Warning: this article contains spoilers for the finale of Locke & Key Season 1!
After a 10-year wait and 10 magical episodes that upended what fans of the comic were expecting, Locke & Key Season 1 ended with a finale that offered up a shocking cliffhanger and a mystery that set up a major conflict for the Locke family.
With the Locke kids finally defeating Dodge after a season of battling the evil demon, it seemed like all was well in Keyhouse. But a last-minute reveal that Dodge had been hiding under a familiar face all along and that Ellie was the one tossed through the Black Door threw all of that into chaos. Keep reading to discover how this compares to the source material and what it means for the cult comics adaptation going forward into a potential Season 2.
Who is Gabe and what happened to Ellie?
In the comics, the Lady in the Well takes on the face of a young boy named Zack Wells who befriends the Locke family in order to discover the location of the keys. But as we saw over the course of this season, the showrunners had a different plan. With the Well Lady A.K.A. Dodge taking on the shape of Lucas — like she did in the comic — to manipulate Ellie, it seemed like her plan was complete. However, as the final episode came to a close she had another shocking secret up her sleeve.
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After the Locke kids and their friends threw Dodge through the Omega Key door, trapping her in the ether where she came from, it seemed like a happy ending was on the horizon. But it was revealed at the last moment that Dodge had actually been hiding behind the face of Kinsey’s new boyfriend, Gabe, the entire time… and that it was Ellie who was thrown through the door rather than Dodge. It was a smart way to subvert expectations of readers who already knew the book’s biggest twist whilst setting up a huge conflict for a potential second season.
But if you’ve been paying attention it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise. Throughout the season we’ve seen Gabe try to cozy up to Kinsey and do his best to find out as much as he can about the keys. Think back to when he first discovers that Kinsey and Scot have the music box – what are the chances that he was really just wandering around and happened upon them? The reality is that Dodge (under the guise of Gabe) was following Kinsey to try and find out the secrets of the keys as well as their locations. Though it’s easy to miss on the first watch, upon a second viewing you can clearly see Gabe ingratiate himself with Scot and the Savini squad simply to get close to Kinsey, and he often supports her when the others won’t in order to earn her trust.
A great example of this is Gabe encouraging the crew to go down to the sea caves to film simply to get close to the Black Door and potentially the location of the Omega Key. Gabe also quizzes Kinsey at every opportunity about how she thinks that the keys were made and where they came from, plus Gabe’s story about his dad traveling constantly sounds awfully familiar to Lucas explaining that his family “moves around a lot.”
The Differences Between the Locke and Key Comics and Show
Netflix’s vision of Locke & Key changes a lot from the comics, which makes sense for such an ambitious and esoteric project. Here, though, the biggest change is the reveal that Dodge was actually Gabe and has been romancing both of the Locke kids to get close to them — and the keys — whilst also helping to orchestrate their final showdown in order to save herself and potentially find a new ally in a demonically possessed Eden.
Talking to IGN about these twists, co-showrunner Meredith Averill explained why the team decided to change that final big reveal. “Fans of the comic, they’re gonna be expecting Zack Wells to show up, and in the comic the issue with Zack Wells is he still looked like Lucas Caravaggio so people were constantly recognizing him and he would have to kill them as a result, as you saw with Joe Ridgeway, so what we liked to do with our version was make it a surprise for everyone.”
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Averill explained how it was the creative team’s way of keeping fans of the comic guessing whilst staying true to the source material. “We’re still telling a version of the same story about Dodge choosing to take on this persona in order to manipulate the Lockes, but holding that reveal until the last 10 minutes of our season.”
Co-showrunner Carlton Cuse elaborated, explaining how the change was embraced by the comics’ creators. “We wanted to do something different in the show than what was in the comic, and obviously there was this demon character who changed identities. For us, [we’re like] ‘Oh, here’s a really cool thing that we can do that takes an idea that was really embedded in the comic, but do it differently and expand upon it,’ and … [Locke and Key co-creator Joe Hill] was really enthusiastic about the change.”
What Would Locke & Key Season 2 Be About?
There are two big questions left at the end of Season 1. First, where is Ellie? Second, what is Dodge/Gabe’s plan now that they’re in Matheson with no one aware of their presence? It’s clear that both of these threads set up a major conflict going into a possible second season — Netflix has assembled a writers’ room for another season but has yet to officially greenlight it — and during a chat with IGN, Cuse teased what fans can expect if it does happen.
Trying to adapt a huge comic series like Locke & Key isn’t easy, so deciding what they could logically introduce in the first season helped them shape the finale, he said: “There are things that fit in Season 1 and there are things that don’t fit in Season 1, so we started collecting these things that we thought would be great for Season 2 and they helped inform some of the decisions about where we were gonna end this season.”
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Why Did Dodge Pretend to Be Gabe?
With the astonishing reveal that Dodge was actually using the persona of Gabe as a way to infiltrate Kinsey’s friend group and find out more about the keys, let’s look at how that plan came to fruition in the finale and what it means going forward. As Kinsey’s new boyfriend, Gabe gets a front row seat to the Lockes’ plan to defeat Dodge, which is incredibly helpful, seeing as the two are one and the same. Knowing that the Savini squad and company will be hunting down the demon themselves opens up the perfect opportunity for Dodge to put their ultimate plan into action. Using the Identity Key, Dodge switches their face with Ellie’s and leaves the transformed woman knocked out on the floor. Though finding Dodge completely vulnerable seems a little too good to be true, the squad doesn’t question their luck and quickly dispose of her through the Black Door, leaving the real Dodge free to reign terror as Gabe.
This big twist was something the showrunners were incredibly excited about setting up. “We wanted the show to end with a big twist, and we loved this idea that you would be able to kind of look back on the season and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I wasn’t really seeing what I thought I was seeing,'” Cuse added. “It really does set up a lot of stuff in Season 2. There’s so much that comes out of what we did at the end, particularly Gabe and Eden being teamed up. We saw that a little bit at the very end of Season 1 but that’s a relationship that we think is gonna be fantastic in Season 2.”
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What Happened to Eden?
Speaking of that team-up, what is Dodge’s plan going forward? In the comics she never had an ally, so Eden’s possession is a completely new addition to the story, and was that part of Dodge’s plan all along? Could the demonic Dodge possibly have known that her fellow demons would jump out of the ether and potentially take over the body of one of the Lockes’ friends? Or was that just a wonderfully convenient coincidence? In the comics, Dodge’s ultimate goal was to gain access to the Omega Key and invite a whole bunch of world-ending demons into our world. If that’s her plan here, she’s already on the road to achieving it with Eden at her side. The scarier thing for everyone, though, is that we know Kinsey has picked Gabe over Scot, putting more space between her and the one person who truly had her back. It also puts Gabe in prime position to convince Kinsey to revisit the Black Door and reveal the location of the Omega Key. We have to hand it to Dodge, it’s actually an incredibly smart plan, especially as the two already have a connection through using the keys together.
What’s Behind the Black Door?
There’s certainly a lot that can be mined for Season 2 and Cuse also wanted fans to know that Ellie’s fate would play a key part in the series going forward (pun intended): “Where Ellie went is… she went into the void. And what all that means, we’ll learn more about that in Season 2.” From the Locke & Key comics we know a little about the Black Door and what lies behind it, which already seems to differ from what we saw when Kinsey, Locke, and their friends opened it. In the comic series from Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, the ether is a horrifying Lovecraftian landscape filled with terrifying monsters and a great amount of demonic power rather than a swirling space-scape. Those real demons seem to be represented in the show by the magical fiery bullets that escaped the door.
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Another big thing here is the fact that it seems like Ellie (in the form of Dodge) actually seemed to survive enough to scream for Tyler and realize the terrible situation she was in. Whenever we’ve seen someone venture through the door in the comics, whether human or animal, they’ve immediately become possessed and obsessed with the world beyond the door. Seeing as the showrunners are clearly planning on this being a major part of Season 2, it seems like there’s a good chance that we might get to see the Locke kids venture beyond the Black Door to try and save Ellie. Maybe we’ll get to see Rufus realize his abilities from the comics — he can’t be controlled by the Head Key, and has a skill for spotting people who are hiding their identities using the keys — and return to help save his mother? If they do manage to save her, she might be forever changed, but there’s the possibility that she’ll have learned vital information about the demons while stuck in the void, and that could help the group beat Dodge and the freshly-possessed Eden.
There’s also the matter of the demons that passed through the Black Door. As they shot out of the door you might have noticed that the ones that didn’t strike Eden turned into a lump of molten metal when they hit the ground. This is a massively important part of Locke & Key lore, as in the comics (spoilers!) it’s revealed that the keys are made from that demonic metal, called Whispering Iron. Now that some of that magical material has been left behind, the Locke kids could possibly learn of its properties and make some new keys of their own. Or, perhaps it’s Dodge and Eden who will work out the secrets of the metal and fashion themselves a set of keys that they can use as weapons against the Lockes.
What did you think of Locke and Key Season 1, and will you tune in if it gets a Season 2? Weigh in below!
Source: IGN.com Locke and Key: Season 1 Ending Explained