Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Summer DVR Dump: Lucifer 1.01: “Pilot”

“Do you think I'm the Devil because I'm inherently evil, or just because dear ol' dad decided I was?”
- Lucifer

If you can’t tell already, I’m usually a big fan of procedural with a twist shows: see Blindspot and Sleepy Hollow. So when I heard that the reviews were rather middling for “Lucifer” I was a little skeptical. But having watched the pilot, I have to admit I loved it. Tom Ellis and Lauren German have amazing chemistry together and Lucifer is just so smarmy that you can’t help but laugh (and the accent doesn’t hurt). I also think the show used some great “devil” music for the score. It really made it feel exciting.

When we first meet Lucifer, he’s driving down the streets of LA at a rather high speed and gets pulled over. But he uses his power (to make people confess their deepest desires) to get the officer who pulled him over to take a bribe. That scene totally sets up just how powerful Lucifer thinks he is. He is immortal after all. He heads to his strip club (because of course he owns a club) and meets up with a young woman named Delilah (who is now a big recording artist). She gets kind of down on herself about all the drugs and alcohol and drama she’s put herself through since Lucifer hooked her up with a producer but Lucifer tells her that she needs to pull it together. Sadly, she won’t get that chance because a guy pulls up and fills her full of bullets. Lucifer gets a little information out of the shooter (who drives into a bus) before he dies.

Enter Chloe Decker. She’s all about the facts and not falling for Lucifer’s smarmy attitude and tricks (and he tries very hard to get her to fall for them). That in and of itself is intriguing to both him and the audience. I certainly want to know what makes Chloe so special. Lucifer decides (despite a visit from fellow angel Amenediel (played by DB Woodside of Buffy season 7) warning him to go back to Hell) to pursue Delilah’s killer. He ends up crashing her ex-fiancé (and producer)’s wedding to a supermodel and learns that Delilah was seeing some rapper. So naturally he heads over to make some threats and learns that Delilah was sleeping with a married guy. Man, the girl got around! Just as Lucifer gets information on the therapist that Delilah was seeing in secret, Chloe shows up and arrest Lucifer for threatening the rapper. He convinces her to let him ride along to see the shrink and she agrees that if his tip pays off, he can help her work the case.

While Lucifer’s tip pays off, he and Chloe have a stop to make along the way. Her seven-year-old daughter, Trixie, got into a fight at school with a bully who was cyber-bullying her. So Trixie punched the girl in the vagina. Interesting move, chica. Lucifer doesn’t seem to like children even though Trixie takes him almost instantly. We also learn that one of the cops at the original crime scene that told Chloe to wrap up the case as an easy open and shut is her ex-husband and Trixie’s dad. Lucifer detest him almost immediately. I am kind of hoping that they don’t go the “pair up the two leads” route. It tends to be more fulfilling as a viewer if they can work together and have good chemistry but be friends.

At the therapist’s office, Lucifer gets the shrink to reveal who Delilah was sleeping with. He has to promise her sex in return for the answer but to him it’s a small price to pay, I suppose. It happens to be a former co-start of Delilah’s. He denies the affair at first but then Lucifer gets him to admit it (right in front of the guy’s wife). She knew about it and was banging his bodyguard. Gotta love Hollywood. After sharing a little backstory (Chloe tried being an actress first and then became a cop and then saw a cop shooting differently than everyone else and got ostracized for it), Lucifer figures out who the person was that ordered the hit on Delilah. So he and Chloe storm a recording session with Delilah’s former producer. It turns out he produced the soundtrack to one of the films Delilah was in and it boosts sales. Lucifer, being immortal and all, tries to get in the guy’s face but he shoots Chloe. So Lucifer gets really mad and tortures the guy before letting his soul pass on to hell. It was very interesting to see Lucifer (who didn’t care about leaving hell behind and the fact that no one is there to guard all the demons and damned souls) get super pissed that he’s not there to make the guy’s afterlife hell, no pun intended.

It wouldn’t be much of a series without the female lead so we know that Chloe survives her gunshot wounds. And it looks like Lucifer might have ingratiated himself enough with her to help out again once she’s out of the hospital. But Amenediel and Maze (Lucifer’s right and woman and bartender) aren’t pleased with how he’s acting. He’s the Devil after all and he should act accordingly. Of course Lucifer thinks that maybe he’s perceived as evil because God dictated it. I also want to know more about our angel friend because while at first he seemed like a messenger from God, the second time we see him it sounds like he might be more evil than we assumed. Since Lucifer doesn’t have wings (and we haven’t seen Maze do much yet), it’s hard to know if fallen angels (the other ones who left with Lucifer back in the day) have wings, too. I am very eager to find out what happens next and see how Lucifer and Chloe work together. And we definitely need more scenes with little Trixie because she’s a spitfire and makes Lucifer so damn uncomfortable that it’s hilarious.

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