Chloe Gets a Grip on Lucifer’s “Love Handles” 

Oh, the Lucifer writers’ room was so VERY naughty this week. After the tantalizingly sweet kiss they left us dangling on last week, this week opens on a very hot entry to Lucifer’s penthouse seguing into inappropriate use of the grand piano and culminating on the couch where Lucifer gets *literally* horny to Chloe’s delight just in time… for her to wake up (alone) in bed to the sound of Maze crunching away on snacks in a nearby armchair enjoying “the show”, as she puts it. Show over, Maze has a few questions about some of Chloe’s contortions but the mortified detective isn’t forthcoming so she leaves after commenting that loosening up for once might not be a bad idea.

Cut to a Lucifer therapy session where he’s busy talking his way out of any real personal breakthroughs and assiduously misinterpreting Dr. Martin’s hints about the possibility that this new relationship between him and Chloe might be founded on genuine emotion.

On the scene of the newest murder, the partners are each trying out some new moves. In Lucifer’s case, an old move, where he tries his devilish mojo thinking that somehow Chloe’s kissing him was the result of her suddenly becoming susceptible to his powers. She quickly vanquishes that theory with her usual pragmatic tone but then tries to take Maze’s advice with a little “loosening up” which just proves awkward. She is nothing if not persistent though and that leads to multiple moments of awkwardness this episode.

CSI Lopez is back in the picture (yay!) this episode and fills them in on their victim, Rick, a poisoned college freshman. The twist is that Lopez is mystified by what kind of poison causes petechial hemorrhaging, ribboned skin, and ocular discharge (insert Lucifer quip here and awkward moments #2 & 3 when Chloe laughs a little too hard at his joke then makes a wink-worthy innuendo about sex with friends).

While questioning Rick’s roommate, Tim Nolan (Alex Pangburn, The 100), they learn that movie star celebrity Johnny Kane (Mike Doyle, Odd Mom Out) had recently been by the campus just as the man himself makes a dramatic entrance holding a large knife, distraught over the news of Rick’s death, blaming himself because he’d been sent a video the day before threatening Rick’s demise if he didn’t cut his face up.

Reviewing the video at the precinct, the killer is revealed to be an unknown lab-coated man wearing a mask. While deducing that the poisoner is playing god with this little experiment, trying to make people do things they’d never do, Lucifer’s new theory about Chloe’s behaviour springs fully-formed in the shape of Charlotte “Mum” Richards. Conveniently, she happens to be at the police station and he demands to know how she made Chloe kiss him, revealing to her that they had, in fact, kissed which she is inordinately pleased with but which she takes no credit for.

Tracking the source email of the threatening video, Chloe and Lucifer head to the library of Malibu State (awkward moment #4 when Chloe asks if he’s ever made out in a library) where they find Matthew (Scott Patey, Monster Trucks) the owner of the email address viewing porn in a back room. In trying to prove that he didn’t send the email, he is able to let the know that another video was sent that very day to a Dr. Gwendolyn Scott, threatening a female sophomore student, Ashley Corbett (Max Chadburn, Continuum), with a similar death by poison.

Tracking Ashley down to a frat party, Lucifer does a keg stand (in the interests of the investigation, of course) and hunkers down with some ladies for some relationship advice while Detective Decker fends off bad pick-up lines. When they find Ashley, her nose has begun to bleed and she is unable to stop it. Unfortunately, upon getting her to the hospital, they discover that she has been infected with a different poison from Rick and the antidote they’d developed for Rick’s poison is useless. Detective Dan, sitting with Dr. Scott (April Grace, Zoo) relays the information and the doctor, a renowned surgeon now trapped in a horrific ethical dilemma, makes her choice and mutilates her hand as the masked poisoner demanded.

Meanwhile, Dr. Martin is a little surprised to get a visit from Lucifer’s mother who wants her to deliver the news about Chloe to Lucifer on her behalf, knowing that he is unlikely to believe anything his mother says. Dr. Martin turns down this task, despite Charlotte’s grudging use of “please” (which isn’t as magic a word as she has been led to believe), stating that she’s too smart to be the bearer of such upsetting information. Charlotte interprets this to mean she should track down Mazikeen to do the job, a rather left-field conclusion which prompts the doctor to recognize some familial behavioural resemblance between mother and son.

Hard at work back at the station, Lopez’s network has discovered another poison victim found in the cargo hold of a plane in Chicago, having come from L.A., with similar symptoms to Rick but showing signs of the poison spilling on him. Bouncing her information off Detective Dan (who has probably been benched at the station for letting Dr. Scott garburator her hand on his watch), they are able to identify the victim as Andy Kleinberg (Jamie Kennedy, “Stewardess Interruptus”) a person of interest from the previous episode and case. Dan makes the connection and realizes that the mysterious package they never recovered must have contained the designer poisons which are now being used for these experiments.

When Chloe and Lucifer discover that both Rick and Ashley (oh geez, the writers Rick-rolled us!) had received flu shots the day of their poisoning, they are able to pin down their lead suspect as Dr. Jason Carlisle (Tim DeKay, White Collar), a disgraced former Malibu State professor who was caught on video saving his research over the life of a college student. In setting up these “experiments”, he has been recreating the moral dilemma he had been faced with, trying to prove that what he did was what anyone in his situation would do.

In order to draw him out, Chloe sends the doctor an insulting email, trusting in Lucifer’s read on him that he’ll respond out of ego … which he does. Across a video link, he reveals that his newest victims – another innocent student and a track star, respectively – are in his lab with him. The track star need only sever his own leg and the other student will get the antidote. Racing against the clock, they find him at a Pasadena campus lab and face-off with the mad scientist through bullet-proof glass. He runs, leaving the antidote but releasing a poisonous gas so that if Chloe wants to try for the antidote, she’ll guarantee her own death.

Lucifer sends Chloe after Dr. Carlisle, betting that once she’s far enough out of his vicinity, his invulnerability will return and he’ll be able to break into the lab and save the student. Chloe chases the doctor down but he commits suicide rather than be taken in, declaring that “choice is an illusion”. Returning to the lab, she finds the student and track star recovering on a bench outside and flings herself into Lucifer’s arms, relieved that he is okay as well. Lucifer is at first taken aback by this display of affection but realizes that it is truly genuine, not the product of coercion or magical influence, and finally accepts that this relationship is “something real”.

Riding the high of new emotion, Lucifer swans into the dive bar where Maze and Mum are waiting to inform him of Chloe’s ethereal origins. When he reveals his joy over this evolution in his relationship with Chloe, Maze changes her mind and tries to chase him out of the bar before Mum can spill. While the ladies have a heated debate on what is doing right by him, he notices a photograph on the wall of Amenadiel sitting with a very young Penelope, aka Chloe’s mother. When he demands an explanation, his mother states that God set this whole thing up, putting Chloe in Lucifer’s path. Flashing through the two years of interactions with the detective, Lucifer becomes enraged and storms into Chloe’s house to confront her … only to find her with her nose bleeding uncontrollably exactly the way Ashley was when they found her.

Oooooh, cliff-hangers! Next week’s winter finale is going to have Hell to pay.

Lucifer airs Monday nights at 9pm ET/PT on FOX.