‘Lucifer’ Series Finale Proves the Title Character Is an Angelic Father (SPOILERS)

Spoiler warning: The following article contains spoilers for Season 6 of Lucifer.

Turns out, Lucifer Morningstar isn’t the deadbeat father his daughter thought he was. The sixth season of the supernatural Netflix drama Lucifer introduces his progeny as an angel hellbent — pardon the pun — on making Lucifer pay for being an absentee dad. So why does Lucifer abandon Rory, anyway?

In the season’s fifth episode, “The Murder of Lucifer Morningstar,” Rory (Brianna Hildebrand) introduces herself to Lucifer (Tom Ellis) and Chloe (Lauren German) as their future daughter, and she has some daddy issues!

Rory explains to Lucifer and Chloe that she she was going through “something big” in her present, and she was certain that Lucifer would have shown up then. But when he was MIA yet again, a “rush of pure rage” somehow gave her the ability to travel through time, sending her into her past — Lucifer and Chloe’s present. In Rory’s timeline, Chloe refused to tell her why Lucifer dropped out of Rory’s life.

But she finds out in the series finale.

In the series finale — Episode 10, “Partners ‘Til the End” — Rory has been kidnapped by Vincent Le Mec (Rob Benedict), the same mercenary who murdered Chloe’s ex-husband, Dan (Kevin Alejandro).

Lucifer and Chloe come to Rory’s rescue, dispatching many of Le Mec’s henchmen. And when Lucifer reaches Le Mec, he offers his life in exchange for Rory’s. Rory frees herself from her restraints and corners Le Mec, intending to kill him, but Lucifer convinces her not to.

Then, of course, Le Mec lunges at Rory again, so Chloe shoots him in the chest, and Le Mec dies after impaling himself on one of Rory’s feathers. Just before he expires, though, he reveals that Dan “saw the light” at the time of his death and thus made it to Heaven.

Later, during a family confab, Lucifer realizes he helped Dan out of his Hell loop and into Heaven, and he could do so for many more people.

“Hell no longer needs a keeper,” he says. “It needs a healer. Chloe, I think I finally found my calling.”

That’s when Rory realizes that’s why Lucifer was absent for her childhood: Getting people out of Hell and into Heaven has to be a full-time job for him.

“Everything that we’ve been through, it all leads to what Dad just realized: That he needs to help those lost souls,” she says. “I was one of those lost souls. … You said you wished you could be there for me when I needed you most. Dad, you were. You saved me.”

And with that realization, Rory starts getting pulled back to the future, making Lucifer promise not to change anything, arguing that her childhood, which he’s about to miss, is “just a blip in our eternal existence.”

As the finale concludes, we see Chloe bringing a newborn Rory home from the hospital and then — years later — Rory visiting an elderly Chloe, who’s on her deathbed, telling her that she’ll see her on the “other side.”