Lucifer and Ella Explore Family Ties in “My Brother’s Keeper” 

Ah, the joy of Trixie. I forget how much I miss Decker’s sprog until she back on screen, waving her powder pink death blades à la Maze around.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tonight’s offering opens on a sketchy meet-up between a well-dressed dude and another dude with a suitcase full of diamonds. Well-dressed dude’s cel phone suddenly goes off, spooking suitcase guy, especially when the call display reads “LAPD” and out comes a gun.

Turns out well-dressed dude is Jay Lopez (Rey Valentin, Major Crimes) and Ella’s trying to get ahold of her big brother, a diamond authenticator in town for business. When he doesn’t answer, then doesn’t return her voicemail, she hires Maze, bounty hunter extraordinaire, to track him down.

It’s a glorious scene from start (cue Trixie with Maze blades) through Maze’s advice to her protegee (“Sever their Achilles first. If they can’t walk, they can’t betray you”) to Ella’s offer to pay for her services (“Next time, lead with that”) at the finish.

Meanwhile, Lucifer and Cain decide that Amenadiel might be the one to help them with their “Let’s Find Cain Some Eternal Peace” death hunt. But when Lucifer asks Big Bro for his help, he gets turned down flat and that leaves Luci with a negative lens on older siblings in general.

So when suitcase dude Farid turns up dead and Ella’s brother is known to have met with him recently, Lucifer’s eager to prove Jay to be a killer and a disappointment. Ella’s just as determined to prove her brother is “the good one”, an innocent who happened to have been in the vicinity of the murder and then disappeared.

After finding a single diamond at the crime scene that had been reported stolen, Decker and Lucifer follow the trail to a jewellery store where they uncover an insurance fraud scam headed by the store’s millenial-hating owner, Tiffany James (Jackie Geary, Thirteen Reasons Why).

Unfortunately, Tiffany (a bit on the nose with the name, don’t you think?) isn’t the killer. The victim was her broker whose job it was to have the diamonds “cleaned” and returned to her to sell for pure profit.

In a strange little adjacent storyline, Charlotte Richards takes some off-screen Lucifer advice and seeks professional counselling. From Dr. Martin. Who was almost killed by Richards when she was possessed by Lucifer’s mother.

The encounter is both painfully funny and brutally sad in how traumatized Linda is by having her assaulter in her office and how disheartened Charlotte is by being rebuffed by a mental health professional.

This little plotline ties up neatly with Lucifer reminding and assuring Linda that Charlotte is a victim of his mother’s actions as much as she was and encouraging her to help Charlotte heal as the only counsellor in the world capable of understanding what she went through.

From a professional stance, I wonder if Linda couldn’t have found a colleague with a rather open mind about Charlotte’s experiences to refer her too. It’s got to be a challenge to counsel a patient who is, physically, the person who nearly killed you.

Speaking of killing, Cain and Amenadiel spend a good portion of this episode trying to do that to each other. After a chat with Lucifer regarding Amenadiel’s role in so many of their dad’s schemes, Cain realizes that his cursed mark had to have been delivered by “God’s Favoured Son” Amenadiel.

Amenadiel admits it and Cain tries to get him to tell him how to remove it by threatening the lives of the humans around them in LUX. Amenadiel is adamant that he doesn’t know how and Cain switches tactics and empties the club so he can let off a little steam on the guy who placed his mark of immortality on him in their own personal gold-gilt cage fight arena.

Back on the hunt, Maze and Ella (aka “Ellen”) team up to track Jay down to a seedy cash-only hotel where he tries to take them out with a baseball bat. He admits to being at the diamond broker’s place but says he was in the bathroom when the murder took place.

Ella takes him back to the scene of the crime and quickly unravels his story. Maze opens up the broker’s “stash room” and Ella realizes that Jay actually had been cleaning the diamonds when the murder took place. Decker and Lucifer show up, noting the equipment in the stash room is exactly how the insurance investigator, Don Zeikel (Ed Kerr, Pretty Little Liars) had described it and Jay freaks out, pulls a gun on Chloe, and runs.

While Cain and Amenadiel continue to trash LUX and Dr. Martin works up the nerve to approach Charlotte Richards (and jab her with a thumb tack), all our other players converge on Zeikel’s hotel because, of course, he’s our baddie in wingtips.

Despite claiming to have no emotional attachment to Ella’s sisterly plight, Maze shows up to save the day, skewering Zeikel with a throwing knife just as he’s about to shoot Ella in front of her brother and then just disappearing like a sharp, pointy guardian angel.

In her debrief, Chloe cuts Ella’s cover-up babble off, pointing out that she LIVES with Maze and recognized the knife right away. However, she reassures Ella, since Zeikel was about to kill her, it was justifiable so Maze will be ok. Um, pretty sure that she doesn’t get to make that decision, but whatevs.

In the ruins of LUX, Cain and Amenadiel come to the heart of their conflict. Amenadiel feels that Cain’s punishment must be eternal for killing his brother but then Cain throws it back in his face that he also tried to kill his brother. For just a moment, Amenadiel shows a glimmer of uncertainty and that’s all Cain was looking to do – break that armour of righteousness. He calls it quits and heads home.

And that leaves us with the missing diamonds and Ella’s brother on a pedestal. Lucifer lies in wait and catches Jay retrieving the rocks from their hiding place and confronts him with the fact that he’s no better than his troubled siblings. Jay’s pretty blasé about his feet of clay and offers to tell Ella himself but Lucifer says that he has no right to destroy her faith like that.

HOWEVER (and this was the kicker moment in a pretty pulp-weight episode overall) he warns Jay that he’d better get his act together because he will be watching him. Should Big Brother Lopez do anything to disappoint Ella, Lucifer guarantees retribution. And, with that true-hearted motivation of Ella behind his words, Luci’s “devil face” makes a tiny sparky appearance in his eyes. WHA? So tantalizing.

We close out with Lucifer returning to the LUX wasteland to find Amenadiel contemplating his actions in a bloody shirt. He’s remarkably circumspect about the damage to his club but gets into a great little sibling exchange with Amenadiel. Little Brother plans on incurring Dad’s wrath by helping Cain die and Big Brother plans on standing in the way. Fun times.

Lucifer airs Monday nights at 8pm ET/PT on FOX.