This recap contains spoilers for Lucifer seasons 1-4.
Right now, there are two types of Lucifans: those who watched since the series was still on FOX, viewers who discovered the charming Lucifer Morningstar and his merry band of miscreants (and angels) once the show was rescued and revived on Netflix. No matter how you met the devil, however, it’s impossible to escape his charm.
Lucifer was already a worldwide hit before the network change, but it’s clear the shift was a good one. It’s been the number one streaming show on its own network for weeks, is currently the number one streaming show, period, and more people are watching since the move to Netflix than ever did on FOX. Season five hasn’t been announced as of the writing of this piece, but with all this success, it feels imminent.
Season four is only ten episodes long, so it was clear we were going to have a tighter story arc no matter what. One of the greatest anticipations leading up to the relaunch was wondering what else would change. Would the show be grittier? Racier? Would the sets look the same? Would the episodes have a different focus? Would the changes make the show better, or simply a different show?
Episode one made everything clear within the opening sequence. The set was the same—or close enough only the intensely discerning would know the difference. Lucifer was still Lucifer. While he was intense and upset, having given himself back his devil face out of guilt at the end of season three, he immediately projected his own issues onto the thief trying to get revenge, deciding the man was “more than that” and handing him piles of cash—and a crown. He also tries to give the man his trousers, and we get one of the most welcome changes to the series: a shot of Tom Ellis’s bare backside.
The show really is the same, outside a tiny bit of gore and gratuitous shots of Ellis’s peach (nobody’s complaining). It’s a darker season, yes, but given that after three seasons Chloe has finally learned the truth about Lucifer, we were always going to head down a darker path. Initially I worried about the shorter season, fearing ten episodes would stifle things, but in fact the exact opposite happened. The story is tighter and somehow richer than any previous season, though we still have the same format of the murder-of-the-episode still mirrors the interpersonal conflicts of the characters featured. Without the filler installments to pad the season out, everything is distilled, concentrated, and allowed to bloom. That includes the characters…and the relationships.
There are in fact so many ships, romantic and otherwise, that I’m centering my recap from this angle, and we’ll start with the big kahuna.