Lucifer‘s first season was one hell of a journey, and during the Comic-Con round-tables showrunner Joe Henderson reflected on it, deviations from the comic, and where the show is going next.
As a long standing fan of comic books across multiple publishers and genres, I had low-key expectations for where Lucifer was going to be going as a series — like most other fans coming from that same background. Sandman and Lucifer are practically staples at this point in most comic collections, so it took some guts to shift something so well established into its own territory. But Lucifer certainly didn’t suffer for it.
“It’s funny, we noticed we started getting a lot of new viewers come in around episode eight or nine,” Henderson said of Lucifer’s first outing. “And I think one of the big reasons was, one, I think word was starting to get out that we weren’t the show a lot of people were expecting us to be, in a really nice way.”
Having those expectations overturned, as a fan of both Sandman and Lucifer, certainly didn’t frustrate me — what Henderson and the rest of the team behind the show had done was something special. Taking elements and the core characteristics from the source material, and adjusting it into a new setting — with all new mysteries to solve. It kept me — and other fans — guessing.
But Henderson also has a respect for where the show came from. “I get it, I’m a huge fan of the comics. I wasn’t involved in the pilot, I came on after, and I was like ‘this does not sound like a good idea.’ And then I saw it and I’m like, ‘oh, I get it, it’s awesome, it’s its own thing.’”
Of course, turning Lucifer into a pseudo-procedural drama also had its own trials — and became a careful balancing act for Henderson, as a showrunner, and the writers. “That is the challenge and I think what we’ve found, especially towards the back half of season 1, is a sense of balance between the things and keeping it grounded, because we’re not a hugely supernatural show,” Henderson said. “And I think that’s what makes it feel different than a lot of other shows on the air. There’s an element of the fantastic, but it doesn’t override too much, and that I think lets us be sort of playful, and just sort of dip our toes in a little bit, and then occasionally, like in the finale, jump into the water.”
And jump into the water they did. Not only did we get the reveal that Lucifer’s mother had escaped from her imprisonment in Hell — something the cast and Joe Henderson discuss with us in more detail here — but also a culmination of the affect Chloe has on Lucifer, as he was mortally wounded by a bullet, courtesy of Malcolm. Thanks to the Comic-Con panel, we know that we’ll be discovering why Lucifer is vulnerable around Chloe in its second season, but Henderson had a few insights into their approach towards the issue in season 1.
“It’s funny, ‘cause we introduced it early on and then we sort of like walked away from it a bit, with the intention of like all of a sudden coming back with it in episode, I think it was 11,” Henderson told us. “And that was fun. It was fun to be like, ‘oh, have they just decided to ignore this?’ And we wanted to sort of lull it into a false sense of who knows. But now season 2 what we’ve got is this great dynamic of… Lucifer doesn’t need to work with Chloe, in fact, he doesn’t need to be standing side-by-side with the one person who makes him vulnerable. And yet he does. And that’s fun.”
We all have our theories about just who Chloe Decker actually is, but when another writer at our table postulated that Chloe may be Lucifer’s half-sister, Henderson only had this to say: “No comment.” Er, just forget that was ever said, Lucifer and Chloe shippers.
But Lucifer and Chloe are far from the only relationship to have found root in the fandom. Another that captured our fascination developed between Lucifer’s protector, Maze, and his brother, Amenadiel. But with how things left off in the finale, has that relationship come to an end?
“Oh. It’s just tragic, man. It’s just tragic,” D.B. Woodside said of their potentially doomed love affair. “He’s definitely head over heels in love with her but, y’know, sex changes people. So I think that she kind of closes the door on that right away, and so we’re gonna get the chance to see him go through his heartache. So she’s really brought out much more of a human side to him, so he’s gonna be in some pain for quite some time.”
“Amenadiel and Maze is like, they sort of like, I mean he like digs her a whole lot and as an angel shows it for sure,” Lesley-Ann Brandt agreed. “She, I think, is still trying to figure out like what it is. She’s like, well I don’t want to kill you, so I don’t know what that is. Is that love? Or is that just, y’know…”
Figuring out exactly what her feelings are in regard to Amenadiel won’t be the only thing Mazikeen will be wrestling with in Lucifer’s sophomore season. After walking away from Lucifer in the finale, Maze will need to work out exactly what she wants to do with her time on Earth — when she isn’t facing down Lucifer’s mother.
“Last season, Maze was still very much tied to Lucifer and the vow that she made in Hell, y’know, when she followed him through the gates of Hell,” Brandt said. “So, what you’ll find is she’s going to be independent of that vow [in] season 2 and she’s going to be exploring her own life and her own strength separate to Lucifer. But, knowing these two characters and their history, of course, they always come back and will clash, and will come back together again. But she’s a lot more, she stands on her own two feet much more comfortably on Earth in this season.”
Though will her vow be that easy to break?
“That’s the thing about Earth and what it does to characters,” Brandt told us. “Maze will blindly follow Lucifer based on a vow in Hell, but when you then come to Earth and you are introduced to the idea of free will, that changes things. And just like Lucifer, the idea of free will and exploring humanity it affects characters like Amenadiel and Maze too, just in different ways.”