LOCKE AND KEY Recap: (S01E03) Head Games

Melis Noah Amber

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Fair warning: This recap of Locke & Key episode 103 called “Head Games” contains more spoilers than hints Scot isn’t taking. That is to say, a boat load.

Welcome to another recap of Locke & Key, the show based on the comic book series byJoe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez. Last time, Bode found a third key while Echo got her groove back. The other Locke kids, Tyler and Kinsey, did some “teenagering” and Nina did some home reno.

In this episode, the kids take a walk down memory lane by going inside their own heads. Kinsey confronts her fear, while Tyler confronts the past. And Bode turns into a ghost, but just for like five minutes. 

Ready to dive head-first into the specifics? 

Bode holds a new key in episode three of Locke and Key
Locke & Key “Head Games”—Episode 103— Pictured: Jackson Robert Scott as Bode —(Photo by: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix)

We open right where we left off last time with the three siblings in Bode’s (Jackson Robert Scott ) room. He invites Tyler (Connor Jessup) and Kinsey (Emilia Jones) to join him in his GI Joe trunk-arcade. They do. He welcomes them to his head, where a jack-in-the-box takes them to one of Bode’s memories—dad Rendell (Bill Heck) telling him a bedtime story. They’re whisked away before it ends because real, younger Bode fell asleep before he ever heard it. 

Back in Bode’s room, Kinsey and Tyler want to know what’s up. Bode explains how whispers lead him to the keys and Tyler decides since he’s the oldest, he’s gonna hold on to the keys. He also thinks they shouldn’t use them anymore until they know just how dangerous they are. Besides, even if Bode is the one finding them, he lost the Anywhere Key. Bode sort of fesses up about Echo (Laysla De Oliveira), aka the scary well lady who wants the keys. Tyler takes the Mirror Key and Kinsey, the Head Key. They make Bode promise to tell them if Echo comes back.

Cut to: Echo at a coffee shop. She hijacks a stranger’s laptop (and donut). Echo is searching for a man named Mark Cho. Hey! We’ve seen that house before. It belongs to the guy who exploded himself in the pilot. She Anywhere Keys herself to the charred remains of Mark’s house, but his key is gone. Three young boys just happen to be wandering by. One of them (Alexander Eliot) is wearing Mark’s key around his neck. Echo straight up rips it off his neck and tosses him in front of a train. That got dark. 

Meanwhile, at school, Kinsey is wearing a floral shirt she no doubt bought off an Instagram ad. Scot (Petrice Jones) is waiting for her and thanks her for working on his film by inviting her to see a local cover band play. Even though it’s just a “hang” because he’d never be so old-fashioned as to expect anything under the “dating umbrella,” she still says maybe. 

Later, at Tyler’s hockey match, Ellie (Sherri Saum) asks Nina (Darby Stanchfield) out for Italian food. Please, let it be a date. 

Meanwhile, Kinsey is all alone because Nina insists she make friends. Eden (Hallea Jones) and her brother’s crush, Jackie (Genevieve Kang) invite her to sit with them. Logan (Eric Graise) watches the trio and laughs. 

Tyler is PO’d that he’s benched most of the game on account of being a newbie. After the game, Tyler offers Jackie a ride to a party at Javi’s, but his flirt game is interrupted when a Literal Chad (Steven Love) won’t leave his sister alone. Things get physical and Chad morphs into Rendell’s killer, Sam (Thomas Mitchell Barnet). These poor kids. 

Joe the English teacher (Steven Williams) breaks up the fight and lets Nina know that even though Literal Chad started the fight, Tyler escalated it to the point where he’ll probably be suspended from hockey for a bit. Nina wishes she could fast forward life a year, get past the hard parts of grief. My heart breaks a little. There’s so much truth about loss here.

Another flashback! Sam and Tyler talk outside of Rendell’s office. Rendell is mad at him for breaking his curfew by 15 minutes. They commiserate about how awful their dads are and when Sam says that he sometimes thinks about killing his father, Tyler asks him to kill his too. He didn’t realize Sam was serious, but kid has been beating himself up over and over about this. Logan comes up and warns him not to give in to anger. I hope this character becomes more than a trope.

Later, Kinsey’s drawing more bicycles, getting ready for her application to Parsons. Scot cannot stop beating a dead horse and texts her about the concert again; she doesn’t reply. Tears are streaming down her face. She confronts Tyler about the fight. He apologizes for accidentally pushing her in all the mayhem. But that’s not why she’s angry. She doesn’t know who he is anymore. More importantly, she’s decided she needs to get inside her head. Tyler won’t let her go alone. 

Instead of ending up at an arcade, they find themselves at the mall. That feels a little…sexist? The concept of the mall itself is kind of neat though. It’s filled with memory stores. They go to the store with memories of Rendell. Kinsey’s looking for the bedtime story that Bode never heard the end of. It’s a story about a sea monster that eats a crew of sailors for stealing its gold. The lone survivor gives the gold to the families of the lost men to make up for their deaths. When the sea monster sees what he did, he returns the miraculously-still-living sailors to the land. Sounds like something Rendell wishes would happen. Tyler doesn’t remember the story having this happy ending. 

They jump memories and end up back to that night, Tyler beating on Literal Chad, but they see a creepy Wolverine-like Kinsey in the distance. They jump again, this time to Murder Day, when Kinsey is hiding with Bode. She regrets hiding, having been paralyzed by fear. Suddenly, Wolverine Kinsey runs in and attacks Tyler. Kinsey stops her with the same fire poker she wishes she’d used on Sam. Back in Kinsey’s room, she tells Tyler that Wolverine Kinsey was her Fear. Tyler’s still injured IRL and wants to know why she made her Fear attack him. 

That evening, Tyler is creeping on Jackie’s Insta when he accidentally likes one of her photos. Dude, you don’t double tap on an old photo. He flashes back to the end of the fisherman story his dad told him. He got a version about loneliness, punishment, isolation and how we can’t run from the past. Are these memories reality or shifted in their minds? Does it matter?

EEEE! Ellie and Nina are at the Italian restaurant. Ellie wants to split a bottle of Malbec, but it turns out Nina is six years sober. That might explain her reluctance to believe she’d been inside her mirror. Nina takes a moment to brag about her kids to Ellie, using Bode’s imaginary well house friend to illustrate her point. Ellie looks like she’s seen a ghost. This date is not off to a good start. 

Meanwhile, whispers stop Bode from stealing a cookie from the cookie jar. He finds a key decorated with a skull stuck in a painting of a judge, hanging over a fireplace in the study. The Skeleton Key turns Bode into a ghost. He soars over the forest, enchanted, and comes upon the family cemetery, where he meets the ghost of his great great grandpa (Chris Britton). Bode learns that his dad and uncle used to use the keys when they were kids. 

On his way back home, Bode sees Ellie heading towards the well house. She deposits a key on the well and calls to Lucas in a whisper. But nobody’s home. 

Back inside Key House, Tyler discovers Bode’s undead body, but he reenters the land of the living before Tyler completely loses it. Tyler gets really angry at Bode, though, when he confesses he found and used the Skeleton Key. He softens when Bode admits he broke his promise not to use the keys because he thought he could find their dad.

In her room, Kinsey is surrounded by her bicycle drawings when Nina comes in. I really hope that there’s a narrative reason for the bicycles. Anyway, her application is due Wednesday and she still can’t select a picture. Nina thinks she’s gonna do just great because whatever she chooses, it’s from her head! Also, she pushes Kinsey to go on that “hang” with Scot. Kinsey gets close to the venue’s doors, stops, pulls out the Head Key and turns around.  

Nina and Kinsey look at art in Locke and Key episode three.
Locke & Key “Head Games”—Episode 103— Pictured (l-r): Emilia Jones as Kinsey, Darby Stanchfield as Nina —(Photo by: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix)

Meanwhile, Tyler is hanging up glow-in-the-dark stars in Bode’s room. Aww. They try to figure out why Rendell wouldn’t have told them about the keys. Did he forget, like their mom? Maybe he didn’t want them to use the keys. Tyler reassures Bode that no matter what, he and Kinsey are there for him.

But maybe not right this second…because Kinsey’s out in the woods, dragging a bag with her back to her head mall. 

Nina’s on her bed, flipping through Rendell’s high school yearbook. She pauses on the page with Lucas and Mark; there are omegas drawn in blue ink on the page. She flips the page—it’s covered in omegas. Nina remembers that Sam had a tattoo of a blue omega. 

To wrap things up, Kinsey’s back in the woods and her bag’s full. With Fear. Which she stabs to death and buries as Echo watches. 

I liked this episode more than episode two. It’s better when the teenagers are more involved with the supernatural than teenage angst. It’s clear the writers are more invested in the fantasy elements and the sibling dynamic is also something rare on television. I like all three of the Locke kids, but there’s something really interesting about the way Connor Jessup chooses to say his lines, putting emphasis on unexpected words, that make Tyler very natural. And, I wanted to give a shout out to the mall inside Kinsey’s head; It was very whimsically designed—the candy shop of dad memories was a nice touch.

Were you surprised by the reveal that Nina’s in recovery? What’s going on with all those omegas? Most importantly, will Scot finally take the hint? Join me next time, as I recap Locke & Key, here on Geek Girl Authority

The first season of Locke & Key is available now on Netflix.

Catch all of our Locke & Key recaps, here!

 

 

Melis Noah Amber
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