When Lucifer takes its final bow on Netflix, it'll do so with a 10 episode final season packed with plenty of surprises — including (as revealed in the most recent trailer) cartoon versions of Chloe (Lauren German) and the titular devil (Tom Ellis), which were created by an animation team that knows a lot about wild characters in wild circumstances.
The final season of Lucifer features what happens when Lucifer, after a hard and bloody battle with his rival angels, finally gets what he's always wanted: The opportunity to succeed his father and become the one and only God almighty. No major spoilers here for what happens during the episode in question (entitled "Yabba Dabba Do Me"), but in an extended interview with Collider about the upcoming release of Season 6, executive producer Joe Henderson said that taking the show for an animated spin was "something I've always wanted to do."
However, added Henderson, he never thought it'd be a real possibility — until the pandemic happened. "I just didn't think I'd actually get to, because it's just such an undertaking. But it was COVID and we were looking for ways to have fewer days on set. And so the problem became the opportunity, because I secretly had been wanting to do it for years."
Stepping in to handle the actual process of animating the characters was Harley Quinn supervising producer Jennifer Coyle and the team of animators who work on the gloriously chaotic animated series. (Henderson didn't specify how the Lucifer team got connected with Coyle and her team, but it likely didn't hurt that both Lucifer and Harley Quinn are based on DC Comics-owned characters and are thus both produced under the WarnerMedia umbrella.)
"We got super lucky," Henderson said of the Harley Quinn team's involvement, "because we had this just incredibly lucky window of time where you have these animators who can just bring so much humanity to cartoons. And so it was just this wonderful confluence."
Again, no spoilers for how Chloe and Lucifer end up appearing in animated form, but the justification for it is something, in Henderson's words, "that is organic to our show, similar to what [co-showrunner Ildy Modrovich] had to find in her musical episode. We can't just do an animated episode. How do you earn it within the show? How do you earn it within the language of the show? That was important."
Modrovich added that in early conversations about the style for these animated sequences, "we were sort of talking about doing a Hanna-Barbera style, and then they actually worked a bunch of Looney Tunes influence in there as well, which you very much see in there. I mean, we gave them our instincts and they just flew. They're amazing. Like they're just incredible to work with. I mean, we had the starting point, but they brought it to life."
Find out what all this means when Lucifer returns for its sixth and final season on Friday, September 10. We'll have more from Collider's conversation with Henderson and Modrovich soon.