Lucifer Continues to Defy Father's Will, Snark His Way Through LA ("Lucifer, Stay. Good Devil.")

Image courtesy of Screencapped.net

FOX has tricked me into watching a buddy cop police show. Except I'm mostly OK with it.

This week on Lucifer, we explore with a new sordid crime that Chloe Decker feels the need to poke her nose in. While the crime is sleazy and trashy, it's nothing we haven't seen before. There are no twists here waiting in the shadows.

What is waiting in the shadows is our anti-hero, Lucifer Morningstar. And once again, his character shines through the banality of the plot. His zingy one-liners are a bit more toned down this week, but the character is still on point and struggling with the fact that Chloe Decker fascinates him, to the point of making him more human - a change that does not go unnoticed by Amenadiel and Lucifer's lackey Maze. 

But what's still interesting here is how unhuman he is - how he frightens a charlatan doomsayer on the streets of L.A. for laughs, how he causes a brawl among the paparazzi with a few words, how he snaps at Maze and we get a glimpse of how he might once have been in hell. What exactly his powers are remains a bit of a mystery - we know he can persuade people, he clearly has some form of levitation ability, but it doesn't appear that he can slow down time like Amenadiel can. (Immortality and apparent invincibility almost go without saying.) 

As the show progresses, we're getting more backstory into what happened to cause Lucifer's resentment of "Father." It sounds almost like he was bullied into his position against his will, and having a devil who isn't really interesting in being the devil at all goes against expectations and works really well for the show. It makes him sympathetic, because who hasn't been in that position, forced to take on a role that they didn't really want in the first place?

That being said, he's definitely into punishing those he believes deserves it (leading to some very funny dialogue when he tells Chloe that yes, it really is that simple for him). His plan to make our two paparazzi criminals attempt to shoot each other was deliciously sadistic, and his unrepentant use of Amenadiel's ability to slow time to suit his own purposes was a genius way to tie up the end of the episode.

The therapist angle also has a lot of potential - it's very Sopranos-esque. It's clear she doesn't believe him, but it's fascinating that he even feels the need to get himself a shrink. 

The rest of the show continues to truck along. Chloe got marginally more interesting this episode, and her daughter is an absolute treat whenever she's on screen. Much like Lucifer, I'd love to see Chloe's mom become a character, and I'd be interesting in meeting more supernatural entities other than just Lucifer, Maze and Amenadiel. The buddy cop aspect of the show doesn't do much for me, though the scenes where Lucifer subverts the genre are quite wonderful (especially the older woman he "persuades" to let him break the suspect out of custody near the end).

But what I really want to see next week (aside from Maze's response to Lucifer's conversation with Amenadiel at the end of the episode) is Chloe's reaction as she starts to believe. She knows he survived six gunshots, that he snatched a bullet out of the air and managed to disappear before her eyes and reappear behind her. And now she's seen Lucifer's leftovers - the record producer from episode 1 who's now in a psych ward and screams, "He's the devil!" when she questions him.

Chloe is teetering on the edge of a big revelation - and I want to see her fall off.

Other Assorted Thoughts:

• Lucifer's pad is sweeeeeet.
• The apple was a nice piece of continuity work in that scene.
• I will never think about the Eiffel Tower the same way again.
• Lucifer telling Chloe's daughter to fetch and calling her "little human" kills me (in a good way). As someone who doesn't care all that much for children, his attitude resonates strongly with me.
• Also did I hear the term "spank bank" get used? If so, mad props writers.
• The title line is very funny in context.