Welcome back to the Key House! Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode Locke get some severe testing for their emotional bandwidth in this episode. Gabe is pissed about using all his materials to make a new key but brings some unexpected good news.
1. Chamberlin Knew
It seems like the dear old ancestor of the Locke’s wasn’t as foolish as he led everyone to be. When Gabe went ghost and got the information on making a key and giving it a purpose, good ole’ Chamberlin Locke told him the wrong moves to waste his time and resources. Gabe tricks Bode Locke into using the ghost key again to talk, and Chamberlin quickly reveals how he knew Gabe was full of crap. It turns out he had this obvious leech-like thing stuck to his back while he was in ghost mode. Although it was apparent to him seemed a bit problematic for the audience because it wasn’t visible at all during the times we’d seen Gabe go ghost and fly around.
It also reminded the audience that Sam Lesser is still in the mix since he went ghost right before the cops showed up last season and assumed he was dead since he wasn’t breathing. His spirit tried to make a run for Gabe’s body since it was unoccupied, but unfortunately, Gabe/Dodge is relatively stronger than Sam and knocked him back out to the graveyard.
2. Ancient Bullet
Mr. Barrett, always finding ways to mix with our characters, has a piece of Whispering Iron (the material behind the Black Door and is used to make the magical keys). He’d found it along with journal entries from an ancestor of his, and Gabe happens to hear it as he’s passing by at a party in the dorms. This is the connection to some brief moments in this season where British soldiers in the revolutionary war find the black door and are hit with pieces of Whispering Iron and then become possessed. At this point in the season, what happened after the fact has not been revealed, but it seems sure to make the audience think about it again.
Now as for Gabe, getting the material from Mr. Barrett’s office was a cakewalk. He snuck in with Eden, and while he got it pretty quickly, Kinsey did happen to catch the two of them in the room, so her suspicions of him are continuously growing. The fight with Scot may have got him a little leeway. It seems like it may be running out.
3. Trip To Bath, England
Tyler decides to make a huge romantic gesture for Jackie’s birthday and use the Anywhere Key to take her to Bath, England, the home of her favorite author, Jane Austen. It’s a fun adventure for the two of them until Jackie’s memory gets wiped again, and she begins to panic because of where they are and how they got there in the first place. Tyler takes her home and shows her a video they made trying to help her remember, but it still seems too much for her. She begins to give up on the idea of trying to save her memories of magic because it feels like it’s causing more pain than it’s worth. It’s tough for Tyler to hear because he feels like she’s giving up on the two of them, but he also understands. It seems to be more of a fear of what is going to happen to him in the upcoming months, and if they both forget the memories of magic, does that mean they’ll forget the memories of each other? Tyler knows that they are close to finding a way to remember, but he feels like it may be too late.
4. Kinsey’s Fear
Perhaps because it has been a minute since it was mentioned, but since Kinsey removed fear from her mind, she’s been a different character than initially introduced, and now it seems like it may not be someone she wants to be anymore. Her questioning of Gabe’s intentions has her thinking that maybe some fear in her system could help her make some more cautious but safer decisions. She and Erin find Kinsey’s fear outside of the Locke House and, although still, monstrous-looking seems to be happy to go back to her “home” inside of Kinsey’s mind. It’ll be good for her character to hopefully take a step back from trying to shut down Erin every time she mentions destroying the keys. Fear isn’t always necessarily a bad thing, and it can help people take a breather and reevaluate their game plan instead of carelessly jumping into trouble.
5. Duncan’s Restoration
A huge chunk of this episode had to do with Duncan Locke dealing with having his memories back. He tries to make sense of it as he walks around the house almost in a daze and flashes back to the moments taken from him, such as seeing Rendell Locke kill his friend Lucas who Dodge possessed. Duncan is essentially running the gauntlet of his emotions with these newfound memories in his mind and even at one point mixes Bode up with a young version of himself and screams to leave him alone. This was the emotional explosion that I felt was missing from the first season as everyone just tried to move on from the brutal murder. We got tears, anger, and genuine fear from a man who realizes a whole chunk of his life was taken from him. Duncan’s character has already been revealed to have made the key that helped Rendell and his friends keep their memories of magic, so it’s a mystery to the audience if there was even more taken from.
