Locke And Key Season 3 Ending Explained. Locke & Key is an American fantasy horror drama TV series developed by Carlton Cuse, Meredith Averill, and Aron Eli Coleite, based on the comic-book series of the same name by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez. It premiered on Netflix on February 7, 2020. The series stars Darby Stanchfield, Connor Jessup, Emilia Jones, Jackson Robert Scott, Laysla De Oliveira, Petrice Jones, and Griffin Gluck.

In December 2020, ahead of the second season premiere on October 22, 2021, the series was renewed for a third season which premiered on August 10, 2022. In April 2022, it was announced that the third season would be its final season, as initially planned by the creators.

Synopsis

After Rendell Locke is murdered by the hands of former student Sam Lesser, his wife Nina decides to move with her three children, Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode, from Seattle to Matheson, Massachusetts, and take residence in Rendell’s family home, Keyhouse. The children soon discover a variety of mysterious keys throughout the house that can be used to unlock various doors in magical ways. They soon become aware of a demonic entity that is also seeking the keys for its own malevolent purposes.

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Locke and Key Season 3 Review

The primary antagonistic threat this year comes from Captain Gideon, who is hellbent on getting his hands on every single key from inside the house. In order to do that, he uses the power of the Well to conjure up several of his lackeys to do his bidding and invade Locke House.

Along the way, Bode and the gang stumble over numerous problems, most of which are issues they’ve caused themselves. In episode 1, Nina nearly kills Bode by abandoning him while using a new key. He ends up trapped in the cold in a snow globe. Now, back in season 1 we’ve learned that these keys are quite dangerous and should be handled with care.

In season 3, all of that’s out the window as the aforementioned situation I just talked about is a recurring trope throughout the series, as Bode finds several new keys that completely change the dynamic of the whole show… and he dives in headfirst with no regard for the implications of his actions. There are a couple of world-changing additions late on which are handled with about as much care as a kid with a shotgun. It’s really quite spectacular how badly these destroy the integrity of the story.

Regardless of how exciting the keys are, season 3 is actually moderately bland and moves at a pretty poor pace. We get a whole episode devoted to Duncan’s wedding and then he disappears from the plot completely, save for a conveniently expository voicemail late on in the game. Meanwhile, there’s a last minute plot twist that comes out of nowhere, a distinct lack of action in the middle portion of chapters, and then, to top all of it off, the final episode rockets through its antagonistic threat with such speed that it feels like riding a mild ride at a theme park before the hydraulics are slammed on and you rocket around the final curve back to the station.

Locke and Key is one of those shows that’s actually not too bad to binge in the moment. Sure, the characters are still extremely stupid and make dumb decisions right the way through, but the keys are such a unique and fascinating concept that you’ll stick with this in the hope that it gets better. Excluding a couple of aesthetically pleasing moments late on, it doesn’t. When you finish this season and take a step back, you really do come to appreciate just how shockingly poor this final season is.

And it pains me to write this because I really enjoyed the first two seasons. Now these weren’t without their problems but they could be ignored by the imagination and visual flair on offer. Season 3 waits until its penultimate episode before giving us a taster of that same flair. I can’t help but feel that if this series dabbled a bit more with its visual design, it would have worked to paper over the nonsensically stupid and erratic characters at the forefront of this.

Ultimately, Locke and Key bows out its third season by burning everything behind it. This is a story riddled with problems, from the worldbuilding and narrative structure through to its characters and contrivances. There are a couple of stand out moments but judging as a full season, this is miles below par.

Locke And Key Season 3 Ending Explained

Locke And Key Season 3 Ending Explained Capt. Frederick Gideon (Kevin Durand) is by far the most sinister villain in Locke & Key. Even the demon Dodge, who torments the Locke family throughout the series’ first two seasons, wants nothing to do with the man. In the final episode of the show’s final season, the possessed 18th-century British soldier is finally defeated when Kinsey Locke (Emilia Jones) stabs him in the chest with the Alpha Key.

Then Nina Locke (Darby Stanchfield) pushes the demon into a portal he created in the middle of Keyhouse, which leads back to the evil dimension from which he came. This triumph, though, isn’t where the series ends. After Gideon falls into the portal, it begins to shrink, and Tyler Locke (Connor Jessup) realizes that this happened because the demon had two keys in his possession when he entered the blue void. While there’s been loads of wickedness throughout Locke & Key’s entire run, Season 3 includes some particularly bleak storylines.

Now that the Lockes have seen their youngest member possessed by a demon and family friend Gordie Shaw (Michael Therriault) killed by Gideon, they can no longer ignore that the keys cause way more harm than good. Before the family is fully ready to eliminate magic, however, they use the Timeshift Key to travel into the past and pay one final visit to Rendell Locke (Bill Heck), the children’s late father and Nina’s late husband.

Once back in the present, they throw every last key into the blue void, which finally closes forever. Then, the Lockes’ lives move on, tinged with a subtler but still very present sort of magic. This ending, while certainly satisfying, is totally different from the ending of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez’s graphic novel series on which the show is based. “Gideon doesn’t exist in the source material, so the blue void isn’t opened in the Keyhouse and they don’t throw the keys back in,” co-showrunner Meredith Averill tells Tudum.

“It was important to us to tell the story of this discovery of the fact that the keys are actually rooted in some evil and some darkness. While they’ve brought all of these good times and [the Lockes have] had fun with them, there’s also another side of them, which is that they’re produced from the stuff of demons.”It was also important to Averill and her co-showrunner, Carlton Cuse, that the family find closure for Rendell’s death, since grief is a major theme of the series.

“A part of saying goodbye to him is saying goodbye to the keys and realizing, as Rendell says, that the magic was never about the keys. The magic was always about the family,” Averill explains. “So we felt like it was a really nice way to illustrate how far they’ve come and what they’ve learned by having to make that sacrifice.”Averill and Cuse’s decision to make the show’s ending completely different from that of the source material was motivated by wanting to make the story their own, an idea that was fully supported by the graphic novel’s creators. “You can read the comics and really enjoy the show as a separate thing.

Because it’s an adaptation and because film is a different medium and because we’re different storytellers than Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez, Meredith and I really set out to take the things that we loved about the comic, but then turn it into something that was ours. It was our own vision as writers and as showrunners,” Cuse tells Tudum. “And the good news is Joe and Gabriel seemed to have embraced it as well. It’s its own thing and we’re proud of that, but it’s so rooted in this unbelievable work that they did before us.”