‘Locke & Key’ Showrunners Discuss Series Finale, Ending on Their Own Terms

After three seasons, Netflix’s adaptation of Locke & Key has closed the door on Keyhouse. And unlike many, many other series, Locke & Key had the luxury of ending on its own terms.

“We started talking with Netflix about renewing the show after the end of Season 1, which was very successful for them, they were very interested in making two seasons back to back of the show,” co-showrunner Carlton Cuse told Decider. “And then we really started having hard and honest discussions about: what’s the length of the show? What’s ideal for telling this story? Out of those conversations, we came collectively to a decision with Netflix that three seasons of 28 episodes made sense.”

Based on the comic books by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, the show told the story of the Locke family, and their battles with the demonic entities that wanted the magical keys hidden throughout their house. Spoilers for the final season of Locke & Key past this point, but after beating final boss Frederick Gideon (Kevin Durand), and an emotional reunion with the Locke family’s slain patriarch Rendell (Bill Heck) thanks to the time-traveling Timeshift Key, in the finale the Lockes came to the difficult decision to get rid of all of the keys by tossing them back into the demon dimension they came from.

Without the keys, the Lockes are still in Matheson, Massachusetts, but are finally ready to move on with their lives. Bode (Jackson Robert Scott) has accepted that his mom Nina (Darby Stanchfield) is dating someone new. Kinsey (Emilia Jones) is considering studying abroad to be with her boyfriend. And Tyler (Connor Jessup) is heading on a road trip of his own with his new girlfriend Carly, before restarting his life as a construction. Even the supporting characters get their own wrap-up, including Ellie Whedon (Sherri Saum) and her son Rufus (Coby Bird) deciding to restart their lives in Matheson after a harrowing few seasons of terror.

All in all, it’s a surprisingly neat wrap-up to a previously complicated story… Up until the final moment, as the doors to Keyhouse are shut, and we hear one, last whisper — are there more keys out there?

Well… Yes, and no. Locke & Key is over at Netflix, there’s no Season 4 in development. But as we discovered talking to Cuse and co-showrunner Meredith Averill, they’re open to more Locke & Key at some point. To find out more about that, crafting some of the bigger moments in the season, and how Joe Hill’s father Stephen King provided a surprise contribution to the penultimate episode, read on.

Decider: Big question first, when did you know the series was coming to an end and what were those discussions like?

Carlton Cuse: We started talking with Netflix about renewing the show after the end of Season 1, which was very successful for them, they were very interested in making two seasons back to back of the show. And then we really started having hard and honest discussions about: what’s the length of the show? What’s ideal for telling this story? Out of those conversations, we came collectively to a decision with Netflix that three seasons of 28 episodes made sense. We live in an era where there’s a lot of shows, and it’s hard to have an audience invest in something that’s really long. We didn’t want to just have the decision driven by, well, let’s just make more episodes, which you don’t have to do in the streaming world. For Meredith and I, we were just like, this feels like we can tell our story in this without a lot of filler and get through what we want to do. And that was how we made the decision.

Just to get the timing correct on it, this decision was made before you even went into Season 2, so you had that plan there — or did it come midway in the process?

Meredith Averill: It came midway in the process. We were actually in the middle of our Season 2 writer’s room when we got the official pickup for production on Season 2. And when they let us know that they intended to shoot Season 3 back to back. So it was actually a really unique situation where we had not even rolled camera on Season 2 yet, and yet we had broken all of Season 3. So we had to work ahead in that way, which is pretty unique. I can’t think of another show that would have ever had to do that. But it was a benefit because it allowed us to go back and plant some seeds in Season 2, stuff that would pay off in Season 3. Gordie Shaw being one of them, as starting to establish some of the things that we knew we wanted to pay off in Season 3.

Were there things from Season 3 that you were able to shoot during Season 2? I’m thinking specifically of the scene of Bode time traveling back to Season 2. Or did you actually bring everybody back to do that?

Averill: We shot that at the very tail end of Season 2, right before we started shooting Season 3. Our line producers and assistant directors there, the way that they had to work so hard to make all the scheduling work with not just because of — mostly because of COVID stuff, just being able to schedule those scenes and bring in actors. And not to spoil things, but bringing back Bill Heck who plays Rendell, who’s a very busy actor. We actually had to shoot all of his scenes from both seasons two and Season 3 in one week, so he had a rough emotional week, between helping his wife through her alcoholism and saying goodbye to his family. So yeah, we were able to recreate the sequence that you’re talking about on the second floor of Keyhouse, we were able to do that at the end of Season 3.

In terms of the pace… You have eight episodes, less than previous seasons. And then a lot of them, particularly in the back half, are all 30 to 40 minutes, which feels really rare in the streaming area where everything is 60 minutes or 70 minutes or more. So what went into that, just trimming the fat off of the scripts and the production? Was there any pushback from Netflix where they’re like, “No, we need more minutes”?

Cuse: There was certainly no pushback from Netflix. Netflix has been very supportive of us having the episodes be whatever we want them to be. I think for Meredith and I, both of us having, I would say, a more rigorous education in the world of making network shows, we both have a lot of training in that bloated episodes just feel innately wrong when you’ve grown up on a system of making episodes to get to time. And we had to rigorously hit time marks on Lost and it just… I don’t know, I think one of the great things about having a partnership with someone as wonderful and talented as Meredith is there’s not a lot of bullshit that goes on.

We call each other on our stuff, and there’s not really room for bloat. We’ve really tried to make sure the show is all thriller, no filler. And that was what we were going for in Season 3. We didn’t really want to just go down some lazy cul-de-sacs that just added time, but without really keeping the momentum going. We wanted a high momentum thing for Season 3, that was our goal.

Averill: Yeah. And the story dictates that. I mean, once Gideon lays siege to Keyhouse, there’s not a lot of time or patience to have a family dinner scene, because some pretty heavy stuff happens in that episode. So it really felt like it was run-and-gun to the end. And that’s when you see those shorter episodes, because it felt like that’s how long the episodes wanted to be.

This is a very broad question, but given this is the final season, what was important for you to accomplish — emotionally for the characters, but also textually for the plot?

Cuse: We were looking for almost like a narrative circularity, that this family had been launched into Keyhouse by this horrible event, the murder of their father and husband, and they were experiencing a lot of grief from that and dislocation. We wanted the end of the show to be some resolution of that. While I don’t think grief is something that’s ever shed, they’ve come to a new place in terms of their ability to move forward in the world, carrying the events that they’ve experienced, and metaphorically that journey, we wanted it to be represented with the keys, because the keys are, I mean, they’re obviously literal objects that you can do magic with, but we tried to make them also connect to the characters’ moralities and the decisions that they had to make. And the lessons that they would learn from using those keys were all very important part of the storytelling.

When did you hit on the idea to get rid of the keys at the end, literally throwing them back into the demon portal? Or was that part of the idea from the very beginning of the show?

Averill: It evolved, that idea. That idea came out of early discussions in the Season 3 writer’s room, and the thematic that we would discover that the keys are not all good, which comes out in Season 3, this idea that they’re actually made of the stuff of demons. And even though the Lockes may have claimed them for themselves, they don’t actually belong to them. They brought a lot of good into their lives, but they also brought a lot of bad. So we just thought this was a beautiful way to tell the story of them having to let go, and move on from it. And we thought this was a great pitch to have them have to get rid of the keys. As Rendell says in that scene that the real magic was never the keys, the real magic was the family. As Carlton was alluding to before, this coming right back around to them being able to hold their grief in a different way, which I think is really what the whole show is about.

Gideon is such a blunt object of a villain, to the point that he’s almost like The Rock in Fast & Furious-style bashing through walls in the last episode. What’s it like writing somebody like that, versus a sympathetic villain or even more of a planner, like Dodge?

Cuse: We were going for a contrast — a contrast, and an escalation. We had felt like Dodge was very manipulative, and just defeating Dodge alone felt like it wouldn’t be an escalation of the stakes. We wanted whoever the next villain was to feel like an escalation of the stakes. And we had done a lot of manipulation, a lot of hiding the ball with Gabe, and it felt like, okay, let’s just go with the straightforward big, bad, scary demon figure of Gideon. It felt right to us, in terms of how we would escalate the narrative, in terms of the force of antagonism.

I wanted to ask you about Bad Bode, which is so much fun right there in the middle of the season. That’s pretty much right out of the comics, though obviously, you’re doing it in your own way — but what was it like crafting these episodes, and working with Jackson Robert Scott on the new version of the character?

Averill: The best. We’ve been waiting for three seasons to be able to tell the story… And as has he, by the way. Every single time we would see him when we come visit, Season 1 and Season 2, he’s like, “When do I get to be Dodge? When do I get to be Dodge?” So he knew it was coming. He knew that we had to do that. It’s so delicious in the comic, but we also knew that’s a story you do at the end, because there’s not much road after that. How do you top Bode as Dodge? So we were excited to be able to do that. And he was thrilled, and I think almost too natural as a demon.

Cuse: He played this horrible serial killer in the body of a kid in a movie-

Averill: The Prodigy.

Cuse: He’d been playing the adventurous, prodding Bode… I mean, it was just fun for him as an actor to get to do something very different than his sweet, adventurous Bode persona.

Carlton, the second to last episode, which you co-wrote with Joe Hill, works on two relatively simple ideas. You’ve got Gordie Shaw — focusing on the side character, what is life like for him and how do we focus on him and bring his story to the front? But also this idea of what happens if you’re using the Head Key on somebody, and they die while you’re in their head? What was important to you in breaking this episode, and how did you craft the thing?

Cuse: Well, there’s this guy who was a friend of Joe’s, who’s a writer named Stephen King, who thought it might be cool to wonder what would happen if somebody died while using the Head Key. So that’s where that idea came from.

I think I’ve heard of him. Maybe read a couple of his books.

Averill: Sounds like that guy’s got some good ideas.

Cuse: Yeah. He’s got a few good ideas. That guy, he might go somewhere. Anyway, so and then Joe really fell in love with the idea, and really wanted to do that episode with us, and be involved in the writing of it. It was such a great thing to get to have Joe circle back around. He had been involved in writing the pilot, initially. And so to have him part of writing the penultimate episode. Again, there was a lovely circularity to that, both for the show and for us as a creative team. We are so indebted to Joe and to Gabriel Rodriguez, not only for their incredible material, but probably even more so for the openness with which they embraced us as creators and they gave us the opportunity to take the material and shape it in our own way.

And they not only gave us that opportunity, they embraced that. It was just such a wonderful thing to have that, and to have them really be super, not only open to it, but champions of the idea that we were going to take their story and tell it our own way. So it was really fun for Joe to circle back in and contribute to that. He had a lot of really cool ideas about what happened. It’s a really cool episode, especially with all the trippy stuff that happens in Gordie’s head as he’s dying. Joe, he’s a wonderfully imaginative guy. He’s a great writer and gave us this nice infusion, right at the end there of all this really interesting, a lot of really interesting ideas.

And it’s also, I think, fun for him to work in the realm of pitching visual ideas, things that are really about, oh, that’s going to look really cool on screen when we’re going through Gordie’s head, and this and that happens, which is different than his normal job, which is writing that in the form of stories and novels.

That said, I guess Joe and Gabriel got fired as paramedics, because you had replaced them in that episode.

Averill: …Or did they get promoted?

There we go.

Cuse: We would’ve loved to bring them back, but it was a Canadian COVID production situation to get that done. But you’re right. It feels like, that was the one major concession that we made to COVID was not being able to have those guys back. But they have a strong spinoff idea. So maybe we can convince Netflix to do the Locke & Key paramedic show.

More seriously, we touched on this a little bit earlier, but the scene with Rendell is so heartbreaking in the last episode and so beautifully done. But I was also just impressed from a writing perspective, because there’s so many different things you need to balance, so many different emotions — from the level of Nina’s with Josh now, but she’s seeing her dead husband. Tyler is in a different place, everybody’s in a different place. So just talk about from a writing perspective, crafting that scene in particular, what was important to get through? How did you put it all together?

Averill: Yeah. It’s a tricky balance that scene because Rendell is being hit with so much information, but you want to live in the joy of them being able to reunite and not wallow in the sadness. But yet you still also want it to feel sad. So it’s tricky, because it needs to be a balance of all those things, and it’s a very bittersweet scene. And it’s a really important scene for the whole family for different reasons, because it’s what gives Bode the permission to feel like he could be okay with Nina and Josh, that he could be okay with letting go of the keys because of what his father tells him. You have Tyler hearing his father say that he’s proud of him. You’re getting all of these little layers and pieces in a pretty economical scene, but I think still has a lot of emotional weight, even in its economy.

And it was just amazing and tremendous to be able to get Bill Heck back for that. We were not sure if we were going to be able to, because he’s very busy on a lot of other shows, but he really loves the show and flew up for that week of incredibly emotionally heavy scenes to do this. The family, when they’re all together, they just have this great stride and they fall back into it, no matter how long they’ve been apart. That was actually the very first scene we shot for that block, which was good in that we got it out of the way, because we knew it was the heaviest. But it was definitely a really emotional day on set.

Can you talk about the final whispering right there at the end? I took it as more of a metaphorical, there’s always magic there in the world type thing versus “here’s a big cliff hanger for season four where there’s more keys, check out the keys.” But what was your goal there, versus my interpretation?

Cuse: I think your interpretation is wonderful. It’s like you said, that magic still exists in the world, and never say never about what could happen.

Averill: Reboot.

On that note, given this ending was a mutual decision, is there any possibility for more Locke & Key down the road — there’s “The Golden Age” collection that was recently released, and Joe and Gabriel are working on “World War Key.” Or is this it for your time in Matheson?

Cuse: We certainly would be open to doing it. It ultimately comes down to a Netflix decision. So everybody’s got to wait and see how the show does, and where they are in the world in terms of this kind of programming and stuff. But I mean, we so loved our experience, and we’re certainly not closing any doors. We’re not locking any doors.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Locke & Key Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.