Earth - but again,
we see how little Amenadiel knows about hell)
While Amenadiel gets
mistaken for a porn actor - and really do we need to humiliate Amenadiel at
every turn? It’s getting old - the same way we tend to use Dan as the eternal
punching bag - Lucifer interviews the porn actor (in between learning her firm
love of her job and how it pays better to help her pursue the career she wants)
who tells them that Aiden was a professional fighter who was approached about
throwing a fight.
So time to go to the
fights with overly sexualised female fighters - and do we really need to have
sexy women in every scene and place Lucifer goes to? It’s getting more than
slightly ridiculous now and equally tedious. We get it, Lucifer is surrounded
by beautiful women and likes sex - but it’s ludicrous that everywhere he goes
he happens to run across half naked sexualised women.
He passes Amenadiel
off as a trained fighter which he obviously shows off with his unbelievable
divine power as God’s greatest warrior. Which means we then get a hilarious
training montage of Lucifer training Amenadiel to reign in his ridiculous
divine might. Eventually they do find someone willing to pay money to throw
fights - and whisk him away for questioning
Which Amenadiel quickly passes to Lucifer since he does torture thing. Again his ignorance shows - and Lucifer outsources this to Mazikeen (her first introduction to Earth) who is his chief torturer - since he doesn’t torture. She goes in… and is overwhelmed by the choice. In hell she has to torture people with their own guilt, but on Earth she can torture with anything so she uses sex
Gah, this episode
really has so much going for it, I absolutely love this whole look into
Lucifer’s past and what caused him to come to Earth but even for Lucifer
it’s ludicrously over-sexualised.
I do like Maze’s
lines on torture:
“You don’t have to do
this!”
“No, I get to do
this.”
This episode has some
good lines.
Anyway he was a red
herring but leads to someone else paying large sums to make someone lose the
fight so they decide the best way to do this is to actually throw a match. So
they set off and Amenadiel thanks Lucifer - he knew it was best to turn to him who
was more cunning, crafty and evil
Which wipes Lucifer’s
face - evil is not something he accepts. He’s not just offended, but enraged -
complete with glowing red eyes - and gets in the ring with Amenadiel. He can’t
win against his more powerful brother but Amenadiel has to swallow his pride to
throw the fight for their plan. He also refuses to “stoop” to Lucifer’s level,
clearly holding his brother in contempt
Their plan does
expose the man behind the theft who they question, get the necklace back and,
for Amenadiel, everything is good. For Lucifer not so much - the man is Aiden’s
manager, considers himself to be a father figure to the man he murdered. A
father who killed his son for refusing to play his role in his father’s plan.
Yes that’s Lucifer’s sore spot. Very very sore spot.
He pulls out his
devil face and sends the man to Chloe and Daniel spouting confessions of guilt
Chloe has been
following her own clues and investigation to come to the same conclusion
(complete with managing to get information from Charlotte in her criminal
lawyer days) showing competence and capability without needing any supernatural
involvement which is always good
In the aftermath
Amenadiel is ready for them to go home but Lucifer is taking the words of the
porn actor to heart - LA is a place to embrace freedom. He’s come to realise he
isn’t an angel any more, he’s been rejected and condemned by his father for
aeons so why is he trying to seek his father’s approval still? If god has
abandoned him why shouldn’t he abandon god? If his father - and Amenadiel -
have decided to condemn him as evil why not embrace that?
And he has a favour owed by Amenadiel to call in to stop him dragging Lucifer home. If god wants to impose his wrath, well he knows where to find Lucifer
Amenadiel leaves -
and Mazikeen cuts off Lucifer’s wings, with tears in her eyes
Though this episode
was largely light hearted and silly and with some problems because of that -
the over sexualisation and the constant humiliation of Amenadiel, I also found
it subtly powerful in exposing just why Lucifer is doing this. Not just because
Hell isn’t fun, but how firmly he is DONE with god and the trappings of Heaven,
just the sheer enormity of what it means to cut off his wings and, from all
that, just how outrageous it is to him to have those wings returned against his
will. We knew all this on some level, but seeing Amenadiel’s complete ignorance
of what hell means, of who Lucifer is, of what he stood for, the casual
condemnation and contempt they have for him all. This just really works in
building that foundation of this show and these characters
