With a show (adapted from the graphic novels) whose name seems a bit too salt-in-wound for the times, Locke & Key bears the characteristics of something a millennial child might have watched in the 90s–somehow bearing equal parts Are You Afraid of the Dark? meets Ghostwriter but more uncensored in its penchant for hair-raising. Of course, like any good buildup to all-out creep factor, Locke & Key eases into things with the seemingly non-supernaturally related death of Rendell Locke (Bill Heck). A high school guidance counselor in Seattle, Rendell is attacked by one of his own students while at home doing some repairs with his wife, Nina (Darby Stanchfield, a sort of Julianne Moore lookalike), who freezes in terror as she watches Sam Lesser (Thomas Mitchell Barnet) point a gun at her husband. With his finger on the trigger, he demands that Rendell tell him everything he knows about Keyhouse (hence the name, Locke & Key–clever, no?). When Rendell refuses, Sam clips Nina in the leg, causing Rendell to loosen his lips only slightly to warn, “Whatever you think you understand about that place, you don’t.”
From the outside looking in on the horrific scene as it unfolds is Rendell’s oldest son, Tyler (Connor Jessup), who can’t unlock the door in time to stop the shooting. Meanwhile, his daughter, Kinsey (Emilia Jones), and youngest son, Bode (Jackson Robert Scott), are forced into hiding for their own self-preservation as Sam’s menacing behavior escalates. Now, of course, he’s locked up in prison (like the rest of us) as the Locke family moves to Rendell’s ancestral home–the one Sam was so oddly curious to know about. It is at Keyhouse (on the other side of the country in the fictional Matheson, Massachusetts) that they’re greeted by Rendell’s younger brother, Duncan (Aaron Ashmore), an “odd duck,” for sure–who immediately reveals his lack of a reliable memory, or any memory at all, really. This, obviously, will come back later in the narrative with regard to what, why and when he started to exhibit similar effects of a lobotomy.
And as Tyler and Kinsey begin to settle into their new scholastic environment, with both homing in on potential love interests–Jackie Veda (Genvieve Kang) and Scot Cavendish (Petrice Jones), respectively–Bode encounters the sinister being he doesn’t seem to immediately categorize as sinister, the “Well Lady” (Laysla De Oliveira). It is she who instructs him on the various keys he can find all throughout the house, one of the most special being the Anywhere Key, which can open a door to anywhere its holder thinks of. Playing right into her–or rather, “its”–trap, Bode finds the key and brings it to her, forced to surrender it when she agrees to help him get his mother out of the Mirror Room, a horrifying dimension where one is faced with nothing but the self (which is what a lot of humans are having to experience while in enforced quarantine), easily losing track of the way back out and inevitably driven to madness if forced to stay in there too long. So no, not every key is necessarily beneficial.
And, to the point of madness, there is one of the most used keys throughout Season One, the Head Key. For by slipping it into the back of one’s neck, they can instantly gain access into their own mind via a portal that’s shaped like the perfect introductory piece to what might be inside (in Bode’s case, the entrance to his head is a toy chest). In this way, both Tyler and Kinsey are able to confront some raw, objective memories shared between them and their father. Yet none of it seems to unlock the ultimate clue to the primary puzzle piece of Keyhouse shrouded in mystery: the drowning of three of Rendell’s friends from his close-knit high school group after dipping down into the caves located at the shore’s edge (for Massachusetts is always rife for making its denizens fall over the edge). In any case, it seems to only be Bode who is adept at unlocking the clues as he finds yet another key–the Ghost Key–in the third episode, “Head Games.” Able to leave his body as a spirit, he floats all the way to a small graveyard where he encounters the ghost of his great-great-grandfather, Chamberlain Locke, who says that Rendell and Duncan used to visit him all the time when they were kids.
Meanwhile, Kinsey decides to go back inside her mall-scape of a head without Tyler so as to kill her own fear, represented by a version of her that looks inspired by mid-90s Courtney Love. This enables her to more seamlessly open her heart to Scot’s overt advances as he does his best to welcome her into his horror film club, the Savini Squad. With her fear extracted, Kinsey comes off as an entirely different person in episode four, “The Keepers of the Keys.” It is also in this episode that Ellie (Sherri Saum), one of Rendell’s only remaining living high school friends, starts to get closer to Nina after Bode himself has already taken a shine to her developmentally challenged adopted son, Rufus (Coby Bird), who, for some reason, is the groundskeeper of Keyhouse. But it is a closeness that is, naturally, not without ulterior motive on both women’s part. As each family member appears preoccupied by their own social dramas, Bode continues to be the one most concerned with keeping the Well Lady at bay, unearthing the useful tidbit that she can’t actually take keys unless they’re given to her.
This sets off her highly irascible nature as she conspires to line up several dominoes in the background of “Family Tree,” in which Tyler and Kinsey unearth the Plant Key in the graveyard where Chamberlain is buried, causing a number of Duncan’s buried memories to rise up from the ground, one of them showing Rendell beating a high school friend, Lucas (Felix Mallard), to death. It doesn’t exactly help the two preserve their deified image of Dear Old Dad. But, of course, like everything that relates to Keyhouse, nothing is as it seems. Just like the Music Box Key, which opens to show a dancing ballerina, not instantaneously obvious in meaning to those who haven’t had to metaphorically dance for someone before. As such a metaphor, once the key is put into the music box, whoever has placed it inside can tell anyone near them what to do and they have to obey. It’s one of the best, most useful tools in terms of a defense and yet, for some irksome reason, it is used all but one time for some petty payback on Kinsey’s part to a fellow student at school, Eden (Hallea Jones–the third Jones in the cast credits). It is its lack of use in the seventh episode, “Dissection,” that tracks the extreme dip in the show’s quality (though the special and visual effects naturally remain on point throughout), which, up until this point, had been engaging rather than predictable and annoying. For yes, using the Music Box Key to tell Sam what to do as he takes the Keyhouse under siege would’ve spared so much trouble for the Lockes. And it’s just what any sensible person would wield in order to protect themselves.
Alas, anything resembling logic goes out the window from this moment forward as we build to the crescendo of the tenth and final episode of the season, “Crown of Shadows” (the donning of the eponymous entity being clichely soundtracked to Billie Eilish’s “you should see me in a crown” in the closing scene to the penultimate episode). A denouement that “does its best” to “fool” us, yet sticks to exactly all the anticipated reveals. Just like Earth Season 2020, though no one wants to believe their worst projections could possibly come to fruition.
