Lucifer, S2 E18: “The Good, the Bad, and the Crispy”
Written by Ildy Modrovich
Directed by Karen Gaviola

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“Definitely rethinking the lasagna I had for lunch.”

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An old saying posits that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. This suggests that he’s a mean old bugger with a sadistic sense of humor. But seriously, folks, let’s play devil’s advocate here, and ask a deep, existential question: if God is omniscient why do you have to tell him anything? Shouldn’t he already know? And by extension, all this plotting that Mum, Lucifer, and Amenadiel have been doing to get back into heaven must already be known to the big guy. And if that’s true, then what’s the use of having free will, if everything anyone chooses to do can always be completely undone at the whim and will of Der Commandant in the sky?

The season finale of Lucifer begins with Mum stapling her stomach together so that she doesn’t incinerate everyone and everything in her path. She also calls a cleaner to dispose of Chet’s body, the unfortunate gangster she UV’ed to death in last week’s episode. She recruits Dr. Linda to help her find a more permanent solution to her problem and the ever resourceful Dr. Linda patches her together with duct tape. Mum reveals to Lucifer that, not only did she torch Chet, but they must find the missing parts of the flaming sword and get back to heaven as soon as possible before she bursts and microwaves the entire planet. Meanwhile, Exceptional Ella and Detective Decker find Chet’s body, completely shaved and doused in bleach, in a warehouse. It’s not often on a crime show that the weekly homicide victim turns up with a fried head.

Knowing that Mum is responsible for Chet’s death, Lucifer tries to stall the police investigation into the murder. Although the professional cleaner hired by Mum did a great job of leaving no forensic evidence, Exceptional Ella figures out that they can use satellite imaging on the location where the body was found. This gives Decker and Lucifer a lead on a van, which just happens to be owned by a company that cleans crime scenes. Decker and Lucifer arrive at the van’s location just in time to see two people in full hazmat gear carrying a plastic-wrapped corpse on a stretcher. The cleaners turn out to be two young women who are sisters, one of whom took the van to the area where the body was found in order to meet up with an ex-boyfriend. That seems to initially clear the two of any wrongdoing.

Amenadiel goes AWOL because he’s so thrilled that he is actually God’s favorite son. This restores his faith, and his sense that contrary to what he and Lucifer previously believed, God was not manipulating them. He was merely allowing them to form their own beliefs.

Amenadiel attends one of Detective Douche’s acting classes because Douche told him that it was such a great way to work out problems. Instead of staying on script, he keeps obsessing about how he can’t possibly attack heaven and kill his father, now that he knows he’s the favorite son. The idea of being Daddy’s favorite little boy makes him so exuberant that he gives Douche a big hug. Lucifer commissions Maze to bounty-hunt Amenadiel. She tasers him and brings him back to Lux, where Lucifer has locked Mum in the wine cellar. What a family! When Amenadiel tells Lucifer that he no longer wants to fight Daddy, Lucifer admits that he never intended to enter heaven. He simply planned to get Mum through the gate and take off, leaving Mum and God to duke it out.

Unbeknownst to Lucifer and Amenadiel, though, Mum has escaped from the wine cellar. Knowing that something is hinky, she goes to Dr. Linda to force her to reveal Lucifer’s plans.

Another crispy-fried body turns up, and this one belongs to one of the cleaners. The surviving sister reveals to Decker that she did get back together with her ex, but he has a gambling problem and needed money. She “cleaned” Chet’s body in return for $100,000. Since she sees her sister’s death as a warning, she refuses to reveal who hired her. Decker calls Lucifer at Lux and asks him to do the eyeball thing just as Mum walks back in. Lucifer’s strange behavior on the case leads Decker to conclude that Mum must be involved in the murders.

Amenadiel and Lucifer try to talk Mum out of her planned invasion of heaven. Amenadiel refuses to reveal where he’s hidden the third piece of the flaming sword. Miffed that they’ve been working against her, she throws them both 50 feet, and leaves.

Douche and Decker track Mum to the Santa Monica Pier. She uses Decker’s phone to call Lucifer, threatening to obliterate Decker and all of the humans nearby if he and Amenadiel don’t do what she wants. Lucifer brings two of the three parts of the flaming sword to the pier, and gets the third piece from Douche: Amenadiel had slipped it into his jeans pocket while they hugged. Mum admits to Decker that she burned Chet, but she says she didn’t have anything to do with the death of the cleaner. Just then, Chet’s brother Hector appears. He pulls a gun and points it at Mum in revenge for Mum’s betrayal of his mother and the death of his brother. Lucifer tries to stop him, knowing that an injury like that to Mum would be like setting off a huge bomb, but Hector fires his gun twice.

Maze and Amenadiel find Dr. Linda badly injured on the floor of her office. She’s bleeding out, and Amenadiel can see that she won’t live long enough to get to a hospital. Apparently his restored faith has restored his powers: he doesn’t stop time, but he slows it enough to give Maze a chance to get help for Dr. Linda. It also slows time enough that Lucifer and Mum have time to jump off the pier onto the sand below before the bullets reach Mum.

Lucifer ignites the flaming sword and points it towards Mum. He tells her that she cannot go back to heaven. They both know that that would inevitably cause a war with terrible casualties. Surprisingly, Mum doesn’t want to hurt any of her children. Lucifer tells her that she must go forward, not backward, and uses the sword to slice open the universe, creating a portal of some kind. He tells Mum that she must create a new world. They say goodbye. The light leaves the body Mum’s been occupying, which crumples to the ground, and she enters the portal. Lucifer tosses the flaming sword into it behind her. Up on the pier, Decker shoots Hector, thus ending the standoff.

Way back at the beginning of this season, Mum entered the body of Charlotte Richards, reanimating it after someone shoved a screwdriver into her spinal cord. At first it looks like Mum’s departure has left Charlotte’s dead body on the beach, but Charlotte is alive. She wakes up but of course does not know who any of these people around her are, nor what has happened, because she wasn’t present for any of it. Later, in the hospital, Dr. Linda also wakes up. While it initially looked like we were losing two characters in this season finale, the head count actually remains the same: though Mum is gone, Charlotte is now present, albeit in the same body, and Dr. Linda survives.

Lucifer calls Decker and leaves her a message that he plans to tell her all about himself and his family. Apparently, at that moment, God laughs. Someone conks Lucifer on the back of the head and he wakes up all alone and half desiccated in the middle of the desert.  When he stands up, it is in his full divine majesty, pristine white wings and all.

Next fall when season three begins, all of these characters will scheme and plot and choose and believe and make plans. And then God will laugh. Sometimes this show is just too damn uncomfortably close to real life to be funny. After all, as John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.

GRADE: B+