Adaptation Induced Plot Hole / Locke & Key (2020)

Season 1

• Chamberlin Locke's ghost is not haunting the grounds in the comics, so there's nobody who the heroes can consult on the history of the family and the many dangers of the Keys. In the show, however, Chamberlin's potential for advice is almost never used - the most prominent exception to this being in season 2, when Dodge is willing to consult him for help.
• Dodge's habit of sneaking around instead of attacking head-on is much less justified in the show: in the books, possessed characters and Echoes aren't super-strong or invincible, forcing Dodge to keep his head down to avoid detection until he can find a Key that can give him the advantage - hence why getting his hands on the Crown of Shadows was such a big deal. In the show, Dodge is practically invincible and could easily brute force their attempt to hunt for the Omega Key without having to worry about anyone fighting back, so long as the attempt took place before the Lockes got their hands on the Music Box Key, or before they learned about his vulnerability to the Wellhouse threshold. This is especially egregious considering that the Omega Key hasn't been claimed by the Lockes and is still hidden in Rendell's ashes until late in the first season, meaning that Dodge could easily have found it if they'd just killed the Lockes and tossed the house. Indeed, Dodge's powers are so notable that one might wonder why they even bothered looking for the Crown of Shadows for so much of the season when the shadows are actually weaker than Dodge.
• The Identity Key and the demons' inability to take Keys from the Lockes has resulted in a rather problematic characterization clash: the Locke family are way too trusting, even after they learn of the Identity Key's existence. In the comics, neither such element exists, and the Lockes aren't aware that the "Well Witch" has used the Gender Key to become Zack Wells/Dodge - and Dodge encourages the misconception by using the Crown of Shadows to impersonate his female self. Consequently, Bode, Kinsey, and Tyler have no qualms about sharing the magic of the keys with their friends, and it's just rotten luck that one of them happens to be Dodge. In the show, the three of them are eventually made aware that people around them might be shapeshifted, possessed, or both, but don't start testing anyone until the events of season 2, hence why season 1 ends with Ellie being passed off as Dodge and tossed through the Black Door while the real Dodge remains undetected as Gabe. Consequently, rather than just being young and naive, the Locke kids come across as really, really stupid.
• In the show, Sam Lesser's attack on Keyhouse is rescheduled until after Dodge escapes from the Wellhouse and more Keys are discovered... but the overall script remains the same - meaning that the Lockes apparently don't think to use the Music Box to stop Sam.
  • On a similar note, the show features Sam somehow making it from the prison to Keyhouse with astonishing speed despite not possessing the Anywhere Key, and somehow never being recognized by bystanders or the police in the meantime - despite burning down a good chunk of the prison with the Matchstick Key. In the comics, Sam's escape from the prison was much stealthier and way less destructive; also, his journey from the detention center takes up a huge chunk of "Welcome To Lovecraft" plus several days of hitchhiking, during which he murders numerous people who he fears might have recognized him.
  • Also, the reason for Sam's attack on Keyhouse. Again, in the comics, the attack happened before Dodge escaped the Wellhouse; indeed, Dodge didn't just want to take another shot at finding the Omega Key, but actually intended to use the attack as a means of tricking Bode into handing over the Anywhere Key... but here, Dodge is already free and has access to the Identity Key, which can allow them to take on any number of personas that could theoretically trick the Lockes into handing over the Keys (as they do later in the show). More to the point, Dodge is indestructible and super-strong, whereas Sam is an ordinary human with one Key, so there's no explanation for why they bother breaking the guy out jail and sending him to Keyhouse when - unlike the comics - Dodge has tons of other options.
• In the show, Kinsey, Tyler, and their assorted friends don't seem terribly worried about Kinsey's manifested Fear running loose - and actually leave it for another season before dealing with it. In the comics, this relaxed attitude was due to the extracted personality elements being small enough to fit in a bottle; in the show, these elements are human-sized and are capable of inflicting physical harm - as Eden has already found out the hard way - making Kinsey and co come across as both stupid and deeply callous.
• In the comics, Rendell Locke set out to open the Black Door because he was worried about forgetting magic when he turned eighteen and wanted Whispering Iron to create a Glamour Key to preserve the sense of glory he'd attained using the Keys; plus, because he was aware of the dangers involved thanks to the Timeshift Key, he and his friends took as many precautions as possible, including full use of the Keys they had obtained, and things only went wrong because Duncan made the mistake of following them into the cave, accidentally getting Lucas possessed while trying to save Duncan from the Door. In the show, Rendell was just curious about what was behind the Black Door and went in completely cluelessly, making him come across not as a proud and egocentric teenager undone by his own hubris, but as a thundering dumbass.
  • Also, in the comics, the Keepers are not fooled by Lucas's claim of being okay after being touched by one of the demons from beyond the Black Door, and are able to stop Lucas from attacking the sleepover party - Mark even holding him down with the Crown of Shadows while the memories of the Black Door are removed from Lucas' mind; as such, the deaths of "Dodge", Kim, and Mark are postponed until a showdown in the caves a few days later. In the show, no precautions are taken whatsoever, resulting in Kim and Jeff being brutally murdered on the same night Dodge was possessed. Once again, the Keepers of the Keys end up looking like idiots.
• In the comics, Rendell and his surviving friends willingly forgot about magic thanks to their remorse over all the deaths they unwittingly caused in their attempt to make a Key - hence why nobody in the presence knows what happened to Erin and why she remains in her sorry state for so long though it's also because Dodge ripped out her mind with the Head Key and the contents were lost in the cave-in that killed him the first time around. In the show, Rendell and his friends successfully created and used the Memory Key to preserve their knowledge of magic... but even though they would be able to understand and recognize what had happened to Erin, none of them ever heard anything about it or did anything to help her - not even Ellie, who was living in the same town as her at the time and never left.
• Ellie Whedon's comic incarnation summons Dodge from the Wellhouse as a result of being Mind Raped by a fragment of Dodge, and originally came to Keyhouse to murder her abusive mother - which she ultimately couldn't do, but Dodge could. In the show, the fragment and the abusive mother don't exist... so instead, Ellie summoned Dodge of her own accord, even allowing them into her house after Dodge escaped, seemingly not understanding that this was the version of Dodge that was possessed by a demon until he murdered someone in front of her. In the comics, she at least had the excuse of being unable to remember the supernatural; her show incarnation has no such excuse.
• In the show, Ellie is forced into working for Dodge due to a direct threat against Rufus - despite the Lockes having enough of the Keys to theoretically keep Rufus safe - and doesn't confide in the Lockes until Rufus talks her into it, making her seem weak-willed and easily manipulated considering all the murders that Dodge has committed by this stage. In the comics, Ellie is being kept in line due to a mixture of guilt, psychological abuse, and outright Mind Rape via the Head Key, to the point that she isn't able to turn against Dodge because she honestly believes that he's actually her nephew.
• It's never explicitly stated why Dodge chose to take the form of a woman when the Identity Key could have allowed him to take the form of just about any human being imaginable... or why he chose to do so at the bottom of a Well, or even why Dodge continues to use this female form when using literally any other one would prompt less fear from Bode. In the comics, there is no Identity Key, the various shapeshifting powers being divided between the Skin Key, the Tempus Fugit Key, and the Gender Key - the last of which Dodge actually has access to... and far from using it in the Well for no good reason, Dodge used it before he was killed the first time in order to Show Some Leg and trick Mark Cho into letting his guard down. Because he was killed soon after while still female, Dodge's Echo remains in this form until he escapes.
  • Also, how Dodge got his hands on the Gender/Identity Key: in the comic books, Ellie accidentally dropped her Keys in the Wellhouse after her mom hit her in the face; then, when Dodge's freshly-summoned Echo snapped Candice Whedon's neck, Ellie fled in a blind panic without picking them up. In the show, Ellie's first meeting with Dodge was conducted quite peacefully with no murders, with Ellie still being totally clueless about the fact that Lucas's Echo was possessed, even when he began demanding the Keys with open aggression, to the point that when asked, she just... handed over the Identity Key - which, unlike the Gender Key, offers literally unlimited opportunities for disguise.
    • In turn, Ellie's reason for possessing two keys differs sharply: in the show, she was given them as part of Rendell's inexplicable desire to divide some keys between the Keepers while hiding the others around his house for no discernable reason. In the comics, it's because Dodge hid the Echo Key and the Gender Key (the only Keys he had at the time) in the wall of Ellie's house, complete with a fragment of his personality - as part of a contingency plan just in case the Keepers of the Keys ever stopped him, which they did. As such, whereas the comic books emphasize Dodge's return being due to him being a brilliant strategist, the show makes the villain's reign of terror due solely to Rendell and Ellie being fundamentally stupid.
  • For that matter, it's not explained why Ellie would be allowed on the currently vacant Keyhouse grounds without getting spotted by the cops and arrested for trespassing; in the comics, she's been given a key to the gates and permission to visit by Duncan.
• Late in season 1, Ellie reveals that most of the Keys were split between the surviving Keepers of the Keys and the rest were simply hidden around Keyhouse... but it's never once explained why they couldn't all be hidden around the house - especially since the ones being "protected" by the Keepers were arguably the easiest for Dodge to find. More to the point, it's never explained why Mark needed to commit Heroic Suicide in order to keep Dodge from torturing the Key locations from him, since the Keepers have already removed Duncan's memories of Dodge's first death and could easily do the same for Mark and the others. In the comics, Rendell never needed to include any of these overcomplicated contingencies: he just hid the Keys around Keyhouse by himself, leaving him as the only one who knew all the secrets until he turned eighteen and forgot about magic - hence why Sam went after Rendell instead of any of the others.
  • For that matter, it's never once explained why the job of hiding the remaining Keys was given to Mark of all people; in the comics, Mark died long before the events of the comics, so the job fell to Rendell anyway - as it should have, because the Keys are property of his family.
• Season 1 ends with the revelation that Gabe is actually another one of Dodge's secret identities... but nobody thinks to ask where he lives or where he came from or any other basic questions about his past. Even when Kinsey becomes close with Gabe, the matter of his house is never brought up. And how the hell is he justifying himself to the high school that he apparently attends? In the comics, "Zack Wells" claimed to be a relative of Ellie Whedon and accordingly stayed with her, while providing the school office with faked records and killing off any teachers who got suspicious. By contrast, Gabe appears to be relying on people around him not asking intelligent questions.

Season 2

• The true cause of Erin's catatonia. In the comics, it's due to Dodge using the Head Key to literally empty her mind during their final confrontation in front of the Black Door, with the contents being lost in the rubble of the ensuing cave-in; in the show, it's due to her being accidentally trapped inside her own Mental World when a maid at Keyhouse removed the key from her head... naturally raising questions: why would Erin have been stupid enough to use the Key with her body alone and unguarded? What the hell was she using the Key for at the time? And, most frustratingly of all, why did none of the Keepers of the Keys ever try to help her?
• In both the comics and season 2 of the series, a disembodied Sam Lesser attempts to kill Dodge by possessing his body, only to be thwarted and forced back out again. In the comics, Dodge is in ghost form and trying to negotiate with Sam not far from the house and understands the risk of a Grand Theft Me, forcing Sam to fight him to a standstill before he can get anywhere near Dodge's unconscious body. In the show, Dodge is negotiating with Chamberlin Locke in the graveyard on the far, far end of the property, leaving Sam with ample opportunity to fly off and possess Dodge's body while he's still distracted... but for some reason, Sam doesn't get moving until Chamberlin tells him to, alerting Dodge to the threat and wasting precious time.
  • Also, the attempted possession features Sam trying to kill Dodge with his own hands. In the comic books, this made perfect sense, as Echoes can be killed via mundane methods despite their supernatural natures. However, in the show, Echoes are effectively invincible and can only be killed by forcing them over the Wellhouse threshold - which Sam isn't actually trying to do - and yet the episode attempts to play this as if Sam might actually have a chance to end Dodge's reign of terror once and for all, even though Dodge has already demonstrated his invincibility on camera back in season 1 by casually taking six bullets to the chest.
• In the show, the fact that the Keys cannot be stolen from the Lockes (by demons, at any rate) results in some confusion: despite being cautious enough around Jamie Bennet to check her for demons via the old "take this Key from me" test, Bode doesn't seem to find it suspicious that Gabe feels the need to borrow the Ghost Key from him. In the books, no such rule exists, and Dodge can steal any of the Keys at any time - to the point that he's in the habit of pinching the Head Key from Kinsey and returning it before she realizes it's gone. Furthermore, in Dodge's Ghost Key incident, he didn't need to ask Bode for anything: he already had the Ghost Key and had snuck into Keyhouse in the dead of night to use it.
• The fact that only the Lockes can create Keys via sacrificing some of their blood resulted in some critics wondering what made Locke blood so important to this process, with some even theorizing that the Lockes might be secret demon hybrids. In the comics, however, no such blood sacrifice is needed, and Whispering Iron can be made into Keys like any ordinary metal.
• In the "Clockworks" issues of the comics, the cave housing the Black Door was originally underwater up until Peter Locke pumped the water away and allowed the revolutionaries to store their provisions there; the Black Door itself was an actual carved door that almost immediately began luring in victims and couldn't be closed until Benjamin created the first Whispering Iron lock and the Omega Key. In season 2 of the show, it's revealed that the cavern was perfectly mundane and could be reached at low tide with no potential for demon attacks... up until Captain Gideon was forced to retreat in there, whereupon the wall inexplicably cracked open to reveal the portal that would become the Black Door. No explanation for Gideon's miraculous discovery is ever provided.
  • On that note, the fact that the demons can shoot out of the Black Door like bullets raises questions as to how anyone could have safely obtained Whispering Iron without casualties. In the comics, the demons don't shoot out like bullets, and can't cross the threshold without immediately collapsing to the ground as Whispering Iron, and it's theoretically safe to harvest so long as you can ignore the mesmerizing effect of the Door; indeed, it's so safe that Lucas was the first case of possession on record following Harm Timmerman and his brother back in the eighteenth century.
  • Likewise, the fact that the Black Door started out as just a portal raises all kinds of questions about how Benjamin would have been able to get a door over it without being possessed; in the comics, there's already a door - so all he had to do was create a lock that could hold it shut.
• It's never explained why it was so important for Benjamin Locke to create a door for the portal in the first place, when it would have been easier to just seal the cave entrance. In the comics, it was necessary to keep the caves open because the militia were using it as a hideout and storehouse - vital resources in the American Revolution in the other words. Plus, at the time, Keyhouse was occupied by the Redcoats, so the militiamen had nowhere else to go; faced with being possessed or murdered by the possessed, the militia would have had no choice but to surrender to the British, and the only reason why they didn't have to go through with any of that was because Benjamin was able to bar the door with the first Whispering Iron lock. In the show, Keyhouse is still in American hands and for some reason the British appear to be the underdogs, so why the hell would Benjamin have bothered to go anywhere near the portal ever again?
• Because the show never revealed that the adulthood-induced Weirdness Censor was actually created by a Locke ancestor in the 1940s in order to prevent the Keys from being misused by adults, it's assumed that it's just a random fact of magic that nobody will ever understand... but it also means that the audience is left hopelessly baffled by the fact that Benjamin Locke started creating the Keys at the age of eighteen, the exact point where kids forget all about magic, a good two hundred years prior to the creation of the Memory Key.
• During the Enemy Civil War between Dodge and Eden, Dodge uses the Crown of Shadows to bring down the roof of the caves down on top of her and Josh - unwittingly breaking the Black Door open and giving Ellie a chance to escape. If this was possible with the Crown of Shadows alone, one might wonder why the hell Dodge even needed the Omega Key in the first place when brute force would have been enough, or why he chose to menace Keyhouse with the Crown back in season 1 when he could have gone straight to the caves with a few hostages and made them into an army. In the comics, this is categorically impossible: if the Black Door is opened by any means other than the Omega Key, it will simply open onto an empty room, hence why Dodge never tried brute force.

Season 3

• Considering the fact that the final battle of season 2 resulted in numerous deaths among the adult and teenage population of Matheson, the fact that a town so small doesn't seem to be mourning all that much - or even investigating what happened - seems quite unusual. In the comics, the nearest equivalent to this event occurs at the very end of the story and results in a huge number of memorials for the dead students (of which Kinsey can only attend one), and the police are left trying to pass off the incident as methane gas poisoning because they simply can't make sense of it.
• The presence of the Timeshift Key and the grandfather clock creates a plot hole on par with the failure to question Chamberlin Locke's ghost. In the comics, the time travel can't go past the year 1999, hence why Tyler and Kinsey can't use it to learn more about Dodge's activities or that he's performed a Grand Theft Me on Bode. However, in the show, the clock can take them to any point in the past, including the events of season 2... so why don't the Lockes use it to learn more about the threats of this season?
• In season 3, Bode's possession by Dodge. In the show, it's because "Zack" was able to improvise despite being unmasked as Dodge and managed to outsmart Tyler, Kinsey, and even Sam Lesser; in the show, it's because Bode decided to go back in time to gloat over Dodge's defeat... only for Dodge to follow him back to the present. Suffice it to say that there's still no explanation as to why Bode would do something so insanely reckless after going back in time once and clearly recognizing that people in the past can react to his presence - unlike the comic incarnation, which was based around Intangible Time Travel.
• The Keepers of the Keys' decision to hide the Creation Key inside the mind of Gordie Shaw via the Head Key has no counterpart in the comics: there, Rendell hid the Keys in Keyhouse and only resorted to such a risky move in the case of the Omega Key - which he hid inside his own mind - because it was easily the most dangerous of the Keys and couldn't be left in Keyhouse. By contrast, the Creation Key is pretty benign and so the hiding place seems ridiculously excessive, not to mention exceptionally dangerous.
  • For that matter, why they decided to get Gordie involved in the first place: in the comics, the Keepers restricted their risks to themselves, even preventing Duncan from getting involved with the mission to the Black Door... but in the show, they decided to hide the Creation Key in Gordie's head right after erasing his memories of magic, leaving him directly in the line of fire with no way of understanding why - and never once telling him of the danger even after the incident with Dodge, which was supposedly enough to get them to set up countermeasures against future threats. This is a decision that paints the Keepers of the Keys in the darkest possible light... and yet nobody feels the need to comment on it because the show is still abiding by the comic characterization of Rendell and the Keepers as repentant heroes who've learned from their past hubris and tried to do the right thing.
  • For that matter, why Gordie had to have his memory erased of magic. The nearest counterpart to this event in the comics was justified, because it was inflicted on Lucas immediately after he was possessed. There, the decision made sense because it was the only way to non-lethally pacify Dodge - before he recovered his memories from the Wellhouse and had to be killed for the first time. In the show, Gordie is, not to put too fine a point on it, harmless and wouldn't be able to do much damage by revealing magic to the rest of the school because everyone would eventually forget all about it, including the perpetrator. So, by all appearances, the Keeper of the Keys have essentially Mind Raped a man for nothing.
• Gideon's inexplicable ability to create new portals is left as a confusing enigma, for if all you needed to create a new portal into the world beyond the Black Door was the Keys being together at once, then why didn't Dodge try the same thing? Why did Dodge need the Omega Key in the first place if it was that easy, and why did they need to go to so much effort to create the Demon Key? In the comics, none of this is possible: no Demon Key or additional portal exists. The Black Door is the only way to make contact with Leng - no exceptions.