Locke & Key “Five Minutes Past”

Well, this episode started off doing all the sort of stuff I really don’t care about on Locke & Key before it turned around and did the sort of stuff I really like about Locke & Key.

So, there’s that.

I haven’t exactly been shy about pointing out that any Nina plot tends to bore me, and that I likewise don’t much care for the high school drama that popped up quite a bit in was the high school drama.  There’s a bit of the drama as Kinsey and the Savini Squad find Eden’s body and give her, uh, a burial at sea by tossing her body off a cliff and into the ocean.

Yeah, don’t tell her parents or anything.

But then the episode seemed to be dealing with Nina.  Nina’s kinda dull.  Her love life doesn’t interest me.  To be fair, none of the characters on this show have a love life that interests me.  But at least the kids can do stuff with the keys.  Here, Nina has to deal with Bode’s general disapproval that she’s dating anyone.  Bode believes she’s going to forget his father.  She takes him into some of her memories using the Head Key, but then she quickly kicks him out rather than let the boy see something on a camping trip from before his birth.

Basically, Nina keeps going back to remember how she was a drunk back then and kept making things bad, and so she spends a lot of time there until Kinsey comes along and helps her or something, and the whole time I was kinda bored out of mind with this sort of thing.

And then came the second half because, for all that Bode can’t use the Head Key to see his father, he can use the Clock Key to go back and see his dad there.  Only he kinda screws it up and visits the recent past to see a battle between Duncan, Tyler, Kinsey, and Dodge, a battle that Bode interrupts and assumes that it will play out the exact same way even as he brags about what had yet to happen.

Only, as Duncan tried to remind him in a previous episode, the Clock Key’s time travel doesn’t work that way.

Oops.

Now Dodge can chase Bode down again, and Bode’s best trick is to play dead by the door for the Soul Key.  That doesn’t work, and it basically allows Dodge to steal Bode’s body before going back to the present.

You know, I was wondering how they’d do the Dodge-takes-over-Bode’s-body plot, even figuring that it might be asking too much for the young actor playing Bode.  But nope, they found a way even after Dodge was killed off or cured or whatever you want to call it.

See, that’s the sort of thing I want from Locke & Key.  That’s unique and colorful.  Parents dating and unruly children making accusations and memories of past alcoholism somehow seems bland and cliched in a show about magic keys scattered throughout an old house.