Lucifer 1.07 “Wingman”

The Sandman: 5 Stars Read this first, it’s really good. I’m going to just keep putting this here because really, it’s a comic classic. You’ll thank me later.

Lucifer – The Comic: 5 Stars, read it, but not before The Sandman: Seasons of Mist because it connects and stuff. Will also keep putting this here, because. I need no other reasons.

The Rundown: Come on man, you’re killing me here. So, no, not getting so back into your source material that we’d like… or actually using your source material. Way to pull the wool over my eyes Lucifer. What a jerk. Lucifer and co. infiltrate an illicit religious artifact auction in an attempt to get back Lucifer’s wings. Joining him is not just the lady-cop, but his brother Amandiel as well.

Well, in the latest crushing disappointment from Fox’s Lucifer, the title character, our resident Prince of Darkness is desperately using mundane criminal underworld contacts to find out who has his wings. Having little success with his normal methods of seduction and torture, he decides he needs some pointers on interrogation from his bestest bud, the lady-cop. Oh, and there’s some big development in one of lady-cop’s past cases that points to corruption in the police department. Cool. Whatever.

So yeah, big disappointment on the Lucifer’s wings storyline. Something that could have been a season spanning trek into some really heavy supernatural materials turns into just another case of petty theft. The ‘villain’ is the auctioneer who found Lucifer’s wings too beautiful to put up for sale, and instead kept them for himself. The culprit behind the theft? Oh, shocker, it was Amandiel in another lame attempt to try and coerce Lucifer back into hell. They barely address the mythos behind an angel cutting off their wings, about ‘falling’ and how much of Lucifer’s heavenly power is contained within the wings.

Nope, nothing about any of that really awesomely rich material.

Let’s hear about more corrupt cops, which it’s pretty telegraphed that lady-cop’s douchebag ex-husband is totally in on. They do spare a line of dialogue or two about the divine power in the wings themselves, and how people may die if…. something happens to them. Clearly their presence isn’t a threat, or LA would have been leveled by now, but somehow someone may do some-vague-something with them that is dangerous. Well, thanks for that sense of impending doom, but not really spending any time on building any tension, or even showing us a slight implication into the wings’ power besides some dude throwing himself off a roof.

Let’s not forget a further dumbing down of Mazikeen the badass. In this episode we get Lucifer flaunting her as a sex-object in order to lure in criminals to interrogate. She also does almost nothing to help in the raid on the auction, using absolutely none of her badass martial prowess to help when things go a bit sideways. Do they go bad because the wings do something supernatural? Nope, it’s because the FBI is raiding the place. Seriously show, what’s the point of having a supernatural crime show if you never get into any supernatural crime? The theft of the wings is barely worth the two episode arc they spend on it, focusing more on the Detective’s dead case and her relationship with Lucifer.

Once again, the hope for a representation of Lucifer on screen that does it any kind of justice was a fleeting one. Closing off the wing’s storyline by destroying them, making a grand gesture before Amandiel, doesn’t even move Lucifer’s story forward. The entire show he’s shown no regret for leaving Hell, giving Amandiel a poignant reminder of that fact just insults the audience’s intelligence even further. So many wasted opportunities for this show, and they just keep coming. Aren’t you glad I’m here to suffer for you? Who would want to subject themselves to this on a weekly basis? Someone crazy, clearly….