Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Locke and Key’ is the story of the Locke family, who possesses a set of magical keys. The keys have been in the family for generations and have attracted many evil forces towards them. To battle them and prevent the keys from falling into the wrong hands, the Lockes have had to entrust outsiders with the secret of the keys. When he was a teenager, Rendell Locke told his friends about the keys, and together, they became the Keepers of the Keys. One of them is Ellie Whedon.
By the time Rendell’s kids show up at the Keyhouse, Ellie is the only remaining Keeper who knows about the keys and their magic. She meets a tragic end when the first season wraps up, but she shows up again at the end of the second season and becomes an important character in the third. What happened to her during her absence, and how did she come back? Let’s find out.
Ellie’s Return from the Demon World
Ellie is thrown into the demon world through the Black Door at the end of Season One. Dodge uses the Identity Key to make Ellie look like herself. After the fight at the Keyhouse, when the Locke siblings believe that they have defeated Dodge, she replaces herself with Ellie, whom the kids mistaken for Dodge. Because Dodge is a demon, they find it best to throw her back where she came from, unaware of the fact that it is Ellie.
Ellie remains in the demon world for a major part of the second season, while Rufus, her son, is sent to live with his relatives in Nebraska. Everyone believes that Ellie had suffered from mental illness and she ran away, leaving her son behind. In the second season, when Josh and Eden visit the Black Door, Dodge/Gabe shows up and tries to kill them by using the shadows to attack them. During this, the ceiling of the cave collapses, and we see the Black Door open just by an inch. It is not enough to let the demons escape, but it is enough to let Ellie out of the door.
While she still looks like Dodge, Ellie quickly realizes she has escaped prison. She shuts the Black Door behind her, which loses its magic and is shut down permanently. Ellie runs out as the cave collapses, and the Black Door is buried behind it, never to be opened again. She returns to Keyhouse as Dodge, and while Bode attacks her at first, he soon discovers what had really happened the night they thought they had killed Dodge.
For Bode, the first sign that Dodge was still out and about comes when Rufus shows him a drawing with two Dodges in the living room of his house. While he’d been unconscious when Dodge used the Identity Key on Ellie, Rufus knows that the two Dodges had something to do with his missing mother. Now, with Ellie back at the house, safe and sound, the Lockes give her the Identity Key to come back to her original form.
Later, in a conversation with Nina, Ellie describes the demon world as a place where time passes differently. As a human, being stuck there made her feel like she was surrounded by nothingness. While months had passed in Matheson, for her, time seemed to move at a snail’s place. No one knows exactly how the Black Door opened, but it seems like it knew it was not going to open again, so it threw out the one thing that didn’t belong in its world, and Ellie got to come back home.
Read More: What Happens to the Black Door in Locke and Key? Is it Destroyed? Theories
