‘Lucifer’ Character Spotlight: Ella Lopez
Welcome to our next Lucifer character spotlight! This time, we will be focusing on our favorite crime scene expert and forensic scientist, Ella Lopez.
By now I am sure you know the routine: we will start off with a quick refresher on the character, then dive right into three of their best moments, followed by three of their funniest. In case you missed one, you can check out all of our previous spotlights here.
Who is Ella Lopez?: Ella is a quirky, highly intelligent, hugging machine who hails from Detroit. She is the most recent addition to the team and has never failed to bring absolute joy to her peers. She seems to love all things nerdy (She would fit in perfectly with us!) and is up for anything and everything new at any time. She is on the scene at every new case, collecting evidence that she then processes herself back at the lab.
All right, we will kick this off once again with three of our top Ella moments:
“I already started”: Still fairly new to the team in season 2, episode 7 “My Little Monkey,” Ella puts her other work on hold to help Chloe find the person responsible for her father’s death. Ella tells her there is no harm in a fresh pair of eyes looking over all of her father’s old incident reports, arrest records, and booking slips. Chloe tells her she does not need to do all of that, but Ella had already requested all the paperwork and was more than willing and prepared to help out.
This moment is just one of many that exemplify who Ella Lopez is. She is the person who would drop whatever she was doing to help a friend in need; she would even do that for someone she met five minutes ago. She realizes the importance of this case to Chloe, and the team as a whole, so she brings her fresh set of eyes, new perspective, and enthusiasm to the case.
Hunting Candy: In episode 6 of season 3 titled “Vegas with Some Radish,” we see Lucifer get a call that his ex-wife (from a marriage that lasted a whole two weeks) has gone missing in Vegas, where he had first met her. Ella overhears Lucifer’s side of the phone call and, after he fills her in, offers to alert the rest of the team to begin a search for her. Lucifer is against this idea because it is Chloe’s birthday and insists she not know. Ella does not want Lucifer to go to Vegas to search for her alone so, despite her obvious discomfort with Vegas, she talks herself into going with him.
Once again, Ella has chosen to be there for a friend in their time of need, rather than focusing on anything else. Her hesitation to go to Vegas is very apparent in her initial conversation with Lucifer, specifically when she reveals she has a “thing” with the city. But as Lucifer is about to walk out the door, she says, “…but then I can tell it’s really important to you and I do have the next few days off, so… Okay, you’ve convinced me. I will help you.”
This scene, a lot like the first, really serves to exemplify Ella as a person. She puts her own feelings aside in order to help her friend. There is not much more I can say aside from this: we need more people like Ella Lopez in the world.
Old friend: I could not narrow this one down to a singular moment, so I decided to go with the episode as a whole. Season 3, episode 25 “Boo Normal” gave us a look into Ella’s past. We meet an old friend of Ella’s, one that, as it turns out, only she can see. Throughout the episode, we see Ella and her friend have many conversations, with someone always walking into the room in the middle of the conversation and seeing no one. These conversations give us a small look into Ella’s old life, and we can slowly piece together more and more about who this friend is.
I love this episode so much because of the insight it gives us into Ella’s past. We learn she was in a terrible car accident as a child, she grew up thinking she could see a ghost, she was bullied after she admitted to it, and she tried to remove that piece of her history but ultimately could not outrun it. We learn about her insecurities, and her friend sums up the feelings of the audience in regards to those insecurities by saying, “You know, the way I look at it is you’ve always looked out for everybody, but I think you deserve someone looking out for you for once.”
Now onto some of our favorite moments that Ella made us laugh:
(Air) Guitar God: Season 2, episode 4 “Lady Parts” brought us arguably the funniest episode to date. While out on the town, Ella, Maze, Chloe and Dr. Linda decide drunken karaoke is a great idea and Maze takes the lead on singing a classic: “Heartbreaker.” We get a wide-angle shot of the four on stage, and it gives us a perfect view of Ella rocking out on the air guitar.
If you say you have never rocked out on the air guitar before, you are lying. You may not have done it as publicly as Ella (you probably did) but you have done it at some point.
Joke thief: In season 3, episode 2 titled “The One with the Baby Carrot,” Ella gets to meet her favorite comedian. Things do not exactly go as planned, though, when he turns out to be incredibly rude and the dreaded joke thief. Finding out that one of her idols has stolen, and based his entire act on, another man’s life does not go over well with Ella. She essentially becomes a revolving door of anger, moving in and out of frame, coming back with new angry words to fire off at the man she had defended.
We have established that Ella is a loving human being. She is not the type to hate anything, let alone hate anyone, and when she finds out a man she idolized had stolen the very thing that made her love him, she was understandably angry. However, despite her anger, she never loses that cool-headedness we have grown accustomed to. She simply throws what can barely be considered insults at the man before walking away and then coming back again with something else to say, and that is what makes this moment so funny. She tries to be angry, but all we can see is her Ella charm. It is like watching someone try to yell “bubbles” angrily… it just does not work.
“Nipple deep in Jäger”: Season 3, episode 22 titled “All Hands on Decker” is an episode I have mentioned previously, because it is chock full of hilarious one-liners. And Chloe’s hijacked (and immensely boring) bachelorette party brought us a great Ella line: “We should be nipple-deep in Jäger by now and playing Pin The Tail on Ryan Gosling!”
What can I say about this one? Ella has expectations and those expectations were not met by this party. When you walk into a bachelorette party, especially one in Los Angeles, things are supposed to be a certain way, there are certain things that are required to happen, and it is a violation of the Geneva Convention if they do not happen. Booze and strippers were expected… snooze and stickers were given.
Aimee Garcia plays arguably the most consistently relatable character on the show, and she does it flawlessly. Nothing Ella does comes across as anything even remotely close to making fun of people who enjoy the things she does, or speak the way she speaks. She represents so many people, not only in the Lucifer fandom, but all over the world. This next season is sure to bring more fantastic Ella moments that will be acted out perfectly by Aimee, and we honestly cannot wait!
Let us know what your favorite Ella moments are, and be on the lookout for our next Lucifer character spotlight!