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NOTE: My score of 8/10 is for the episode SPOILER ALERT specifically, not this half-season overall.

SPOILERS FOR "Lucifer! Lucifer! Lucifer!" AND SEASONS 1-4 ONLY; SUGGESTIVE SPOILERS OTHERWISE

I've never been a huge fan of LUCIFER - I enjoyed the first season, but where I expected future seasons to properly expand on its ideas I find it only dug itself a hole that got deeper with each season; season four was almost as good as LUCIFER's freshman season, but was let down severely by an annoying addition to the cast with Eve, as well as having its two final episodes be cliché-ridden messes. For this reason, my review is likely to be harsher than one from those that have a love for this series, but I still like to try to be as fair as I can be. However, I find it near impossible to call the first half of LUCIFER's fifth season anything other than its worst series of episodes yet. This is not to say the season is without merit - far from it - but the show seems to be steadily losing what made it stand out among the rest in its preceding years.

ACTING

To begin, one of this season's most glaring issues has been the quality of the acting. While the cast have mostly been able to give good performances in seasons past, and while Ellis continues to carry it, there's a significant sense that everyone on screen is so tired of doing what they're doing. The variety of core actors seem to all have lost their passion for the series, at least that's what shows on screen. To be honest, I can't really blame them - by far LUCIFER's greatest overall flaw is its unwavering dedication to the crime-of-the-week over the fantastical overarching narrative. Police procedurals are an extremely saturated market and have been for decades, and LUCIFER's shtick of 'It's the same as all the others except we have the devil!' only carried it above the rest for so long; now, LUCIFER has overstayed its welcome, especially considering it favours its worn-out whodunits over its more original and far more interesting narrative premise. If I were Tom Ellis, I too would be exhausted from carrying this brittle concept on my back for 4 years straight. Put simply, none of the cast have much, if any, energy or passion for their roles anymore and it shows. Occasionally, someone will pull a great performance out of nowhere (for example, Alejandro delivers a great scene at Charlotte's grave in OUR MOJO), but the general portrayals are very downplayed. The one exception to this in LUCIFER's fifth series is Lauren German, who seriously stepped up and delivered an unusually great performance in her role this season. However, she was the only improvement across the board, and again, the vast majority of main players just seem drained.

WRITING & NARRATIVE

In season one, we learned that the devil, an immortal being, is physically vulnerable when he's around some seemingly random human, Chloe Decker. This is interesting; why does she make him weaker; how does Lucifer feel about this; how will this service the story going forward? In season two, we dealt with Lucifer and Amenadiel's mother coming to earth. This is interesting; what are her motives; what will she accomplish; how will this service the story going forward? In season three, we deal with the return of Lucifer's wings and the re-appearance of Cain, humanity's first murderer. This is interesting; what will Lucifer do with his wings; why has Cain sought Lucifer out; and it's been three seasons, when will someone figure out Lucifer's actual identity? In season four, we deal with Lucifer's reacquaintance with Eve, the first human woman. This isn't that interesting, and didn't serve the story that much necessarily. In season five, we find out that Lucifer has an evil twin brother who has never been mentioned nor even alluded to within the series prior, Michael. This is not at all interesting. This is cheap. This is terrible writing. This is a complete betrayal of the audience's intelligence. And while I was able to accept it as a concept for the remainder of the episodes past his reveal, I never stopped being angry about it. If even once, Lucifer, Amenadiel, or Mazikeen had mentioned anything that could allude to there being a Michael out there somewhere, this would have been okay. But this 'plot twist' is a half-assed subversion of expectations and clearly shows the writers' burnout. That's what happens when you drag a concept out for longer than it naturally allows for; this was LUCIFER's jump-the-shark moment.

Or maybe that moment came when episode four, IT NEVER ENDS WELL FOR THE CHICKEN, was a film-noir parody that failed to service the story it told in any discernible way and half-assedly tied itself into Mazikeen's character arc, whilst doing absolutely nothing else of value, neither for entertainment nor narrative. I love film noir as a genre, always have. And homages to the genre in television can absolutely be done well (take a look at IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA's recent THE JANITOR ALWAYS MOPS TWICE, for example). The problem comes when the decision to do a film noir episode is done simply for the sake of doing a film noir episode. You just know the writers' room one day went, 'Hey, let's do a film noir episode', and everyone else was like 'Okay, yeah, sure, why not'. It wasn't done out of a love for the genre. It wasn't done to service or complement the narrative, self-contained or overarching, in any meaningful way. It was done for the sake of doing it. It's meaningless filler drivel. The one thing of note it adds to the series is the origin of Lucifer's immortality ring and his vow to Mazikeen's mother, all of which could have been instead tied up in one very simple conversation between Lucifer and Maze at any other point in the span of the seven important episodes.

The mid-season finale, titled SPOILER ALERT, was in fact an actually good episode (hence my 8/10 score on this review). While Michael continues to be a disgrace of an idea with hideous dialogue and worse characterization, the episode was a great bookend to many of this season's overarching plots, whilst also setting up the back eight episodes to come and tying its crime-of-the-week shtick into the overall narrative, something the show has done very rarely before but almost always to good effect. A better outcome would be removing the procedural aspect entirely, but this is likely the best compromise we're ever going to get. Its cliffhanger, too, was a bit clichéd and somewhat contrived, but an important and interesting moment that's been foreshadowed since LUCIFER's pilot episode; a satisfying few seconds for sure.

MISCELLANEOUS ELEMENTS

The camerawork in LUCIFER continues to be serviceable but without artful thought put into it, although I noticed multiple shots that were very clever and fun (i.e. the camera going over a door from the hallway into an apartment room in one clean shot, Lucifer being pushed into a glass window and shattering it in frozen time thus leaving its broken bits in midair, Dan's freshly-fired gun shown against a blazing blue light background). The music continues to be uninspired and forgettable, while generally servicing the scenes it plays in well enough (although the soundtrack for the final fight scene in the finale was a notable step-up, with cinematic and grungy violin complementing the action well). And the show still puts far too much focus on its procedural aspects as well as the personal lives of characters that don't really matter that much (Ella's situation this season was terribly uninteresting until the extremely predictable twist in the finale, and I can't force myself to give any two sorts of crap about what Linda is thinking or feeling at all).

CONCLUSION

By far LUCIFER's weakest (half-)season yet, not without its merit but hurt by significantly weaker writing and acting nonetheless. After the promising first season, despite the occasional episode that really expands upon its ideas in a meaningful and entertaining way (A GOOD DAY TO DIE, GOD JOHNSON, A DEVIL OF MY WORD), LUCIFER has yet to really reach its full potential, choosing instead to dig itself a hole that gets deeper with every passing season.