LUCIFER Recap “Quid Pro Ho”

By Chris B

Tonight’s episode of Lucifer picks up with last week’s cliffhanger, Charlotte primed to shred Chloe into confetti with a car bomb.  But, alas, the fun will have to wait.  Amenadiel intervenes and convinces her that if she follows through with her plan, Lucifer would hate her forever.  This appalls Mom—one paltry human against her divine greatness, against his family?

“What’s so damn special about this one?” Charlotte muses.  Stick around and find out.

Dan is whistling his way through a Monday, a fact that does not go unnoticed by Ella, who accurately pegs him as a man relieved of his sexual frustration (and not by himself, for a change).  His glee is cut short, however, when he opens the postal box that contains the severed head of Boris Sokolov, the prosecution’s key witness in the case against Perry Smith for John Decker’s death.

But wait—there’s more!  The new lawyer for the defense?  None other than Mommie Dearest.  This is part of her plan to show Lucifer that Chloe is not worthy of him, that she would never even come close to making the sacrifices for him that he has on her behalf—namely, killing his own brother to protect her.  When Charlotte reveals casually that she nearly blew Chloe up, Lucifer goes all red-demon-eyes on her and makes her promise she won’t touch Decker.  Charlotte assures him very deliberately, “I’m not going to hurt anyone.”  This only begs the question: who will?

Chloe appeals to Ella to help her link Perry to Boris’s death so the case does not fall through entirely.  She is able to offer that the cut on Boris’s neck is very precise, accomplished by an industrial meat slicer.  But wait—there’s more!  Amid the human DNA was that of a very specific swine sold only at one location.  How convenient!

In the meantime, Lucifer’s concocted a way to help the trial in his own way:  he’s wheedled his way onto the prosecution’s witness list.  He presents his account of Boris’s arrest as a worthy audition for Witness of the Year, when his melodramatic, prop-laden story gets him a burst of applause from the whole courtroom.  (Ok, so Law and Order it’s not, but at least it had Tom Ellis wrap a scarf around his waist and point suggestively to his genitals.  That has to be worth something, right?)  By the end of his testimony, he and the judge are calling each other by first names.

Later, Chloe is steamed.  She believes that Lucifer’s relationship with Charlotte has cost them the case, that he had to be the one who leaked to his mom that Decker had been the first to the Fields’ scene.  However, it was poor hapless Dan, whose sex-induced “mild coma” gave Charlotte the perfect window to go through his phone and find out all she needed to know.  To cap off her dominance over him, Charlotte gives a Trump-worthy display of licking Dan’s ear and grabbing his ass before leaving him standing alone on the concrete.
Then, Dan gets a lead on Boris’s killer based on the unique neck scar he’d displayed to the butcher shop employee.  He is a member of a Chinese gang who war with the Russian mob, but before he, Lucifer, and Maze can properly investigate, Maze gets Dan to admit that he had been the one to leak the about Chloe to Charlotte when the did the naked mambo.  Lucifer attacks him, and they make a rather clumsy entrance into the gang’s little clubhouse; luckily, the devil speaks Chinese, so Luci is able to make nice with the gang leader, a lovely girl in serious leather, who negotiates a bargain:  the gang will hand over the man who killed Boris if one of Lucifer’s clan can defeat Kang (who looks like a disgruntled, sword-wielding reject from The King and I auditions down the street) in a duel.  Lucifer nominates Maze.  She wins.  Duh.

When Dan and Lucifer arrive to collect their spoils, they find that their quarry is already dead, killed by the Triads for going behind their back.  Perry’s circle seems complete. Not surprisingly, he is found not guilty.

But Dan pays a surprise visit to Perry on the sidewalk outside a seedy downtown joint; he delivers what amounts to a Judas kiss, marking him as the target for the Russian mob, who “don’t like it when one of their own is taken out without permission.”  As Dan saunters away, some gun-toting comrades pour out of a van and drag Perry away.

Justice served.

Truth Has Consequences

Lucifer visits Dr. Linda and tries to bluff his way through details about his date with Chloe, but she knows immediately that he’s “chickened out.”  And though he protests loudly that he never does so, she wisely calls him out on his lying—in this case, to himself about his feelings for Chloe.  This quiets him, as he’s never quite seen it that way.  Kudos, Doc.

Lucifer marches to Decker’s apartment, striding in only marginally prepared to explain why he stood her up; while Chloe’s mom, Penelope, is happy to see him, her daughter is not up for his guff.  Today is the first day of the trial of her father’s killer, so Lucifer takes the out and offers to be “an emotional jock strap for the Decker family jewels.”  Thus, it is fitting when, before he steps down from the witness chair, he issues a gushing spiel about Decker’s honesty and professional acumen, which clearly touches her.

Charlotte’s first action for the defense is to recall Lucifer, intent on asking him one question:  Who was the detective who was first on the scene of Joe Fields’s (her father’s supposed killer) death?  He answers truthfully that it was Chloe; however, the report that she produces from the LAPD claims Dan was the first one there.  Charlotte backs Lucifer into a corner, forcing him (since he doesn’t lie) to set up Chloe as the one who potentially has committed a crime, suggesting that she has interfered with the investigation and is involved in a massive police cover-up.

Then, Charlotte is able to deliver her ultimatum to Chloe:  she will convince her client to plead guilty if Chloe betrays Lucifer and, under oath, calls him a liar.

Despite her passion for justice and love for her father, Chloe doesn’t even seem to consider it.  She does not hesitate to offer Lucifer praise and chastise herself:  “Lucifer Morningstar is many things, but he is not a liar.  Everything that [he] said on this stand is absolutely true.  I was the first person on that crime scene…I let my emotions get the best of me.  Lucifer is the best partner I have ever had, and I can only hope that he can count on me as much as I can count on him.”  Lucifer is struck dumb, as if he had never had anyone make such a plain show of faith in him.

Later, he shares a private dinner with Chloe to make up for the one he’d missed.  They smile, they chuckle, they brush fingertips.  Then, they share the most awkward and extended inch-to-the-kiss scenes I’ve ever seen, grinding to a stop several inches from one another.  Crap.

Selfish Ways

Amenadiel shows up at Chloe’s house to recover the bomb from her undercarriage—her car’s, that is.  Maze interrupts him, and he tries to dodge her by claiming he was there to see her because he missed her.  When they kiss, she wrenches the detonator from his pocket and uses it to explode the bomb, which she has already attached to Amenadiel’s car.  She leaves him with two important tips:  “One, tell your mother no one is hurting Chloe on my watch; and two, don’t ever lie to me like that again.”

Amenadiel stops to see Dr. Linda after his encounter with Maze, still clenching the charred steering wheel of his former car.  She tries to get her patient to understand why Maze may have been motivated to blow up the vehicle, but to him, the answer is clear:  “she is a complete maniac, fueled by rage and violence.”  The doctor tries to get him to understand that maybe, just maybe, he’d played a role in what happened; his action of “obscuring the truth a little bit” is just one of the ways that he mows over the people that he cares about while simultaneously feeling justified in doing so because he thinks he’s serving a greater purpose.  (Wow, he really is Mommy’s little boy, isn’t he?)  It is exactly what he had done to Dr. Linda, too, he realizes mournfully.  Doctor’s orders?  “Apologize your ass off, or next time, [Maze] might blow that off.”
Amenadiel, toting flowers, shows up to apologize to Maze; instead, he finds Chloe’s mother desperately in need of someone to help her grapple with the acquittal of her husband’s killer.  Amenadiel gives her the comfort that, while the reasons for tragic events are cloudy at best, “no matter how bad things get, the true test is how we choose to respond to the pain we suffer, or inflict.”

Suddenly, at the end of their conversation, Amenadiel is struck by something about Penelope, and while she claims he looks very familiar, he swears they’ve never met and hurries away.  Why the change?  He recalls that thirty-five years ago, God had sent him to Earth to bless a couple who had been unable to have a child, the only request of that kind Dad had ever given to him.  Any guesses who that couple was?  Hint:  they had a girl—a beautiful, blonde, mystery-solving girl.

Now Amenadiel knows why Chloe is so special.  Now, he knows he’s been a pawn this whole time.  And now, Charlotte has a new way that she can manipulate Lucifer and Chloe’s relationship to get what she wants most—her ticket home.