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Locke & Key on Netflix
Well, that's 10 hours of my life I'll never get back. It started out so promising, too!
So basically it has a lot in common with Stranger Things and Umbrella Academy; it's that kind of show, with a big old house full of mysterious magical keys, investigating kids and teens, and a lot of twisty mysteries, as well as various interpersonal dramas with the kids and adults.
On the whole it was generally entertaining, although with escalating levels of frustration because, from the setup, it kept looking like it was going to be horror and then never really ran with it. So you got this constant horror-tease, where various horror tropes (creepy mirrors! trying to use a cabinet that fixes things to bring dead people back! being able to go into your own head and mess with your memories! ghosts! monsters!) were brought into the storyline and then fizzled in various ways. I mean, just to give one example, what is the POINT of an entire episode building up to trying to use the magic fixit cabinet to bring back a dead person when all that happens is absolutely nothing, and everyone is sad. It wouldn't be as bad if it was a one-off, but almost every creepy trope in the show was like that.
But there actually was a lot I liked about it! I had a little trouble connecting to the characters but I don't know if that's just a "me" problem, because they were fairly charming, and the kid actor playing the youngest of the kids was really good for as young as he has to be. The show had an autistic kid and a physically disabled kid, as well as one kid who was clearly adopted, and in none of those cases was it actually plot-relevant -- that is, the autistic kid wasn't that way because of some ~secret horror~, the disabled kid didn't lose his legs in a monster-related accident. They were just regular kids. So that was pretty neat.
I also figured as things went along that we weren't going to get satisfying answers - there was just too much going on - but I vastly underestimated the level of infuriatingly anticlimactic ass-pull. It was like Lost on speed-run.
The entire last two episodes were one long parade of stupid behavior on the part of the characters and stupid writing decisions. AAAAAAAAA.
After a certain point, literally EVERYTHING the characters did was staggeringly stupid. I was going to list the stupid things but honestly ... there is ONE character on this show who has a functional brain cell (the little kid) and everyone else just ... I don't know! DOES THINGS! The twist with Ellie and the demon switching places was actually pretty good except they would have figured it out immediately if they had ever CHECKED ON ELLIE, which they had plenty of time to do, and I mean - okay, so you give the shadow key to your friend who is going to go get the shadow crown it goes with, at the place where the monster is (stupid decision no. 1; at least hang onto the key so if she gets caught, he can't use the crown!) and then when the monster shows up with the shadow crown/key, never AT ANY POINT did it occur to anyone that Ellie might be in trouble! Let's go do something else for several hours and send the 8-year-old to go over to her house and make sure everything's fine, and then not even bother to ask where HE is either. OH MY GOD.
It also annoys me in general that they decided to take a nifty and suspenseful premise like face-changing monsters and then show you exactly who the monsters are at the end, but it didn't help that I hated every part of who the reveals were. FIRST OF ALL, the "Gabe was the monster all along!" makes absolutely no sense because he didn't act like Lucas/Dodge at all! The "Lucas is Dodge" reveal was actually very well set up (and creepy) because Lucas had the same vacant-creepy affect as Dodge and so you go OH!! when you find out he can change his appearance - my husband had actually figured out that twist just based on the similarity of body language - but then Gabe behaves nothing like either one of them. He didn't have the expressions and body language, and even more frustratingly, he didn't try to take the keys. He literally was RIGHT THERE with the body-puppet key and made no attempt to get it, whereas Dodge and Lucas were both going for the keys every chance they got. So there's a psychotic demon just like ... hanging out with a bunch of teenagers, pretending to be a teenager, buddying up to the film kids and helping them make a fake horror movie - for reasons?? And none of the adults at this small-town high school ever noticed that some strange kid who isn't enrolled in the school and doesn't belong to any of the parents just shows up and attends classes randomly?
I also felt like the final reveal on who the demons were (the underdog love interest, and the reformed bully mean-girl) really ticked me off because, up until that point, the outcome of their storylines was part of what I liked about the show - the unexpected love interest got the girl, and the mean girl got her own sort of mini-Steve Harrington arc, and then the show undid all of that with the demon reveal, just leaving the "nice" kids as the non-evil set. Thanks, I hate it.
And like ... there's still a fear/rage monster running around town and no one seems to care? Not to mention the ghost of a dead murderer who I guess is just haunting Key House now but it changes absolutely nothing? And I'm sorry but the whole scene with scattering dead dad's ashes at the clifftop and "We brought you home" - look, he literally went ACROSS THE COUNTRY to get away from that place, I don't think he would have been super happy to know that you were going to take his ashes all the way back to the place that he fled as soon as he was able, and on top of that, dump his ashes into the site of his greatest trauma! GOOD JOB!
Also I guess no one cares that Duncan has no memories of most of his life and Mom spends most of her time in a state of magical lobotomy. Oh, and why CAN the original key holders remember the keys when no other adults can? Ellie said something like "We figured out a way to keep our memories" and then went off into the Lucas flashback and never told us.
Also, why did Lucas-demon feel the need to pretend to be Dodge when he was dealing with the little kid for most of the show, when the kid had never seen Lucas and wouldn't know who he was anyway?
And I guess Kinsey is just fine with her fear amputated now, even though she spent most of the show making incredibly reckless decisions because of her inability to feel fear? (This is another example of that thing I was talking about above, where potentially horrific plot developments just fizzle. There was a big dramatic scene with Kinsey burying the physical manifestation of her fear and then being wildly reckless because of her lack of it, and I was expecting it to mess her up somehow, but then it just stopped being a big deal and now she's fine even though she, presumably, still doesn't have the ability to feel fear.)
And where did the keys come from in the first place? What's up with the omega door? Everyone's fine with having the town on a hellmouth I guess? I wouldn't mind some of this being unanswered if there was even a hint that anyone was wondering about it anymore, but apparently they figured that opening the omega door and chucking the demon back into demon dimension solves the whole problem of the door that ACTIVELY MANIPULATES PEOPLE'S MINDS. I mean, even if the demon wasn't still running around (which they don't know yet), I don't think I would be super cheerful about living in the house at the top of the cliff with a hypnotizing, homicidal demon-door underneath it!
So basically it has a lot in common with Stranger Things and Umbrella Academy; it's that kind of show, with a big old house full of mysterious magical keys, investigating kids and teens, and a lot of twisty mysteries, as well as various interpersonal dramas with the kids and adults.
On the whole it was generally entertaining, although with escalating levels of frustration because, from the setup, it kept looking like it was going to be horror and then never really ran with it. So you got this constant horror-tease, where various horror tropes (creepy mirrors! trying to use a cabinet that fixes things to bring dead people back! being able to go into your own head and mess with your memories! ghosts! monsters!) were brought into the storyline and then fizzled in various ways. I mean, just to give one example, what is the POINT of an entire episode building up to trying to use the magic fixit cabinet to bring back a dead person when all that happens is absolutely nothing, and everyone is sad. It wouldn't be as bad if it was a one-off, but almost every creepy trope in the show was like that.
But there actually was a lot I liked about it! I had a little trouble connecting to the characters but I don't know if that's just a "me" problem, because they were fairly charming, and the kid actor playing the youngest of the kids was really good for as young as he has to be. The show had an autistic kid and a physically disabled kid, as well as one kid who was clearly adopted, and in none of those cases was it actually plot-relevant -- that is, the autistic kid wasn't that way because of some ~secret horror~, the disabled kid didn't lose his legs in a monster-related accident. They were just regular kids. So that was pretty neat.
I also figured as things went along that we weren't going to get satisfying answers - there was just too much going on - but I vastly underestimated the level of infuriatingly anticlimactic ass-pull. It was like Lost on speed-run.
The entire last two episodes were one long parade of stupid behavior on the part of the characters and stupid writing decisions. AAAAAAAAA.
After a certain point, literally EVERYTHING the characters did was staggeringly stupid. I was going to list the stupid things but honestly ... there is ONE character on this show who has a functional brain cell (the little kid) and everyone else just ... I don't know! DOES THINGS! The twist with Ellie and the demon switching places was actually pretty good except they would have figured it out immediately if they had ever CHECKED ON ELLIE, which they had plenty of time to do, and I mean - okay, so you give the shadow key to your friend who is going to go get the shadow crown it goes with, at the place where the monster is (stupid decision no. 1; at least hang onto the key so if she gets caught, he can't use the crown!) and then when the monster shows up with the shadow crown/key, never AT ANY POINT did it occur to anyone that Ellie might be in trouble! Let's go do something else for several hours and send the 8-year-old to go over to her house and make sure everything's fine, and then not even bother to ask where HE is either. OH MY GOD.
It also annoys me in general that they decided to take a nifty and suspenseful premise like face-changing monsters and then show you exactly who the monsters are at the end, but it didn't help that I hated every part of who the reveals were. FIRST OF ALL, the "Gabe was the monster all along!" makes absolutely no sense because he didn't act like Lucas/Dodge at all! The "Lucas is Dodge" reveal was actually very well set up (and creepy) because Lucas had the same vacant-creepy affect as Dodge and so you go OH!! when you find out he can change his appearance - my husband had actually figured out that twist just based on the similarity of body language - but then Gabe behaves nothing like either one of them. He didn't have the expressions and body language, and even more frustratingly, he didn't try to take the keys. He literally was RIGHT THERE with the body-puppet key and made no attempt to get it, whereas Dodge and Lucas were both going for the keys every chance they got. So there's a psychotic demon just like ... hanging out with a bunch of teenagers, pretending to be a teenager, buddying up to the film kids and helping them make a fake horror movie - for reasons?? And none of the adults at this small-town high school ever noticed that some strange kid who isn't enrolled in the school and doesn't belong to any of the parents just shows up and attends classes randomly?
I also felt like the final reveal on who the demons were (the underdog love interest, and the reformed bully mean-girl) really ticked me off because, up until that point, the outcome of their storylines was part of what I liked about the show - the unexpected love interest got the girl, and the mean girl got her own sort of mini-Steve Harrington arc, and then the show undid all of that with the demon reveal, just leaving the "nice" kids as the non-evil set. Thanks, I hate it.
And like ... there's still a fear/rage monster running around town and no one seems to care? Not to mention the ghost of a dead murderer who I guess is just haunting Key House now but it changes absolutely nothing? And I'm sorry but the whole scene with scattering dead dad's ashes at the clifftop and "We brought you home" - look, he literally went ACROSS THE COUNTRY to get away from that place, I don't think he would have been super happy to know that you were going to take his ashes all the way back to the place that he fled as soon as he was able, and on top of that, dump his ashes into the site of his greatest trauma! GOOD JOB!
Also I guess no one cares that Duncan has no memories of most of his life and Mom spends most of her time in a state of magical lobotomy. Oh, and why CAN the original key holders remember the keys when no other adults can? Ellie said something like "We figured out a way to keep our memories" and then went off into the Lucas flashback and never told us.
Also, why did Lucas-demon feel the need to pretend to be Dodge when he was dealing with the little kid for most of the show, when the kid had never seen Lucas and wouldn't know who he was anyway?
And I guess Kinsey is just fine with her fear amputated now, even though she spent most of the show making incredibly reckless decisions because of her inability to feel fear? (This is another example of that thing I was talking about above, where potentially horrific plot developments just fizzle. There was a big dramatic scene with Kinsey burying the physical manifestation of her fear and then being wildly reckless because of her lack of it, and I was expecting it to mess her up somehow, but then it just stopped being a big deal and now she's fine even though she, presumably, still doesn't have the ability to feel fear.)
And where did the keys come from in the first place? What's up with the omega door? Everyone's fine with having the town on a hellmouth I guess? I wouldn't mind some of this being unanswered if there was even a hint that anyone was wondering about it anymore, but apparently they figured that opening the omega door and chucking the demon back into demon dimension solves the whole problem of the door that ACTIVELY MANIPULATES PEOPLE'S MINDS. I mean, even if the demon wasn't still running around (which they don't know yet), I don't think I would be super cheerful about living in the house at the top of the cliff with a hypnotizing, homicidal demon-door underneath it!
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Dear God.
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Did they have the excuse of the pandemic crashing into their production schedule, or is its incoherence beyond what can be accounted for by interruption?
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This also torpedoes another theory I had, which was that the show's weird feeling of dislocation and the general emptiness of the crowd scenes was because it was filmed during the pandemic, but apparently it's just like that.
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Welp.
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--Especially the revealed demons being the more interesting plots, like, I love a good reformed!mean girl, that would've ticked me off so much!
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Yes!! It was the WORST, because there was so much happening that's just really cool - there are some wonderful creepy bits and cool concepts, from typical horror-movie stuff like reflections that take on a life of their own and smile at you in a nightmare-fuel way, to being able to see inside the characters' memories with each person's head represented by a different metaphor (one of them is a mall with all her memory categories on a big mall-directory signboard; another one who is Gen-X-age has a room full of VHS tapes) and then most of the time, it never does anything with all of that cool imagery and those neat concepts. They introduce the idea of being able to physically take things into people's heads and carry out or destroy memories, but never actually take it to any of the fascinating or horrible places you could take that. There is a key that can be used to control people like meat puppets, which is used exactly once, as a school prank, and then never again (including times when it would be incredibly useful, like when they're fighting enemies, and times when it would be horrifying, like when the bad guy gets their hands on it and never uses it either!).
I never realized horror-tease was a thing, but apparently it's a thing. You're not missing anything.
I love a good reformed!mean girl, that would've ticked me off so much!
I WAS SO MAD ABOUT THAT. >____> Up until that point she had been given a pretty neat Steve Harrington-esque redemption plot (it wasn't quite as dramatic and cool as Steve's, but she got a nice turnaround from bully-antagonist to one of the monster-fighting teen gang) ... and then at the end it's revealed that she got replaced by a demon about half an episode ago, which has already been established, or at least implied, as an irreversible kind of thing; the original person is gone. Show, why you gotta do this to me.
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Oh wow. Replaced by another person. One of my least favourite things EVER!
Those setups are pretty neat as idea generation goes, though. Maybe someone sees this show and gets inspired to make something better!
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... and then at the end it's revealed that she got replaced by a demon about half an episode ago, which has already been established, or at least implied, as an irreversible kind of thing; the original person is gone.
ACK that would've had me throwing things at the screen! (I know there's some show that did this to me and I was really upset about it, but I seem to have blocked what show it was ^^;)
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And I'm sorry but the whole scene with scattering dead dad's ashes at the clifftop and "We brought you home" - look, he literally went ACROSS THE COUNTRY to get away from that place, I don't think he would have been super happy to know that you were going to take his ashes all the way back to the place that he fled as soon as he was able, and on top of that, dump his ashes into the site of his greatest trauma! GOOD JOB!
D:
That's...awful!
I don't think I would be super cheerful about living in the house at the top of the cliff with a hypnotizing, homicidal demon-door underneath it!
LOLLLL
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So incredibly tone-deaf...!
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If I had to speculate, I would guess that the source of the writing issues is that the show is based on a small-print comic from the mid-2000s or thereabouts. I only ever read one issue of it, but I got the impression that it was more about spook and atmosphere than payoff. I'd love to read a deep analysis from someone familiar with the comics, because I agree that the premise has so much potential!
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