great news Maybe Netflix will give us a break and release them in 2 batches of 8 instead of one big dump of 16. Just kidding, I know they won't.
Awesome news, I'm a huge Dennis Haysbert fan. This means he's going from playing DB Woodside's brother to playing his father. According to the Entertainment Weekly article about Haysbert being cast, Woodside was actually the one to first approach the producers with the idea of casting his former 24 co-star.
Next season we will be getting a musical episode. They've wanted to do one for a while, but apparently couldn't come up with a good story reason for them to be singing and dancing until now. Co-creator Ildy Modovich has called putting the episode together "a little game of Tetris".
I finally got around to watching this. I sort of got tired of Lucifer last season, what with the repetitiveness of Lucifer's "Make everything about me and overreact cartoonishly to every passing suggestion I hear" schtick, and what with the incredibly contrived way that every murder case actually did relate directly and literally to Lucifer's current hangups (though that's a contrivance used by far too many procedurals these days). So I had season 4 in my Netflix queue, but was on the fence about actually watching it. But it's been long enough for my fatigue at the format to wear off, and after they included Lucifer's world as "Earth-666" in Crisis on Infinite Earths on the Arrowverse, that was the nudge I needed to go ahead and watch. Anyway, the season still has a lot of the same problems, but it's not as bad with fewer episodes and with more ongoing arc stuff. Actually I'm of two minds about that. I see earlier posts talking about how the shorter season "trims the fat," but I think the bonus episodes over the past two seasons have reminded me just how good a pure standalone episode can be. Not your serial-episodic kind of thing where the murder-of-the-week is just a reflection of the current point in the ongoing character arc and an impetus to nudge it forward a little more, but an actual, fully self-contained story with a beginning and end. I wouldn't have minded having more pure standalones like that in between arc episodes. They would've fit nicely into that jarring time jump they did midseason to skip over most of Linda's pregnancy. (That's one drawback to having just 10 episodes. A whole year-long season would've let them spread things out more.) Still, I liked the arc because it finally did what I've always wanted the show to do, which is to delve more deeply in the fantasy/supernatural side of the story rather than just having it be a grace note on the procedural stories. I always saw the potential for the show to go in a direction where Lucifer and Chloe were hunting demonic killers set loose on Earth due to the vacancy on Hell's throne, and even though it was just for one episode, they finally went there. And bringing Chloe into the loop let them finally involve her in stories that were about Lucifer's true nature, which allowed the Father Kinley storyline to happen. It always opens up new possibilities when the main characters outside the loop of secrecy finally get brought in. It was interesting toward the end to see how Chloe was helping Lucifer maintain his cover. That was a nice new dynamic. And having her directly involved in the climactic demonic battle was good too. Eve was a fun character. Inbar Lavi is utterly gorgeous, and a pretty good actress too; I found her voice a little insipid at first, but she uses it quite well and it's actually kind of beautiful. It was an interesting approach to characterizing her; she resented having been literally created to be a man's wife, even being a literal extension of his identity, but even though she wanted to break free and assert her own wishes, she still fell back into the pattern of subordinating her identity to that of the man she loved. It seemed a bit contradictory at times, but it realistically captures how hard a struggle it can be to get out of a codependent relationship and break old habits of thought and behavior. Anyway, I really liked the way they struck a delicate balance, making Eve the complication and the catalyst for most of the bad stuff that happened, yet never making her villainous or unsympathetic. That's pretty deft. (I'm also surprised she was still alive at the end of the season. I was expecting a tragic fate or a redemptive self-sacrifice.) Anyway, I wonder what the LAPD is going to make of all those demon-murdered corpses in that nightclub after Chloe calls it in...
I'm just glad they cast an Eve who looked like she came from the part of the world where the Garden of Eden is traditionally presumed to be, typically somewhere around Mesopotamia (now Iraq), rather than going for the cliche of a pale blonde Eve. Although I found myself hoping that Adam would show up and be played by a black or Asian actor, just to infuriate the racists. Although I guess that wouldn't have worked, now that I think about it, since Adam and Eve's son looked like Tom Welling. (But hey, we're getting Dennis Haysbert as God next season, so that's even better.) Honestly, I've never been fond of the Biblical literalism of this show, the assumption that every story in the Bible actually happened that way instead of being a metaphor. I mean, what does that say about the followers of other religions in that world? I would've preferred something more inclusive, something saying that all faiths were just differing metaphors for the same cosmic truths. I guess that's why I'm glad the Arrowverse included it as Earth-666. Now it's just one of infinite realities, and what's true there doesn't have to be true in the other universes. (Although it's interesting that the previous season's final bonus episode was itself set on an alternate-reality version of Lucifer's world, so they'd already seeded the idea of the multiverse there. Earth-667, maybe?)
Eve will be back. I'm happy to hear this, I was hoping we'd see her at least one more time before the series ended.