Locke & Key “Siege”

OK, honestly, this is the sort of episode that does a good job of raising all the stakes.

I generally find Locke & Key to be basically entertaining and if not brilliant at least kinda smart.  By this point, the audience has a good idea how everything in this world works, and so do the characters.  No one is going to mistake this sort of material for Shakespeare or anything, but it does a good enough job of showing people learning from the past while also demonstrating how audience expectations can be played with.

Essentially, this episode finally establishes how powerful Gideon is while also showing the Lockes basically know how to deal with Dodge by now.  Dodge’s lies on why his own body is in Bode’s room don’t really work, and it doesn’t take much effort to capture him with the Chain Key. From there, Dodge drops a bombshell that the Lockes opt to not believe right away.  Why should they? They’ve been handling this stuff for a while now, especially with Tyler’s memory returned.

It seems Gideon isn’t just any ol’ demon.  He’s a god-level demon out to merge the two worlds, and Dodge doesn’t want that any more than the Lockes do because Dodge actually likes the world.  Sure, he likes it because it gives him a place to screw around in and cause misery, but that’s a hell of a lot better than anything Gideon has planned for the human race.

OK, so, that’s character work.  The Lockes think they know what they are doing and are generally proficient with the keys.  Sure, Gideon has a couple, but surely they can hold him off if he attacks Keyhouse directly with just his two goons, right?

Um, no.

Not at all.

He’s stronger than the Chain Key’s, uh, chains.  He can smash the Music Box before Tyler can order him to walk into the wellhouse and destroy himself.  He’s sinister, fast, and he has some actual regular weapons that he knows how to use.  Dodge alone manages to do any good in the fight, and he keeps asking for the Alpha Key to destroy Gideon once and for all, but because it’s freakin’ Dodge, of course no one trusts the guy.  I mean, this is like TV cliche work for a genre show, but it largely works here.  Up the stakes with a much more dangerous foe, let the good guys lose since there’s still three episodes left, and put everyone in peril that should be reversed before the world ends because, you know, this isn’t the kind of show where demons succeed in conquering the Earth.

Instead, there’s a pretty good extended fight scene with Tyler and Nina getting slapped around, Bode-as-Dodge getting shot in the shoulder, and Kinsey twisting an ankle, and Gideon only loses one of his two minions while gaining all the keys.

Made worse because Dodge’s final plan to give Gideon some keys so he could sneak up behind the Big Bad and use the Alpha Key fails because the Timeshift Key sends things back where they came from to avoid a paradox, meaning Bode might be gone for good (unlikely) and Gideon also has the Alpha Key on top of everything else.

See, this is the sort of stuff I like about Locke & Key.