WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Lucifer's Season 6, which is now available to stream in its entirety on Netflix.
After six heaven-defying seasons, Netflix's Lucifer has ended. What started off as a procedural spinoff series based on the DC/Vertigo Comics character created by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg shifted into a heartfelt journey. In the end, the show was more interested in what keeps families apart than punishing those who've let us down the most in life or the afterlife.
Lucifer, especially under the helm of co-showrunner Joe Henderson, prioritized the meaning of chosen families and realized a poignant truth about life: if we do not deal with our pain, we're bound to inflict it on everyone else, especially those we love. Despite these heavy themes, Lucifer has never been shy to play with format -- like Season 5's musical episode orchestrated by God -- and always created inventive ways to depict angels, demons and their battles alike.
Season 6, of course, is no different. This season deftly recruits HBO Max's Harley Quinn animation team to bring the Devil into 2D, while also delivering the hardest of lessons with devilish charm. In an exclusive interview with CBR, Henderson reflected on the difficult choices for Luci and his beloved mortals and immortals in the series' sixth and final season.
CBR: Season 6 is Lucifer's most intimate season. I was not prepared. Every episode made me cry, in some way.
Joe Henderson: Thank you.
So many character arcs are closed and every time I thought the arc was done, the writing just went deeper. Which arc was the one that you're the proudest of? Which arc were you like, "Oh, we stuck that landing"?
Honestly, it was Lucifer and Chloe's. That was the hardest one. That's the one that we had many different versions of it many different times. We always knew where we wanted to end. We always knew we wanted that moment. That's been the end moment for at least a year and a half, if not longer. But getting there, the path there... There have been times where we've been like, "Maybe that's not the moment. Let's open ourselves up to something else." But that always just felt right to us -- the idea that he was a partner for Chloe on Earth and she's his partner in Hell. But that it's a partnership of equals. They have met in the middle and found each other and found the joy of working together and being together and living together.
I was surprised that there wasn't a wedding -- happily surprised because I don't think there needs to be one -- but I was curious if there was ever a version in earlier scripts where Chloe and Luci got married?
We talked about it because we knew that the fans would potentially want it. To us, the bigger priority was the Maze and Eve wedding because that did feel like such a wonderful culmination of their arcs. It also just feels like our ending is what is saying that Lucifer and Chloe's love is eternal in a way that almost supersedes a wedding. One of the things I'm very happy with -- and I'm curious to see how fans react to it -- is it's a bittersweet ending. It does end where you want it to end and it was very important to us to always give fans and ourselves not necessarily what we want, but what we need.
This was going to be my last question, but...
Let's talk about it.
I was watching the finale and I was like, "Goddamn you, Joe Henderson!"
[laughs]
Okay, we see Amenadiel's version of God -- through his storyline and experience of firsthand racism as a citizen and then on the police force -- that he wanted a "boots on the ground" approach for being God, a God that lived on Earth. So, I know fans are going to ask, why didn't Lucifer decide to just stay on Earth with Chloe and/or travel back and forth to Hell?
Love for his daughter. His daughter asked him not to. There's a line in there that was very important to me, which is when she says, "Don't change me."
It's the idea that she is the person that she is because she was raised by a strong mom; but also, the fact now she is who she is because she got to know her loving dad. It was this idea of, "Listen, I'm me. I am the sum of my parts. I don't want you to try to change who I am. I love who I am. I am strong. And I am awesome." So, to me, it's that moment that really linchpins it. It's like, yes, she came back out of anger, but she returned out of love. That's a journey that she didn't want to be taken away from her.
So it was out of fear of breaking the time loop?
Yeah, the superficial reason is: I don't want to break this time loop. I don't want to unravel anything. The emotional reason is: my daughter is proud of who she is. She loves who she is. She doesn't want me to try to muck with her, which I think there's a very interesting story of parents trying to make their children something they're not. It's him listening.
Is that also why the writers felt like it was important for Lucifer to experience firsthand being a father before he found his own calling?
Yeah. We always thought about that one extra story that we wanted to tell that we discovered. I think nobody will guess it but it's the most natural final story, which is he faced his father, now he must become one. Now he must experience that love and that sense of legacy, that sense of passing on the sins of the Father in the same way that he felt his father did to him. He had to face the idea that he might be doing it to his own daughter, but then also having to face -- similar to his own experience -- that we can make our own choices. We are both our parents' children but we are also ourselves, and giving up that control with his daughter was important to help her self-actualize, both figuratively, and in our case, literally.
Speaking of Rory's time-travel powers, what was the hardest thing for the writers' room to decide on about how you wanted time-travel to work on Lucifer?
What was really helpful was a couple of us are huge, huge time travel nerds, and a couple of us do not care about time travel at all. We had to find something that all of us understood and liked. That's a very helpful balance to have. If everyone's a time travel nerd, you're just gonna make Doctor Who and I love Doctor Who, but our show is not that.
Our show has these touches of the fantastic but it's grounded in the emotional experiences of our characters. Our show is not about time travel, so the question became: how do we use time travel but not have it distract from the story? That's when we came up with the closed-loop paradox, which is just us being, "Let's just keep it simple. This has always happened. Let's lean into the mystery of why." One of the earliest discoveries was us asking, "What if she comes back and says Lucifer abandoned her? Why would you ever do that? Is there any reason to ever do that?"
Once we realized that if they get on a journey where he grows to love and understand her enough, and she grows to love and understand him enough that she is the reason she never found out the truth... Then all of a sudden you're giving her ownership of her own journey, but also, now you understand why Lucifer would do something he could never imagine doing. It involves an emotion he's never felt before, which is love for his daughter. I get mushy just thinking about it.
I have to keep looking in the distance so I don't tear up here. Speaking of Brianna Hildebrand's Rory, she's so good. I'm used to seeing her in her Deadpool-like roles where she's a badass, but her levels of vulnerability on-screen here are amazing. What was it like working with her?
She's a lovely human being. She was so great.
So much of what we try to do on Lucifer is to show everything that an actor or a guest actor is capable of. That's what we did with Dennis Haysbert and with Tricia Helfer, and this season, it's what we did with Brianna. It was wonderful to watch her show off and show what she's capable of, and, in particular, she and Tom really got a connection going. You could feel that Tom took her under his wing a little bit in this fatherly way whenever they were on set together. That was really cool because they just vibed off each other. Right before the series wrapped, they just started jamming together and singing -- because she sings and plays guitar. They sang six songs for the crew and were just jamming out and it was awesome to watch.
To me, it was like watching a father and a daughter playing in an impromptu rock band. It was really sweet. So much of our show feels like a family loving each other, which is really a testament to our cast. Seeing that, seeing how she connected with Lauren [German], seeing how she connected with all the actors -- especially during COVID, during all this mask time where it's hard to get these emotional connections -- Brianna meshed.
I absolutely loved Rory's wings. How did you decide, production-wise, on how you wanted them to look?
There was a lot. I think Ildy [Modrovich] was the first out with the color. She was like, "I love the idea of pink. I don't think that has to be just because she's female. It doesn't mean that's not awesome. But let's also make it awesome! Let's have it reflect her." I was talking about a metallic, X-Men's Archangel-like look. We started just blend those two ideas together. Suddenly, it was like, "Oh, this is cool. This is punk." These two disparate ideas all of a sudden felt like her. Suddenly, you've got an iconography that also speaks to the character that you start to write towards. Then the question is, "Okay, if she does have these blade wings, yeah, they're cool. Yeah, they're functional. But what do they say about her?" We knew that we wanted to speak to the idea that our heroes were worried about the, "Why does she look like a weapon?" It took us a little bit to find that it's because she admires Chloe and her strength. It's not a weapon. It's because: "I'm strong. I want to be able to help people like my mom."
Speaking of wings, you gave Charlie wings! Was that something added in just to give Amenadiel a little joy?
It was one of those things where we always knew we wanted to get there eventually. Even with the bittersweet, we wanted some happy endings. Even though Linda's like, "Oh, God," she's also excited. It's gonna be awesome. It was one of the things we actually...
I'll tell you a deleted scene. Initially, in Season 5's finale, we were going to end with Ella finding out via Charlie's wings [that Celestials exist]. We were gonna have a scene where one of her last moments was finding out the truth. She's babysitting Charlie. They all come home. She's like, "Guys, there's something wrong." And they're like, "What?" And she's holding up Charlie and he's got wings. And they're like, "Ella, we can explain this!" And she's like, "No, I think I've always sort of known. I get it. I know." So that was a little bit of Season 5's DNA.
In this case, it became a chance to have one extra step on Charlie's path and to hopefully have people imagine Charlie and Rory soaring through the sky together as they get older and our siblings and are having fun. It was much less about Amenadiel's path at that point, and more about adding a little something for the fans to be able to imagine in the future.
Would you ever consider a spinoff of these younger angels? Or do you feel like right now you need some time away from Lucifer's world?
I will always consider a spinoff because I love these characters and I love this world. If it was a possibility, I would jump at it.
Ella does find out about Celestials in Season 6 and she's heartbroken that people have kept these secrets from her for so long. Was this always the plan for Ella to find out about Celestials on her own? Or were there -- aside from the deleted scenes with Charlie's wings -- other plans in the mix?
We wanted Ella to be the only one that figured it out. Everyone else had it revealed to them, or was surprised by it, or was manipulated into discovering it. But Ella is our forensic scientist. It felt right for her to follow clues. That's where her frog and building her case comes in. Also, we wanted to feel a different energy from all the other reveals we've had. In Ella's case, she's the outsider. She's been the outsider. Writing it, that was the fun of it because she was the only one who didn't know. We were finally like, "Okay, well, how does that feel for her once she does discover the truth?"
We liked the idea that she was sitting on this huge realization, but she didn't tell anyone because she thought everyone else knew. Like the idea of, "If you guys had looped me in, we could have gotten ahead of all of this. But no! You didn't!" To me, that was an interesting path to walk on with Ella. She is everyone's best friend, no matter what. When you give out that much positivity, and you perceive that it has not been returned, or that you thought it was being returned, and instead, it wasn't... There was a level of betrayal that felt like such an interesting story.
Lucifer goes to Hell, by choice this time, because he wants to be a healer. He says his goodbye to almost everyone but not Trixie. I was curious why that choice was made? Was it to keep the focus on her arc with Dan?
It was a mixture of a lot of goodbyes and us wanting to make sure we had them and we wanted to give room for him to say goodbye to the main cast.
Scarlett Estevez as Trixie, in any scene, will break your heart. But it kept butting up against [her goodbye] with Dan. That's her big goodbye. That's the one that matters and so when you had Lucifer saying goodbye, and Dan saying goodbye, you started to get a bit of redundancy. Whereas with Dan, it's the father she lost. Anything shot with Lucifer is just gonna pale in comparison to that beautiful scene.
Like I said, I cried so many tears -- happy tears, sad ones, complicated ones -- especially watching Chloe go through so much sacrifice, but knowing that she got to do exactly what she wanted to do in life.
To that point, one of the things we really wanted to do was make sure Chloe had her agency. She's not just following Lucifer down to Hell and giving everything up. She's living her life. She is doing what she needs to do. Then, once that life is over, she gets to live her eternity with the man she loves -- that felt true to her [character]. That also felt true to the story we're telling because as much as the show is called Lucifer, it is about the ensemble. Also it's really about Lucifer and Chloe and so much of it is making sure we did right by her. We knew where we wanted Lucifer to end, but one of the hardest parts was making sure that Chloe also got her due because she deserved it as a character and because Lauren German would nail it.
I also think it helped to close out her other arc with Amenadiel -- speaking about the racism and corruption on the police form. Not like her apology to him seemed hollow at all, but showing her commitment to fixing that corruption really showed how strong and considerate of a human she is.
Thank you. I know it was important to us. We were writing this in the summer of the George Floyd murder and looking at our place in the role and propaganda, and looking at our place in looking the other way. We -- well, Ildy and I, the white people in the room -- put a lot of us into Chloe. It showed us a lot of the things that we looked away from, or thought we knew but never really dug deep enough to explore. It was important for us to take one of our main characters, and put her on that journey so that people like us -- who might not have had a similar reaction during that summer -- might think a little bit about where they are, where they've been, and maybe look again at the structural systemic problems around them.
To us, Chloe Decker is awesome. You can be awesome and also have a lot of blind spots. It's just the question of, "What do you do when you find them?"
All six seasons of Lucifer are streaming now on Netflix.