Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Lucifer, Season 3, Episode 11: City of Angels?

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And then Lucifer wearing a hopelessly outdated suit and still making it work because he’s Lucifer and Tom Ellis has just mastered this role beyond compare.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