Lucifer, S2 E17: “Sympathy for the Goddess”
Written by Joe Henderson
Directed by Louis Milito

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“So our lead on the killer is a pair of butt boob eyes.”

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An angel who whines about not being his parents’ favorite, the devil who worked in the basement of the family business until he told his father to take the job and shove it, and a Goddess of All Creation who destroys a lot more than she creates. With the cosmic family like that, the messed up state of the world suddenly makes a lot more sense.

What is heaven like that Mum and Amenadiel are so desperate to get back to it? Is it an orderly place where things actually make sense? It must not be that great, for Lucifer shows no interest in returning there to stay. This episode opens with Mum and Amenadiel working hard to get another lost piece of the flaming sword so they can return to heaven. Unfortunately Mum is in charge of buying whatever this lost artifact is from one of her legal clients, and she works at a law firm that only represents guilty criminals. Being new to this kind of transaction, she gives a suitcase full of money to the client before he produces the artifact. When she and the boys follow the client, they find him dead on the floor and the money gone.

At the crime scene, Exceptional Ella finds a phone that doesn’t belong to the victim. Unfortunately, the phone is locked with a passcode and the only clue to the owner’s identity – presumably the killer – is a weird little graphic that might be eyeballs, boobies, buttocks, or a combination of all three. Exceptional Ella continues to prove that she can perform the work of all of the detectives in the department, should the LAPD ever need to engage in extreme layoffs, when she discovers that the graphic is the logo for a vanity record label. The record label exists solely to sell the music of one Chet Ruiz, who just happens to be the youngest son of a tequila magnate who is a big time crime lord involved in drugs, weapons sales, and the sex trade. This crime lord, Bianca Ruiz, is also one of Mum’s shady clients. Since the crime lord is holding a party to launch a new line of tequila, Mum and Decker decide to go undercover to see if they can get any evidence on the killer. Of course this requires that Decker tart up, glue on ho eyelashes, and enter the party with a supermodel strut.

At the party, Decker manages to overhear Chet tell his mother that he did commit the murder. The dead man was a runner for the mother’s drug trade, and Chet worked out that he was running a side business. Bianca informs him that she knew all about that and was in fact receiving 30% of the profits. Though Bianca has always kept him away from her criminal dealings, Chet has been trying to learn the business in order to impress his mother. There’s that theme of heartwarming family dysfunction reappearing again. He’s been putting all kinds of information about his mother’s illegal activities on his phone. Yup, the phone found by Exceptional Ella contains all of the accounts for an entire cartel, proving once again that Decker, Detective Douche, Lucifer, and pretty much everyone else who works for the LAPD could disappear from the show and it would still be a pretty good crime series.

Decker manages to eavesdrop on all of this, but Bianca catches her and confronts her. Decker pretends to be a gushing fangirl who crashed the party in order to meet Chet in person because she loves his music so much. In order to sell her cover, Decker sings a snippet of one of Chet’s songs, and even does a little awkward hip-hop dance. Whatever they’re paying this actress isn’t nearly enough.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the episode, Amenadiel complains to anyone and everyone who will listen that even though Lucifer always messed everything up, he was always the favorite.

Maze walks in on a strange, unfriendly man in Dr. Linda’s office who turns out to be an investigator from the state ethics board. He is investigating Dr. Linda for her role in helping Lucifer escape from the mental asylum in last week’s show. Later, after they find out that Dr. Linda has been suspended, Lucifer and Maze go to the ethics inspector to try and help with Dr. Linda’s case. Maze rips into Lucifer for being selfish and manipulative, because she’s upset that he plans to go back to heaven and abandon her. Instead of helping Dr. Linda, Lucifer lets slip that he not only slept with her, but he also paid for his therapy with sex. Instead of helping Dr. Linda after all that she has done for him, it looks like Lucifer has ended her career.

This bumbling by Lucifer pisses off Maze so much that she punches him in the stomach, kicks him in the balls, punches him in the face twice, and knees him in the groin. Lucifer goes all bad eyes on her, and all hell breaks loose, they end up beating the crap out of each other and destroying a park full of concrete benches before Lucifer finally admits that he never intended to stay with Mum and Amenadiel in heaven. He couldn’t tell Maze his plan, though, because he needed her to be angry so that Mum and Amenadiel will think he was going along with their intentions. This hurts her feelings even more.

The mother of Chet, the murderer, threatens Mum and her family unless she steals the phone back from the police. In exchange, she will give Mum the artifact she was trying to obtain from the dead client. Accordingly, Mum introduces herself to Exceptional Ella to try and get her hands on the phone. She doesn’t have to try too hard, though, because Ella leaves the room and asks Mum to look after the phone. Okay, maybe she’s not super cop after all. Just as Mum’s about to walk out with her prize, Decker walks in and catches her in the act.

Mum meets with the Bianca while wearing a wire. She hands over the phone and is given a key to a safety deposit box. Decker and Detective Douche burst in with the SWAT team and arrest Bianca and reclaim the phone. Back at Mum’s law office, Chet arrives and says that he brought the actual artifact that Mum’s been looking for. He pulls out a knife and stabs Mum in the stomach. When she removes the knife from her stomach, the wound emits enough divine light to fry Chet to a crisp.

The key opens a safe deposit box which contains an old book written in Sumerian, which only Amenadiel can read. He determines that the flaming sword was broken into three pieces: The Blade of Death, the Buckle of Life, and the Key That Binds Them Together. The book says that the key was given to God’s favorite son. While Amenadiel mewls about how Lucifer was always the favorite, he suggests that they try Lucifer’s ring to see if it’s the missing part of the sword. As Amenadiel approaches, however, his necklace stands away from his body like it’s magnetically attracted to the sword. It seems that he’s been pouting for eons for nothing, and our celestial trio has finally found the tool they need to return to heaven.

Lucifer should be the least likely TV show to make anyone feel better about their own messed up family situations, but it does a great job of just this. How many families have a father who sends his wife to jail and makes his son run that jail?  Then, that son kills his brother.  Another son is jealous of the first son and both sons have daddy issues. Both sons have also spent time as the lover of the same ninja biker girl. Now, it appears that the wife and two sons may break into the family home and kill the father?  Did I leave something out? Damn, my family is boring and I can just toss the Prozac.

Grade B+