Thanks to EW we have a first look at Netflix’s upcoming black and white noir episode from the fifth season of Lucifer. The episode is titled “It Never Ends Well for the Chicken,” and it tells the story of what happened to Lucifer (Tom Ellis) when he visited Los Angeles in the 1940s and also explores Maze’s (Lesley Ann-Brandt) past. It also features Lauren German playing a man and Aimee Garcia sporting a mustache.
When talking about the episode, co-showrunner Joe Henderson says:
“Whenever you play [with] flashbacks, the question is always, ‘What’s the time frame that can reflect a person?’ What’s nice about noir is it’s detective stories, but Lucifer isn’t a detective yet. So what we’re almost seeing, to a certain extent, is Lucifer’s first case. There is a case, there is a mystery to solve, but it’s just more filtering our [show’s] language through noir.”
Co-showrunner Ildy Modrovich went on to explain why they picked this era to set the episode in, saying:
“Tom Ellis is made for this style. He kind of is Cary Grant. I think there’s always been something about his portrayal of Lucifer [that’s] old school, that harkens back to the extravagance and elegance of old Hollywood and just noir. There was a moment in our arc where Lucifer needed to give us a little backstory on a character and tell us what happened to [him] a long time ago and we thought, ‘Perfect moment for a Princess Bride moment. So, let’s open it up and have Lucifer tell this story to someone. And if we’re really doing an homage to Princess Bride, that person should be Trixie [Scarlett Estevez].'”
It’s explained that the writers didn’t plan on telling this story, but when Netflix ended up expanding the episode out from 10 to 16, they were given the opportunity to explore the character’s past a bit more and tell this story. Henderson went on to say:
“This was a big one because it ended up giving us such an opportunity to explore Lucifer in an early version of himself. Also, the big fun of the Princess Bride device is, as he’s telling the story, he’s basically putting the characters we know and love into it. He’s replacing a hard boiled detective with Chloe Decker [German], another character with Dan Espinoza [Kevin Alejandro]. The fun of it is, who Lucifer chooses to be who and what that says about how he sees them. [It’s] also super fun getting to see actors play wildly different roles than we’re accustomed to seeing them.”
This looks and sounds like it’ll be a fun episode to watch! The first eight-episodes of Lucifer Season 5 will arrive on August 21st on Netflix.
