LUCIFER Winter Finale Recap: Lucifer Goes to Hell and Back For Chloe

By Chris B

Quiz time:  You have a fatal poison coursing through your veins.  What do you do?

Scream tortuously?  Weep copiously?  Go to the hospital?

Not if you’re Chloe Decker.  She opts to fall back on her skills, choosing to work the problem like a detective to try to find an antidote before it’s too late.

She locates the man who had smuggled shipments for the maker of the poison, Professor Carlisle, reasoning if he had smuggled poisons, perhaps he’d also moved antidotes as well.  Unfortunately, the man’s closed-door session with a red-eyed Lucifer yields no leads.

When Chloe passes out, however, she’s no choice but to hunker down at the hospital while Lucifer and Dan carry on with the case.  They head to the art show of Dave Maddox, but when Dave suggests that an ex-wife is better off dead, Dan decides to comment with a fist to his jaw.  Bad move.  This lands he and Lucifer in handcuffs in a back room, getting worked over by Dave’s henchmen.

When Lucifer realizes that the capture is not part of Dan’s elaborate plan, he rolls his eyes, breaks free in seconds, and demolishes the goons.  When Dave returns with a baseball bat, Lucifer offers a sage warning:  “Take a swing, and I’ll shove that so far up your ass, you’ll have splinters in your stool.”

They barter a deal, agreeing to purchase one of Dave’s hideous paintings in exchange for a file containing the antidote ingredients; unfortunately, there’s no recipe, so the amounts of each ingredient are unknown.  The only place the recipe exists, apparently, is within the professor’s mind.

A mind that no longer exists on Earth.  But it does exist somewhere else.

Lucifer decides to “pop down to Hell and have a chat with the professor.”  How?  Simple:  die.

His immortal clan is not so keen on the idea.  Maze cannot go with him for protection, and she fears he’ll go through one of the doors and be trapped.  Even Charlotte is opposed, calling it “a terrible idea.”  After all, Lucifer was once the Lord of Hell, but he’s been away for a long while, and he cannot be certain that his plan to die, get the formula, and have the others return him to Earth, will work.

Charlotte refuses to have any role in the plan, but Amenadiel and Maze agree to help however they can.  Dr. Linda, who has been present for their dizzying “celestial planning session,” is charged with the duty of bringing Lucifer back from the dead; now the other two have to decide who gets the unutterable joy of killing Lucifer.  Rock-paper-scissors, perhaps?

The clan goes to the hospital and set up shop in the room directly below Chloe’s since being close to her makes Lucifer vulnerable—well, “killable.”  Thus, Amenadiel must make sure that Chloe is not moved during the experiment, since the effects of Lucifer shifting from mortality to immortality mid-stream are unknown.

Ella, using her legal contacts, has tracked down all of the antidote ingredients, save one: a chemical called ZX3.  This she can obtain from one of her illegal contacts—sorry, Dan, step aside—that is known to her from her days of stealing cars and needing to “drive them really, really fast.”  The chop-shop owner who has the chemical is unlikely to part with it voluntarily; thus, “desperate times call for a little B&E.”

Their operation is interrupted by the owner of the shop and his loaded shotgun.  This looks bad.  However, it turns out that the chop shop is owned by Ella’s brother, so she easily cajoles him into giving them the chemical that they need.

Lucifer is prepared to die by defibrillator in some kind of a replay of the movie Flatliners, in which they stop his heart and restart it 60 seconds later.  When Maze gets cold feet and Dr. Linda panics, Lucifer grabs the paddles and stops his own heart, finding himself wandering through the dark mazes of Hell.  He enters a door, finding the professor repeating the act that ruined his life and sent him down to the depths.  He’s suffering for eternity in a Groundhog Day of never-ending torture.

The only way to relieve Carlisle’s guilt and stop the torture?  Save the detective.  He hastily scribbles the formula and hands it over.  His torture continues as Lucifer, revealing his true form, exits to wait for his resurrection.

But it doesn’t come.  Instead, he is drawn to a room from which emanates piano music (“Killing Me Softly”—nice touch).  Who’s playing?  Uriel, the brother that Lucifer killed to save Chloe.  Apparently, Lucifer’s own guilt has trapped him, too.

Uriel, who very helpfully pronounces himself “a manifestation of [Lucifer’s] own guilty conscience,” in case any of us were confused, chides Lucifer for not following up on his clue, his dying words:  “The peace is here.”  Peace in the moment?  A piece of a puzzle?  That is for Lucifer to figure out, but his brother is not so confident in his abilities, assuring him ominously, “I hope you didn’t leave any unfinished business up on Earth, because you’re never getting out of here.”

Wrong.  Uriel may be one for patterns, but Lucifer is successful in breaking this one.  Lucifer returns, the plan is successful, and Decker survives.

When she awakens, Chloe asks Lucifer if they can pick up where they left off, but he dodges her desire to talk, still feeling that it was all a sham, and he later screams to Charlotte that he can no longer trust anything or anyone, including her.  He is done being a pawn in somebody else’s game.

Chloe, released from the hospital, tries desperately to get a hold of him, but he does not answer her calls.  When she shows up at his apartment, the place is empty, the furniture covered in sheets.

Lucifer is gone.

The Density of Intensity

All of the drama of Lucifer is playing out in what the characters have convinced themselves is a sad and ill-fated way.  This makes them, for lack of a better term, idiots.

It is blindingly obvious that the “blessing” of Chloe Decker’s existence is the way in which every celestial screw-up has been able to redeem themselves, motivating them to make choices of a more difficult, but more enlightened, variety.

For instance, when Chloe goes critical—her monitors scream, and she is seizing—the doctor wants to move Chloe for immediate treatment, but Amenadiel stands in her way.  He finds his strength again.  He throws off multiple security guards and blocks the doorway, intent to keep his word and have faith that the plan in progress will work and she will be saved.  He prevents her from getting more care, but in the end, it is what helps to save her life.

Further, even Charlotte shows up and volunteers to put herself in the line of fire, to be the one to go to Hell and pull Lucifer out.  Maze has no problem zapping Mommy before she can finish a sentence, and she awakens in the realm she’d escaped and swore she’d never return to.

She arrives when Lucifer is stuck in the repeated process of stabbing his brother, over and over again, echoing the professor’s words after he grabs his dissertation and leaves an innocent man to die:  “I had no choice.”  Charlotte interrupts him, his “rescue party of one,” and claims instead that the situation is her fault, confessing that she’d been manipulating Lucifer the entire time, “stoking [his] fire” against God in a bid to use Lucifer against Him.  Her actions, she realizes, have only made things worse.  She has pushed Lucifer and Chloe together, knowing he’d be “crushed” when he learned the truth about her origins, and now Decker is dying.  She, for once, seems to accept her role in the tragedy and addresses it with a degree of honesty.

The most egregiously blind, though, is Lucifer.  No reason other than his obvious Daddy issues would cause him to think that encountering Chloe is a punishment or a trick.  From the outset, she is someone he cannot manipulate with his freakish “desire stare”; she is immune to his magical charms.  Thus, her affection for him could only have come from a genuine source.  Despite his angst, Chloe can be nothing but real.

Further, his affection for her has caused him to deviate from his self-involved egotism; he forgoes the typical quick shag and instead forges a friendship with her, one that grows from mutual respect.  It allows him to care for another more than himself, to risk his existence in order to save hers.  She has been the impetus to release his finer qualities of love and generosity through his actions.  In fact, it is the mention of the detective which brings Lucifer back to himself while in Hell, that allows him to literally break the pattern of his self-destruction.  When he moves to leave, Charlotte has gotten stuck, wanting to stay where Uriel is as a “happy family,” but Lucifer drags her from the room as Dr. Linda tries repeatedly to restart his heart up above, ensuring his mother is saved as well.

Do these beings need a road map, or simply a well-placed elbow to the face?  I guess Sherlock had it right:  there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

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