Spoilers ahead for Lucifer and the Good Place. If you’ve not finished both shows, I’d highly advise against reading this entry.
It’s been the tragedy of modern television that shows ever rarely get to tie up their every loose knot at the end, but Lucifer is resoundingly not of that sort. It would’ve been the case a few years ago if Netflix didn’t pick up the show after Fox cancelled it, but the writers and cast were able to carry the story through its final stages. It’s the tendency of finales to be divisive, but if Lucifer’s got one thing right, it’s the emotional payoff of every thread set up in prior seasons–every character and storyline got to have proper closure, and for that the show deserves ample praise.
Much like the final season of the Good Place, the culmination of Lucifer’s storyline — despite it not being as well signposted as it perhaps should’ve been — is a radical reform of the afterlife, wherein humans are presumed to be good-natured with only wrenches thrown in their life path that destined them for eternal damnation. The show made no pretense about embracing the premise of the Biblical afterlife wholesale — good people go to Heaven, bad people go to Hell — but it expanded on it once it was revealed that God intended for Hell to no longer have a keeper, therefore signaling that every damned soul would eventually find its escape and ascend into Heaven. Establishing post-mortem redemption already is a huge paradigm shift for the show, and it is through which that Lucifer’s ultimate purpose was given–to make Hell merely a thorn on the path for greener pastures ahead.
How did the writers exactly achieve that, you might ask? The last two seasons were a thorough — if a bit too subtle — exploration of guilt, an emotion that if a soul is burdened by, they are to be barred from entering Heaven. From my vantage point, this is already a much more compelling direction in which to take the dilemma of the afterlife compared to the Good Place, a show that leaned too much into the “Heaven is its own hell by virtue of being everlasting monotonous bliss” trope–Lucifer concedes that Heaven is indeed blissful and Hell is the bundle…
