Locke&Key Review

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Back in December, I wrote a primer on the Locke&Key graphic novels when it was announced that they'd be made into a Netflix series. Said series has no aired in its full batch of 10 episodes, as is custom on Netflix. I watched it completely, and so I feel uniquely qualified to give you a spoiler-free review of it, burning with anticipation as you are. That sentence contained two exaggerations, for those keeping count.


Anyway, to give you the tl;dr: the series is not good.

Now, for everyone who's interested in a tad more detail: I'm heartbroken. I love the graphic novels (and of course reread all of them instantly to soothe my bleeding heart), and I really wanted this series to be good. But it's not, and the reason for this is that the developers for some inexplicable reason decided to turn this into a generic Netflix series, where they had a much more compelling story at their hands. But let me start in the beginning.

The six graphic novels comprise a comparably tight, closed story. It's finished. That means, the series a finite ending. It's also constantly accelerating, widening its scope every issue, until all of it gets neatly wrapped up in the final one. So why did the producers decide to dilute all of that?

At the same token, the story in the graphic novels has edge to it. I hesitate to use "dark" as an adjective, because "dark" gets thrown around a lot to try and boost cheap gore, violence and sex in order to attract the hoped-for adolescent audience. Maybe aiming for a PG-13 rating for this one wasn't exactly the best way to go.

But the by far worst thing is that whenever there was an adaptional choice to be made, the developers opted for the boring, most conventional choice. And if Locke&Key (the graphic novels) is not a thing, it's boring and conventional. That's what I was trying to allude to earlier with the "generic Netflix series". What do I mean?

Instead of steadily expanding the scope by slowly introducing additional characters and larger mysteries, the show can't wait until the end of its second episode OF THE FIRST SEASON to basically throw everything out there. Character that don't come up until the third or fourth issue of the novel are introduced right from the start, but where in the graphic novels, they can come into the story when needed and then fade out again, here they need to tread water, need stuff to do, and that stuff is almost always stupid.

Game of Thrones suffered from the same problem, but here at least, it was not the developers fault, but a necessity of production. What excuse does Netflix have? All of it is just to generate a J. J. Abrams-compatible mystery box. New secrets, new twists, coming so fast none of them can develop any momentum, in hopes of keeping your interest up at least to make it to the average 5-7 episodes most Netflix series manage to keep their viewers.

This weakness in the storytellers' giving in to the temptation of a quick mystery fix instead of organic storytelling then carries over to the treatment of the viewer. This series is insulting; it clearly thinks very little of its audience. No plot twist can be so obvious that it's not necessary to push in a flashback explaining it IN DETAIL, even though even a 12-year-old would have easily figured it out by now. Worse, the flashbacks don't add to the story, revealing nothing new but sometimes even reusing shots from earlier episodes, just in case you forgot what you were watching two hours ago. That's how this show treats you.

But fear not, the directors can also be counted on to direct their actors to act in the most obvious way possible. The antagonist, for example, is so ridiculously over the top that you need to groan watching them, but not in the self-conscious way that makes Michael Sheen's performance the only good part about the Twilight movies.

It's even worse with the dialogue. Instead of adapting the believable and intense teenage drama from the graphic novels, where teenagers were coping with trauma and stress on top of all the magic stuff that is going on, they get generic high-school-drama dialogue that is almost comically at odds with what's going on. Friends witnessing the strangest magical effects just make a face, stating they don't understand what's going on, shrug, concede that it must be magic and joke about it. It leaves you with an apathetic head-shake.

The dialogue and character decisions are at their worst in the last two episodes, where they character development - usually thin enough as it is - is completely abandoned in favor of contrived plot developments that stretch it to ten episodes and drag the story carcas over the finishing line with a cliffhanger "twist" you saw coming from several miles distance. But worry not, there's an extended flashback sequence to tell you exactly what you already understood ten minutes ago.

Not even worst on his heap of bad decisions is the absolutely inexplicable decision to swap race and sexual orientations of several characters. What they seemed to go for was to check the boxes of "diversity" by making two B-List characters black and the C-List characters that originally were black white. However, in the graphic novels, this was a plot point, as it at one point forced the predominantly white cast to grapple with the daily life of black persons in Massachusetts - a thread that has been dropped exactly as the explorations of homosexual life in America.

This is what I mean by "lacking edge". Everywhere, the adaption goes for the conventional, boring, safe choice, removing anything interesting. Oh, sure, boxes are ticked. One character that is gay refers to his boy friend's name ONCE in the ten episodes, and if you don't pay really close attention or simply know you'd never guess that he's actually gay. Another character who takes to hockey in the graphic novels as a measure to try and fit in in a mindset of toxic masculinity is a hockey jock in the first episode, to repent asap and then be a generic good guy, without ever putting in the work or reckoning with what he actually did wrong. It's the cheapest of cheap redemptions possible.

Another character, who is an alcoholic, is introduced as sober for six years (can't have that edgy alcoholism!), reverts to it in a contrived plot act and gets sober again simply by deciding to do so within the same episode. Most characters have exactly one character trait they constantly repeat. One of them stutters. Another one pouts. One is fat. And so on. One trait.

Unfortunately, the show also doesn't have the highest of budgets, and boy, it shows. The CGI is very cheap looking, and a lot of the cooler concepts surrounding the keys are resolved in rather bland ways. The only genuinely interesting innovation over the comics - that does, however, create a lot of plot holes - is the Headkey, but I'll leave that to figure out yourselves if you're still interested.

I could go on, but you get the point. Everything is washed down, mellowed, BORING.

The saving grace of the show is the strong performances of the main characters. In the case of Jackson Robert Scott, who plays elementary schooler Bode Locke, it's no thanks to the script, which oscillates between delightfully childlike and inexplicably matured and academic dialogue. But Scott brings incredible charisma to the role.

The stars of the show, however, are Emilia Jones as Kinsey Locke and Connor Jessup as her brother Tyler Locke. They put in very nuanced performances, are incredibly likeable, and manage to make the most out of the bad scripts that at least reserve their few lines of good dialogue for them. So, hopefully, these people will move on to more gainful employment. The rest of those responsible can go jump in a lake for ruining this.