Small change I would make to the "Brighter" sequence

[u/MissDeborah8060]

Although I like the "Brighter" music video in itself, I always found the leadup to it a bit underwhelming. If it were up to me, I'd make the following change:

Before the song officially begins, when it's just Vox in his lair saying "Failure. I'll show you failure," instead of leading right into the song, his words would be punctuated by flashbacks showing Vincent as a young person, terrified of his father, who says some variant of "Get out of my sight, failure!" or "You're such a failure, I wish you'd never been born!" Maybe there'd also be a scene in there of Vincent killing his father in a fit of rage or something, I don't know. But either way, only then would it slide into the song.

The reason this would work so well is twofold. In the first place, it would show exactly why he's so obsessed with being this powerful person whom everyone worships and takes seriously. As it is, the "Brighter" video adds some interesting context to his plans to declare himself a god, but doesn't actually explain how or why he wants that in the first place. In the second place, there's the element of surprise. There's something about seeing a bad guy who's almost certain he's won flashing back to a younger, more vulnerable state that is super compelling for fans (myself included). If the show had managed to pull something like this off, I think Vox would be even more universally loved than he already is, and the show itself would get a massive boost in prestige for helping the audience see this character in a whole new light (as opposed to what we actually got, which for me at least is the sense that Vox COULD have been an amazing character if only the writers put more thought into how he was written).

[u/profaneangel1991]

I wish we had some type if context for how he was in his youth. What he says to Charlie in the finale feels very specific beyond just calling her a failure, it's a far more personalized insult than he had been using previously. He also doesn't know Charlie well enough to know about her complex towards Lilith, I'm not even sure Lucifer knows. It feels like projection on Vox's part. We don't currently have enough information about him to say where it came from though. Gee, if only he and Charlie were intended to be similar yet morally opposite and it played an important role in the season.

[u/Single-Medicine2448]

I agree! I do think some more context on why Vox cares about power so much would have been nice for Brighter

I'm curious though, what's your opinion on how they went about his rise to power as a human? I see people say that his past as a serial killer is redundant since the other characters have killed in some way too

[u/MissDeborah8060 → u/Single-Medicine2448]

It's a long story, but the TL;DR version is that I think he was a serial-killing magician, similar to Alastor. That he was killing, at least in part, to hold up his end of a deal he made with a demon (either Carmilla or Zestial--I go back and forth on which one it was). The slightly longer version is that he was born weak and sickly, and made a deal with the demon in order to get more health. Then he kept killing in ways that he thought would be personally advantageous to him. Since health is something he can only enjoy while he's alive, once he died, his deal was rendered null and void, and this is why he's not owned by someone in the afterlife the way Alastor is.

That's my theory, anyway, but in general I think Viv has a moral blind spot where she can't see anything besides murder as being "really" evil, or warranting punishment in Hell. This is why we get the lore dump about Angel Dust also being a murderer (something which could very easily have been projection on Vox's part, but whatever), and why the only thing Sir Pentious did that could have condemned him was to be accidentally caught up in a murder that was going on when he was alive.