The Head and the Heart
Episode 2 of Locke and Key Season 2 begins down on the docks. Gabe uses the key on an unsuspecting fisherman and he dissolves into a disgusting, goopy mess. Only, this isn’t actually the purpose of the key. With only a small piece of Whispering Iron left, Gabe decides he needs to go right to the root cause to figure out his problem. And that means visiting Keyhouse. Naturally, Gabe sweettalks Kinsey at school the next day. Nina is there too, working in the school auditorium and fixing the place up. One of the teachers, Josh, appears but things get frosty between them pretty quickly. It turns out Josh is actually Tyler’s new teacher but following his summer exploits with Jackie, she flips out when she realizes she didn’t do the reading for the upcoming quiz. She has, of course, but Jackie isn’t aware of this given her recent memory loss. Despairing over her current situation, she admits to Josh she hasn’t done the reading and leaves. For Kinsey, she continues to be torn between Scot and Gabe, especially when the former admits that he’s been invited on to a prestigious film school in the UK. Gabe notices this angst and uses it as a crux to get closer to Kinsey, probing her over the keys and their origins. Kinsey has plans of her own, intending to use a key to go inside Gabe’s head. Realizing this could spoil everything, he decides against it. This only riles up Kinsey though, who believes their trust is breaking down. Eventually she tells him to leave. At school, the sexual chemistry between Scot and Kinsey is undeniably palpable, but when Gabe shows up Kinsey quickly skips away. Naturally, Eden appears and probes Gabe over exactly what they’re going to do with Kinsey, especially given she doesn’t know how to make the keys. Elsewhere, Josh tries to make amends with Nina following his macho flexing earlier in the episode. When he and Nina meet again later in the episode, we learn a bit more about this history teacher. Josh has just moved from Chicago after his wife passed away a year back. Josh and his daughter Jamie decided to move and get a fresh start. Matheson has a rich history so given his fascination with that, Josh is living in the dorms with Jamie, who happens to be Bode’s new friend. Speaking of Bode, back at Keyhouse Gabe decides to use the naïve kid as his latest crux to learn more about the different keys. Gabe asks about the ghost key and uses this to learn more about its origin – and how to make them. Specifically, he flies across to a graveyard that happens to hold the ghost of Chamberlin Locke. Feigning that he’s in love with Kinsey, Gabe learns that he needs to add a drop of his own fresh blood along with intent focus on exactly what he wants the key to do as the sole purpose. If he can do that then he should be able to make a key of his own. Meanwhile, Kinsey and Tyler continue to express their concerns about turning into adults. With the threat of memory loss looming over them, Kinsey decides they should find the “keeper of the keys” Erin, to find out how she can still remember – and help them do the same. However, Erin is in hospital and completely docile. In order to find out what’s going on, the pair decide to go inside her head. After turning the key, the pair find themselves inside a nightmarish vision, complete with a younger version of Erin holding a knife and hiding in her class. Erin is terrified of Dodge and believes he’s coming back to get her. Kinsey and Tyler manage to talk her down, revealing that they’ve got rid of Dodge (or so they thought!) and bringing her younger self back to the hospital. This singular act helps bring Erin back from the brink, as she suddenly regains consciousness.
The Episode Review
With a little more development over the keys and some more of those wild key powers being shown off, Locke and Key begins to get back to the intrigue and mystery that made parts of season 1 so endearing. Of course, the show still struggles with its teenage subplots which feel formulaic. The triangle with Scot and Gabe is particularly clichéd (minus Gabe being evil and having an ulterior motive of course) while Nina and Josh will obviously get together too, given their chemistry. However, seeing as Josh has a miniature of Keyhouse it does seem to hint that he’s going to have a larger involvement in this story than we first thought. For the time being though, Locke and Key delivers another decent episode. There’s nothing particularly outstanding with this season yet, but it’s still early days and we’ve got another 8 episodes for this story to start ramping up the drama. It would appear that Erin is going to play a larger part in this story now, and that ending certainly hints we’ve got a lot more secrets about to be uncovered. Roll on the next episode!
