Lucifer only gets better with each subsequent season.

Starting off as the little Devil that could, Lucifer began with a strict procedural setting, and while Lucifer sticks to the mold for the most part, with its growth and network change, it has more room to stretch the mold. Moving to Netflix was an obvious blessing for the series, allowing each episode to reach new heights as it can play with mature content with episode length that works for the series and not for ads and scheduling necessities.

Thank the Devil for the streaming model.

Sidebar: If you haven’t noticed, I’m going for Devil puns whenever I find the opportunity.

Following the trend of growth, Lucifer’s first half of season five is the most impressive run of episodes the fantasy procedural has aired yet. With intriguing enough ‘case of the episodes’ that directly push character growth and spiritual revelations, Lucifer does what many other shows that share an audience cannot do: it stays true to its characters and knows what its fans want.

Lucifer luckily was saved due to the passion of its fans and the potential the series showed from the beginning, and the creators don’t take that lightly. Lucifer hits the sweet spot of avoiding a premature cancellation and respecting its fans to the point where characterization and dynamic relationships remain at the forefront of the series and aren’t sacrificed due to plot or boredom.

Lucifer is what fantasy television should be. When watching this show, I, like many others probably wondered, asked, “How is this so good?” But the question remains: Is Lucifer great or is everything else kinda bad?

We hypothesize: a little bit of both.

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One of Lucifer’s mightiest strengths is its talented cast and the immaculate chemistry each cast member has with each other. The first part of season five is no exception.

While Tom Ellis always has an acting challenge in front of him with the complexities of playing the Devil, season five presents even more of a challenge as he plays both Lucifer and his brother, Michael, and Michale pretending to be Lucifer.

Tom Ellis rises to the challenge. He plays the two characters with ease, reminding the audience of his acting chops. Michael is significantly different from Lucifer, and that’s not taking the accent into account (which felt surprisingly wrong after watching Lucifer for four seasons).

Michael only plays his charade for a short amount of time, thanks to the knowledge of Lucifer’s friends and family around him. It doesn’t take Chloe long to figure out that Lucifer isn’t Lucifer, which is impressive. Many creative teams would have let the act play out for longer, opting for dramatics instead of consistent characterization, but Lucifer knows better than this. It puts character above all else, a nice change of pace for the genre, respecting not only the Lucifer, Chloe, and their relationship, but the relationship that fans have for these characters as well.

However, Chloe did not escape Michael’s initial manipulations unscathed. As a final curtain call, he informs her of the truth of her existence, which sends Chloe into a spiral, to say the least. It’s impossible to blame her, however, that’s a bomb if there ever was one.

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Thankfully, Lucifer’s return helps Chloe process this information and move forward. That’s not to say their eight-episode journey is a smooth sailing one — Chloe struggles with how to deal with Lucifer with this newfound information and Lucifer wants to make sure Chloe is okay before he returns to Hell.

Until Amenadiel returns from watching over Hell and informs Lucifer that Hell no longer needs a caretaker — which is highly suspicious, quite frankly.

However, some of Lucifer’s best character work is done through Lucifer and Chloe’s relationship, and the repercussions their newfound honesty and self-awareness have. Both characters have different insecurities that have rung through the course of the series, but never before have they bounced off in such a rapid-fire way as they do in the first half of season five.

After Chloe is able to accept her newly-realized role in the world, which is now celestial in a way even deeper than it was before, and is able to resume her relationship thanks to Amenadiel, it begins to affect Lucifer’s powers — namely his “mojo” and his vulnerability around Chloe, which sends both of them into bouts of analyzation.

This is a lot to begin with without adding Chloe’s very human insecurity about not hearing Lucifer tell her he loves her in exact words.

However, Lucifer handles their issues with both humor and grace, using very physical manifestations to represent the headspace each resides in as they tackle these newfound bumps in their relationship.

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Maze’s arc stands out as season five’s most emotional arc so far, as she embarks on a journey of facing the root of her abandonment issues. After being abandoned in one way or another by the major players in her life, Maze truly begins to feel alone, and the weight of existing soulless weighs heavily on her. She even perceives abandonment from Linda in a way, due to Charlie, but Linda acts as her rock this season and her shoulder to cry on.

Maze’s story is heartbreaking, from the moment when she showed up to find her mother has died, to the very end when she makes a desperate choice for an option that Lucifer never presented to her (probably because Michael is playing her and she can’t have a soul).

But Maze’s story and journey are the most soulful of them all.

Lesley Ann-Brandy is perhaps the MVP of season five so far, bringing life to Maze’s story while also excelling in the heavily genre-ed episode, “It Never Ends Well for the Chicken” where she plays the root of it all, Lilith.

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The rest of the cast play smaller roles in the first half of season five, but with eight episodes still to air, there’s no doubt that season five will give them all their due, as Lucifer is a show that knows how to give all of its players interesting arcs and respects its character and fans to provide proper closure, as this season was written as a final season before later finding out about its season six renewal.

Linda spends most of the season supporting Maze and being an obsessive new mon in between, but she is explored a bit further as she reveals her past with abandoning her baby which complicates things temporarily with Maze. This also indicates why Linda before has expressed her belief that she is going to Hell. And with God in the mix… she may very soon find an answer to this question.

Amenadiel also serves as a supporting player the first half of the season, but his best episode, “Detective Amenadiel” more than makes up for it with both an emotional and heartfelt story, with his interactions with the nuns also providing Chloe with more insight on her situation and on Lucifer himself.

Amenadiel’s biggest moment of the episodes aired doesn’t occur until the final moments of the show when his stress about his son allows him to stop times once again, leading to the revelation that his son is mortal. This, combined with the appearance of his Father are sure to launch Amenadiel into a larger role in the second half of season five, giving Amenadiel much more to come to terms with.

Dan, who seems to have a less important role most of the time, especially since his unawareness regarding celestial matters, finally gets his celestial cherry popped. His reaction is probably the most relatable one of all. Another victim of Michael, he attempts to kill Lucifer to protect Chloe and Trixie, which would be easy to sympathize with even if Michael had nothing to do with the train of events.

Kevin Alejandro, who also directs the final episodes of 5A, does a fantastic job showing the confusion, heartbreak, and fear that Dan experiences throughout the revelation and aftermath, leaving a usually lackluster character much more intriguing.

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Lucifer’s first half of season five is sold all around, but perhaps the weakest link of the run would be Ella’s plot with Pete aka The Whisper Killer. That’s not to say her arc is bad! It’s not. The struggle of being drawn to people who aren’t right for us is something that many people can understand. And Aimee Garcia plays Ella fantastically — from the crime scene to looking at herself shamefully in the mirror after hooking up with another no-good man.

And while her the heartbreak of finding out that the first good person she found was actually bad could lead to dramatic development moving forward, the plot still feels a bit far-fetched and contrived, even for a show about angels and demons.

Still, the reveal is well executed and besides the slight forcefulness of this arc choice, Ella is still such a loveable character, and with Lucifer centering itself in hope and change, Ella can be expected to overcome this hurdle in her personal life (and finally be inducted into the Celestial club).

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Lucifer’s first part of season five is an unarguable success. Even beyond characters, dynamics, and lore, Lucifer succeeds in the procedural aspect as well, providing intriguing mystery-of-the-weeks at a mock Mars base, a convent, a writers’ room, and not to mention its flashback noir episode.

Lucifer is unique because in a climate with differentiating opinions on what shows should provide and how much weight creators should give their fans, Lucifer transcends all of this. It provides interesting and fangirl-worthy relationships, dynamic character development, interesting supernatural lore, and fun episodic mysteries which are interestingly symbolic to the characters’ personal struggles.

And with a cliffhanger culminating with an angelic fight and an appearance from Dennis Haysbert’s God, there’s hardly any qualms to be had with Lucifer’s new installment.