Review: 'Lucifer,' Season Six Gallops Toward a Strong Finish

Pegged as the third and final season on Netflix, the sixth season of "Lucifer" sees the title angel spreading his wings with no leadership above in heaven. If you were worried that the murder-mystery-of-the-week premise of the show had also passed beyond the veil after the end of Season 5, thankfully it has not. You can take the police folk out of the department and into the supernatural realms, but a detective is still, at heart, a detective.

Hard-won patterns die hard, which is why Lucifer is so hesitant to actually ascend and, eventually, to balance the stakes, an unholy character also needs to control Hell. Transitions are tricky, whether it is ordinary humans dealing with a pandemic for several years or switching jobs when you have legions of loose ends ranging over all creation, no matter how intertwined both posts supposedly were.

There's something that is finally given a decent spotlight in this final season, which is the experience of Black men and women of the LAPD. Given the events of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and long-standing bad blood in Southern California since the Rodney King riots, giving a main character several episodes to explore generations of trauma felt like a white flag that many other cop-related shows may not concede. While initially Lucifer's alignment with the corrupt organization was a joke, actually deciding to tell fairly serious stories on the way out feels honest, and not extremely risky.

Over a decent length run, first on FOX and then streaming on Netflix, this show managed to include talent of color, to include storylines with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, to put truly gorgeous people into hideous costumes. The needle drops and montages were sometimes amusingly comical. There has always been a lot of Tinsel Town magic thrown in, with famous people and places of the Los Angeles area. I maintain that none of these are crimes. My only real gripe with the show has been the overt copaganda, but even then I can't deny that a lot of the supernatural flashbacks, time travel, and bursts of unnatural power have been fun twists to well-worn tropes in forensic procedural dramas.

In a roundabout, comedic fashion, our favorite tarnished angel gets touched over and over again by the humans around him this season. Since Lucifer's thoughts about his father were one-dimensional and misguided, the descent into schmaltz and goody goody acts of kindness ring just as hollow as his freshly-resurrected girlfriend's new obsession with doing something, anything to forget her previous vulnerable, human state. As the two of them go back and forth in the standard dance they have been doing since the start of the show, they both inch Lucifer closer to making some important decisions. While the end of the season feels complete, the existence of a multiverse in the DC comics extended universe could mean that these characters may show up again, but certainly their stories may not be told in the same way.

"Lucifer" Season 6 begins streaming on Friday, September 10th on Netflix.