Locke and Key season 3 recap guide: All 8 episodes explained

Locke and Key season 3 is finally here and there’s some good and bad news that comes with its arrival on Netflix. The good news is we get eight new episodes of the show to enjoy, but the bad news is that season 3 is the last season of the series based on Joe Hill’s popular comics of the same name.

Season 3 picks up in the aftermath of season 2, with Kinsey, Bode and Nina adapting to life without Tyler (who has moved to Montana and neglected to keep his magical memories) and preparations for Duncan’s upcoming wedding to his boyfriend Brian. Dodge is gone and everything appears to be at peace, right?

Spoilers ahead for Locke and Key season 3!

Except we know that Eden unleashed Frederick Gideon at the end of season 2 and it doesn’t take long for evil to rear its ugly head in Matheson once more. Locke and Key season 3 centers on Gideon as the new big bad villain.

Locke and Key season 3 recap guide

Without further ado, let’s get into recapping all eight episodes of the season below!

Locke and Key season 3, episode 1 recap: The Snow Globe

Locke and Key season 3 begins inside of a snow globe. Two women clad in dark cloaks are seen preparing something as Nina Locke (Darby Stanchfield) holds the snow globe aloft. She shows it to Kinsey (Emilia Jones) and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott). Now that Nina has used the Memory Key and has all of her memories about magic intact, she’s been looking for it all over Keyhouse.

Since we last saw the Locke family, things have been going pretty good. Dodge is gone. They haven’t seen Eden anywhere and Duncan is about to get married. Wedding planning is in full swing.

The only missing attendee is Tyler Locke, who has been MIA since he took off at the end of Locke and Key season 2 shortly after his girlfriend Jackie died. Tyler is 18 now, so he can’t remember anything magical and he opted out of using the memory key because Jackie’s loss was still too painful. Since he’s been gone, Tyler has kept contact with his family to a minimum.

In the time between seasons, Bode an Kinsey have discovered the Animal Key, a key that turns its users into a random animal. Kinsey can turn into a cat and Bode into a sparrow. But one night while Kinsey is filming pick-ups for The Splattering sequel with Zadie (Asha Bromfield) and Doug (Jesse Camacho), Bode and Nina find a new key in the freezer. This one is the Snow Globe Key and it turns out Nina was right. There is something magical about the snowglobe.

The key fits inside it and turns Keyhouse’s surroundings into a winter wonderland. It looks like this key brings the snowglobe to life. Unfortunately, it also unleashes the two demon sisters we saw trapped inside earlier in the episode. Ada (Diana Bentley) and Dorothy (Susanna Fournier) Wheeler are working with Frederick Gideon (Kevin Durand), the possessed British colonial captain who Eden summoned using the Echo Key in the season 2 finale.

Ada and Dorothy waste no time in attacking Nina for the snowglobe and the Snow Globe Key, leaving Bode outside playing in the snow. Nina assumes that if she turns the key again, the sisters will get sucked back inside the snowglobe. That doesn’t happen. It looks like the key swaps the outside of the snowglobe for the real world and vice versa.

Since Nina and the sisters are inside the house, they’re fine, but Bode is left trapped inside the globe in the freezing cold. Even worse, since Nina is only a Locke by marriage, the Wheeler sisters can take the Snow Globe Key from her without being burned. They take off with it and a desperate Nina calls Kinsey for help with saving Bode.

Dorothy and Ada meet Gideon in the woods. He takes them to the Wellhouse and has them go down to the bottom (Gideon can’t go inside or he’ll be trapped) to get the Echo Key from Eden, whose body is now rotting away at the bottom. Once he has it, he commands them to retrieve all of the other keys.

Kinsey and Nina go looking for the sisters in the woods and happen upon Gideon’s tent, although they don’t know who it belongs to yet. By the time they arrive, Ada, Dorothy and Gideon are already gone. But no matter because Ada and Dorothy are waiting for Kinsey and Nina back at the house.

Meanwhile, a desperate Bode tries desperately to get back into Keyhouse before he freezes to death, but inside the globe, the house does not open.

In the real world, a nasty fight kicks off between the demon sisters and the Locke women. Nina and Kinsey manage to trap the sisters inside a mirror using the Mirror Key, stealing the Snow Globe Key back in the process and rescuing Bode before it’s too late. However, Gideon still has two powerful keys and a connection to the demon portal in the sea caves.

Besides the fight for the Snow Globe Key, Locke and Key season 3 also sets up Ellie (Sherri Saum) and Rufus’s (Coby Bird) return to Massachusetts. Ellie can’t bring herself to return to their old home, so they rent a small place by the sea. It seems like she’s still struggling with being back in town.

The story being told is that she was discovered wandering around with memory loss, which Ellie believes is better than the truth. Rufus hopes his mom can learn to be happy here. As for Lucas, Ellie says he needed to get out of this place and start fresh somewhere new.

And Tyler (Connor Jessup) is somewhere in Montana, framing houses with a cute co-worker. It looks like he’s bouncing back from Jackie pretty fast, although, to be fair, he doesn’t remember their relationship much. We do see Tyler receive texts from his siblings, but, for now at least, he opts to ignore them. It doesn’t look like he plans on coming home for Duncan’s wedding.