How ‘Locke & Key’ Pulled Off That Shocking Triple Villain Reveal

Spoilers for the end of Season 1 of Netflix’s Locke & Key past this point! Really!

If you’re a fan of the comic books Netflix’s Locke & Key is based on, you knew going into the show that the lady in the well, a.k.a. the echo, a.k.a. Dodge, goes by another name: Lucas Caravaggio. But even with that twist under your belt, there was a second reveal that you may not have seen coming… That Dodge (Laysla De Oliveira) was Lucas (Felix Mallard) and the seemingly sweet Gabe (Griffin Gluck).

Confused? Don’t worry, you’re not alone… In fact, not even the full cast was aware of the double twist.

“Everyone that was playing Dodge was aware that they were playing Dodge,” Locke & Key Executive Producer Meredith Averill told Decider. “But many of our other actors were not aware until they actually got the script.”

In the comics, like in the show, we first meet the female version of Dodge down in a well as a mysterious echo talking to young Bode Locke (Jackson Robert Scott). Though the show goes pretty far afield from the source material throughout Season 1, what you see in the first episode, “Welcome to Matheson,” is extremely close to what appears in the first volume of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s comics, titled “Welcome to Lovecraft.”

There, things change, veering back every once in a while to the source material. In the comics, Dodge uses a magical implement called the Gender Key to switch from a female identity, to his natural male one. However, since Dodge is still 17 years old — the age he was when he “died” decades earlier — he grows a soul patch and adds a lip ring to go undercover as a student named Zack. A few people are able to recognize him as Lucas “Dodge” Caravaggio, a student who was supposed to have died long ago, but he promptly kills them.

The show changes a number of aspects of this, the biggest that instead of using the potentially problematic Gender Key, it turns it into the “Anyone Key,” which allows you to become anyone else simply by sticking it into your chin. That’s how we get the twist here… Dodge is the front facing villain, the one going after the Locke kids in order to find the location of the powerful Omega Key. Lucas, meanwhile, is hiding out in the house of his old high school girlfriend, Ellie Whedon (Sherri Saum) and terrifying her autistic son Rufus (Cody Bird). And then there’s Gabe, taking the place of Zack, who shows up at Matheson Academy in order to get closer to the Locke kids.

“I had my very first conversation with Griffin Gluck, he had read some sides for Gabe,” Averill recalled, “And I called him and I said, ‘so this is not known, but just so you know there’s a lot more to this part than just playing a teenage boy who has this crush on this girl. In fact, at the end of this season we’re going to reveal that you’ve been Dodge all along.’ And he was just like, ‘that is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.'”

Gluck, known mostly for his nice guy roles, was thrilled to play a villain, and it’s certainly an element that will play big going into any potential Season 2 of the Netflix series. But first, the production needed to nail Dodge, and by extension, Lucas.

“[Dodge] was really difficult to cast because she has to be many things to different people,” Averill said. “When we first meet her in the well, she’s sort of a friend to Bode. She has to be kind of creepy, but also later she has to be very sexy and manipulative. And she, we thought, found all of those colors to Dodge.”

As for Lucas, it’s pretty clear when you watch the show that he and Dodge are at least related, though it isn’t until later in the season that it’s revealed they’re the same person. That’s because De Oliveira and Mallard look incredibly similar (and vastly different from Gluck, helping the big surprise of that reveal). Turns out, that wasn’t actually on purpose.

“When you put Felix and Laysla’s headshots side-by-side, they have a lot of facial similarities,” Averill noted, “which we didn’t even realize when we cast him. But [it’s] kind of this happy accident, where they share a lot of similarities.”

As the season ends, the kids think they’ve beaten Dodge, and thrown her through what’s called the Black Door, trapping her in another dimension. Only in another twist, they actually threw Ellie in there, who had been changed to look like Dodge thanks to the Anyone Key. And as it stands, nobody knows Gabe is actually Dodge, or that he’s converted another teen to the side of evil — Eden Hawkins (Hallea Jones). If Locke & Key is picked up for Season 2, there will still be plenty of very dark surprises, and more villain twists headed the Locke kids’ ways.

Stream Locke & Key on Netflix