“Lucifer” showrunners Ildy Modrovich and Joe Henderson didn’t want a sixth season of their Tom Ellis-led Netflix drama. After all, they had made their peace with the fact the show was renewed for a fifth and final season by the time the series finale was just about to be shot last spring, when the streaming service came to them and asked if they wanted one more round for Lucifer Morningstar (Ellis).
“When they told us that we might have Season 6, we were like, ‘We don’t want it.’ Like, ‘What do you mean you don’t want it? Really?’ ‘Yeah, we love our ending.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, think about.’ You know, we’re writers, so we thought about it,” Henderson told TheWrap. “And then, we were just riffing and we’re like, ‘Oh, s–t, so much of what Lucifer has dealt with is becoming his father and also empathizing with his father, understanding his father. So what if he did to his child what was done to him? And what if he doesn’t understand how that possibly happened?’ And then all of a sudden we were like, oh my God, this is a story, this is a story that we wouldn’t have told and now we can’t imagine not.”
This story ended up being about Rory (Brianna Hildebrand), Chloe (Lauren German) and Lucifer’s half-angel daughter from the future, who arrives in the present day to kill her father for abandoning her and her mother without a clue as to why he did it. Ultimately, it is discovered by the end of the 10-episode season that Lucifer left to go run Hell in a better way than he ever had before, by being a devil that tries to help the damned redeem themselves to move on to Heaven. That meant Chloe, Chloe’s first daughter, Trixie (Scarlett Estevez), and Rory spending their days on Earth, with Rory unable to know why her father left, so as to allow everything to play out the way it did in the first place and complete the time loop.
Throwing this major character and huge plot ahead of what they had previously written as the end of Season 5 is actually what allowed the “Lucifer” showrunners to keep that intended end, but still fill up a 10-episode season.
“The whole chapter of Rory was basically the new thing that we thought of, the new storyline,” Modrovich said. “But all the endings for the characters are the same. Like Linda (Rachel Harris) writing a book. We knew we wanted to end with her sort of taking what she had learned from celestials and how they apply to humanity, because that was our entire show.”
Henderson added: “Where the characters ended is pretty close to where we were, in as much as that, Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside) was going to become God, Lucifer was going to go down to hell, Chloe was going to live her life and join him, and Maze (Lesley-Ann Brandt) and Eve (Inbar Lavi) we’re going to ride off into the sunset, Ella (Aimee Garcia) was going to find out the truth, and Dan (Kevin Alejandro) was going to start his journey towards heaven. And so in this case, what we did is we were able to wonderfully step them out. We got to see Maze deal with the challenges of being in a relationship, but also the beauty of a wedding. We got to see Dan actually go to heaven. We got to explore Amenadiel really figuring out, not only whether or not he’s right to be God, but how to do it, what is the best way to be God? And so we were able to take all these epilogue ideas and write them in a way to explore further the complications, the wonders.”
Henderson and Modrovich are well aware that fan reaction to Rory could be mixed, but they also believe the addition works within the context of “Lucifer.”
“The gift of our whack-a-doodle show is that anything goes,” Modrovich told TheWrap. “I mean, we literally can have, you know, a cartoon and people singing and dancing. Like, we can do all these crazy things. And it’s because it’s a show about the Devil. So the fact that we could take the idea that angels self actualize, and if angels self actualize, well, then Rory, who is half angel, she’s so angry that she just wants to go back and confront her father and say, ‘Why did you do this to me?’ It was grounded. It made sense. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s tell a time travel story!’ It all felt believable within our world. So that’s why we could end up making her Chloe and Lucifer’s child, which we really, there was no other choice in that matter of who she would turn out to be when she said she was Lucifer’s daughter.”
Henderson jumped in: “And to that point, too, it’s like, Ildy and are two of the biggest Deckerstar people among all of Deckerstar fandom. And we will fight for that. And this was an opportunity to dig more into Deckerstar. And I hope the fans see how much it allowed us to do that. Like, that scene in Episode 9 where they’re driving down the beach like, ‘Ah! It’s a happy family. They’re so beautiful together. They look so happy.’ It’s like, moments like that make a big, crazy idea like time travel worth it, because, like Ildy was saying, we tried to condense it as much as possible to emotion, to the moments, to the relationships. Dear lord, the fun of it to me is how awesome Brianna is with the two of them and how much they feel like a legitimate family — before you hear the time-traveling half-angel part of it.”
The “Lucifer” showrunner also know the ending, which sees Chloe and Lucifer spend the rest of Chloe’s mortal life apart so that he can fulfill his destiny in hell without her and Rory, could be divisive. But, the sacrifice had to be made because Rory asked them to do it for her — and for the good of the entire universe, really.
“A big part of it came from us, from that line from Rory, where she’s like, ‘Don’t change me.’ And so much of it was, like, she lived a life with Chloe and they had a great life, like, they had each other’s backs,” Henderson said. “Chloe was a great single mom and so like, the idea that, listen, ‘I was mad at you, but don’t change me. I like me and I love the time I’ve had with my mom. And there is a future that we can have together.’ And it explores something a little more complicated than just being able to rewrite your life, but instead to embrace the flaws and embrace the hard choices like Chloe has something to do on Earth, Lucifer has something to do in Hell, but will be together forever eventually.”
Modrovich added: “And the sacrifices that we have to make as parents and that it might be painful for you, but if it is the best thing for your kid, it’s worth it. And I think that’s something that Lucifer learned, that that’s what his dad was doing, that’s what God was doing. It might have been in kind of a screwed up way a lot of times. But that’s what we kind of learn in Season 5, God did things for a reason. He did them because they were the best things for his kids. He wanted his kids to learn the lessons, not to get them spoon fed to them from God, from their Dad. So that’s what the last story was with Lucifer and Chloe and Rory is about.”
Reader TheWrap’s interview with Ellis and German about the series finale here and check back with us throughout the weekend for more “Lucifer” final season coverage.
