‘Lucifer’ Getting Animated Isn’t the Biggest Shock in ‘Yabba Dabba Do Me’ (RECAP)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Lucifer Season 6 Episode 3 “Yabba Dabba Do Me.”]

Lucifer (Tom Ellis) is still on a quest to prove he can be God, and in “Yabba Dabba Do Me,” he finally seems to figure it all out… just before his entire world is upended.

Sure, he started caring about Carol Corbett (Scott Porter). But sort of off Dr. Linda Martin’s (Rachael Harris) suggestion, Lucifer decides to help someone with whom there’s no chance of that happening again: the first criminal he and Chloe Decker (Lauren German) caught together, Jimmy Barnes, who killed the devil’s friend. He may be dead, but that makes it “almost easier,” Lucifer admits. He can just pop down to hell.

Chloe insists on joining him; Amenadiel’s (D.B. Woodside) necklace makes her incredibly strong, so it’ll help her survive a trip to hell. Once down there, she spots Lucifer’s throne (“it looks so lonely”) and begins looking around. He stops her from opening a door because she doesn’t want to be trapped in someone’s hell loop, he warns: “Been there, done that, stabbed my brother to death a million times.” But when they find Jimmy’s, nothing can prepare them for what’s on the other side when they become animated as soon as they walk through his door.

Cue the usual cartoon antics: Lucifer as an accordion Chloe plays as she shows off her strength, Lucifer as an actual devil monster crashing Jimmy’s wedding, little flying devils when Lucifer is stunned and… “I’m a smoothy!” he realizes in horror when he pulls down his pants. Also, Lucifer has no control over the hell loop, so, they’re trapped. They have to help Jimmy. To snap him out of the cartoon, Lucifer urges Jimmy to show him his real hell, and they end up in the ’80s, back to normal. (But Lucifer still doesn’t have his control.)

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They follow Jimmy through a band firing him and a girlfriend dumping him, and there’s a common through line: someone telling Jimmy “you’re only holding me back” and a brief glitch where a blonde woman with a guitar replaces the speaker. As they learn when Lucifer insists on getting to the heart of Jimmy’s torment, that woman is his mother, who abandoned him in a motel room. Cartoons are his comfort. With that, Lucifer understands the pain behind the decisions he’s made, and while he can’t get him out of hell, he does bring his mother back to him.

Lucifer has grown to like Jimmy of all people, so now he knows he can care about and help anyone. “Ironically, we’re in hell, and finally, I’m ready to be God!” he tells Chloe. But before they head home, she needs to see Dan (Kevin Alejandro). There’s just one problem: He’s not where Lucifer has been keeping him safe.

That’s because Dan did make a deal with that angel, Rory (Brianna Hildebrand), out to destroy Lucifer, to get a ride back to Earth. But as soon as he lands in Lucifer’s penthouse, he calls out to warn his friend. (Lucifer and Chloe have just headed down to hell at this point.) As they wait, Dan discovers he’s a ghost: He can’t touch anyone or anything. He tries to talk Rory down, offering to listen about her pain, but she’s not interested.

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Then, when Lucifer does return to his penthouse, he only has moments to register Dan’s presence before Rory pins him to the wall and holds her sharp wings to his throat. “Finally, after all these years I spent hating you for what you did to me, finally, I can have my revenge,” she says. But who is she? “I’m your daughter!” Rory tells Lucifer. Wait, what?!

Elsewhere in this episode:

• Amenadiel starts at the LAPD, and his training officer, Sonya Harris (Merrin Dungey), has a reputation for being tough. And so in an attempt to help her friend, Maze (Lesley-Ann Brandt) gets herself picked up for vandalism (“It was horrifying, I’ll never look at the elderly the same way again,” an officer says). His unwillingness to believe “once a criminal, always a criminal” impresses Sonya after she drops Maze off at a woman’s shelter to get help. That‘s what she wants in a trainee.
• That frog that dropped on Ella’s (Aimee Garcia) windshield after her date with Corbett? She’s keeping it because she thinks it could be tied to something “mind, body, and soul-altering.”

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• Linda may have found what will fulfill her: writing a book, Sympathy for the Devil: My Time With Lucifer Morningstar.
• Lucifer misses Bones just as much as we do. He calls Chloe’s idea to join him in hell “the worst I’ve heard since some genius decided to cancel Bones. … That show was the perfect combination of procedure and banter. It had at least another five seasons.”

Lucifer, Complete Series, Streaming Now, Netflix