WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Lucifer Season 6, now available to stream in its entirety on Netflix.
The final season of Lucifer saw the introduction of a new character, Brianna Hildebrandt’s Rory. Trailers showed her spreading a pair of scarlet, bladed wings, so it was clear that she wasn’t fully human, but up to that point every winged character in the show was an angel, and every angel was one of Lucifer’s siblings. Many fans made the logical assumption that Rory would be another sister, and probably the season’s villain, given the hostility of her first impression. Her real relationship with Lucifer, though, turned out to be something entirely new — for him, for the show and for Heaven itself.
Rory is Lucifer and Chloe’s biological offspring. The potential for angels to reproduce with humans was already established with Amenadiel and Linda’s baby, Charlie, but that still leaves a lot of questions for both the characters and the audience. Ultimately, Lucifer’s relationship with his daughter becomes the central theme of the season. But how did she get here?
The answer, in a first for Lucifer, is time travel. Lucifer doesn’t recognize Rory when they first meet, and his confusion at seeing an unfamiliar angel only deepens when she knows who he is… and hates him enough to want to kill him. When she declares herself his daughter, he initially dismisses it offhand, but then spends an episode tracking down sex partners from his past to try to either account for Rory’s existence or disprove her claim. Although he can’t identify a mother for her, he realizes he believes her anyway, and the mystery gets taken to another level when Rory comes face to face with Chloe and calls her “Mom.”
Since each angel has a unique power that manifests through self-actualization, it makes sense that Rory can do something none of the characters have ever seen before. However, this trip into the past is her first, and all she knows about what caused it is that she was experiencing deep despair and anger at her beloved mother’s deathbed. Her father, she says, wasn’t there for them at the time, and in fact, hasn’t been there for her entire life.
A new side of Lucifer emerges in a series of sometimes funny, sometimes embarrassing, always heartfelt attempts to prove that he cares about Rory. Although her tough facade begins to crack as they bond, she insists that the future can’t be changed and he’s destined to leave before she’s born.
Lucifer’s quest to find out why he would abandon his child and her mother — after millennia of hating his own father for doing the same thing, no less — culminates in the revelation that Rory is the one who asked him to do it. Her rage, combined with the strong sense of self that she developed through Chloe’s parenting, kicked off a chain of events that led to Lucifer making a painful and selfless choice that will save countless damned souls. To keep that choice intact in the present, she needs to hold onto her emotional catalyst from the future.
By the time Chloe’s pregnancy with Rory is confirmed, Lucifer’s love for his daughter is so strong that he wants nothing more than to stay on Earth and be part of her upbringing. The only way he can find the resolve to go through with his plan to reform Hell is out of respect for Rory making her own choice, just as his own choices and their consequences led him to who he finally became. Aurora Morningstar was nothing that Lucifer fans were expecting, but everything that Lucifer needed.
To meet Rory, all six seasons of Lucifer are streaming now on Netflix.
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