Lucifer cast

What do you do when you’ve seen the face of the devil?

Dr. Linda’s having quite a time wrestling with that very fact after Lucifer’s epic reveal in last week’s episode. But while the good doctor has seen the literal face of evil, Chloe Decker’s experience is a bit more human but no less jarring. It turns out that Joe Fields, the man convicted in her father’s murder, has been given a parole furlough of sorts to spend time with family. Unable to come to grips with such an injustice, Chloe tails the temporarily-released Fields only to come across his dead body along with the two transport parole guards in what has all the markings of a professional hit.

Based on their interactions, we could have a spin-off. The Tales of Lucifer and Detective Dan.
Based on their interactions, we could have a spin-off/webisode. The Tales of Lucifer and Detective Dan.

Good cop that she is, Chloe understands that working the Fields murder case would be a major conflict of interest, so Detective Dan and Lucifer team up for the investigation, much to the former’s chagrin. While Chloe’s emotional plight is well crafted, showing the detective with her emotions laid bare in a way we haven’t seen before, the levity and unexpected depth of interaction between Lucifer and Dan are something to behold. Early on Lucifer decides that in his current personality, he only hurts those he cares for; so what better way to change the narrative than to be, well, like boring Detective Douche? The pair actually work well together, tracking down one potential murder suspect after another while at the same time discovering a bit more about each other. Hell, we even discover that Dan’s doing a bit of acting improv, a hobby he picked up to distract him from he and Chloe’s divorce. The two men discover they have a bit more in common than they would have ever believed, with each finding traits in the other that they admire and, in some respects, envy. They may not be best friends anytime soon but it’s very possible they’ve turned a corner in their (primarily) antagonistic relationship.

Back to Chloe, who has the biggest change to process when she discovers that Fields was not the man that killed her father. Boris Sokolov, a fixer for the Russian mob, points Chloe to the true culprit, Deputy Warden Harry Smith. Turns out that Officer Decker was poking around in things that some powerful people didn’t like and the Deputy Warden eliminated the threat. Though many questions still remain (What did Decker know/Will his investigation come back to haunt Chloe, etc),  at least for now, Chloe knows the man responsible for the hit is paying the price. And her final scene with Lucifer in an exclamation point in Chloe’s ordeal and the potential developments with Lucifer. “I think he would be proud of you,” Lucifer tells Chloe in regards to her father. The subsequent hug she gives Lucifer conveys the emotional bond between the two.

Mazikeen not only saves the day by tracking down the Deputy Warden, but she finds her calling as body guard. Another spin-off perhaps?
Mazikeen not only saves the day by tracking down the Deputy Warden, but she finds her calling as body guard. Another spin-off/webisode, perhaps?

Coming full circle from the beginning, we have the understandable freaked out Dr. Linda. Not only has she looked into the face of the devil but then she also discovers that her friend Maze is a demon. Similar to Chloe, Maze also shows a vulnerability—one we got a glimpse of last week after she showed Trixie her true face—one that goes beyond her torturous ways. Like Lucifer and Amenadiel, Mazikeen’s time on earth continues to shape her in ways she’s not quite sure how to handle. That’s not to say she doesn’t like a bit of blood and violence, after all, she is the one that tracked down the Deputy Warden and, in the process discovers her calling of bounty hunter! But again, the biggest development is that of Dr. Linda making the decision to work through the PTSD of Lucifer’s reveal and putting faith in the people she’s come to know them as and not their origins. Like the Lucifer/Dan bromance, time will tell how well it all works out.

Post Script

  • More than any episode thus far, ‘My Little Monkey’ had every character coming to terms with the life, who they are, and how past events have shaped them. The most obvious is Chloe delving more into her father’s murder and the new information on his death. Everything points to this not being over but despite the extra layer that may exist there, it looks as if Chloe may have turned a corner in accepting his death more than she’s ever had in the past. In a way, not talking about her father has chained her to that dark past but if her final scene with Lucifer is any indication, she’s ready to move forward in her life and become all the better for it.
  • On the attempt to move forward, Dr. Linda does just that with Maze through a leap of faith, if you will. Imagine you’ve become friends with someone and find out he or she was an assassin in the past. How do you process the person you’ve come to know them as with the person they are? Sure, we all have a past with things we’re not proud of, but to have someone with such a fundamentally different origin than your own can be difficult to accept. That doesn’t mean we are prejudice or unforgiving, but that we’re human and sometimes we don’t handle the truth when it’s placed before us as well as we’d like to think we would.
  • Though I love Lucifer’s snarky nature, at times his continual bashing of Dan wears a bit on the nerves. This is why his admission to the detective that he does it all “because you’re everything I’m not” was very poignant and gives Dan a greater insight into Lucifer. It’s not to say the two will be best buds but there is some good material to work in there, with Lucifer the sarcastic bastard to Dan’s straight man. Beyond that though, there’s a chance both men may take snippets of what he sees in the other and incorporate it into their personality. For Lucifer that would be to think things through a bit more while, for Dan, being a bit more spontaneous may put them both in a better place.
  • The one disappointment I had is that we didn’t get to see more of Chloe’s past. I will say that, if the breadcrumbs of John Decker’s murder are still out there, maybe we’ll see a bit more of that past play out on screen.

Lucifer: “My Little Monkey” –> 4/5 pitchforks