Spoiler warning

The SU Locke & Key only lasted for three issues…but they tell a neat little one-shot. It would make a good animated short film about the twins John and Mary Locke and their brother Ian.

It’s interesting to see the post-WWI Roderick Burgess again, with Morpheus in his basement.

One thing a longtime Sandman reader will recognize: metaphysical timelessness. Dream-kind like Fiddler’s Green and Corinthian were not made in the three-dimensional world. The angels of the Silver City and Lucifer are even further from the third dimension.

Another thing that stands out to OG Sandman readers: the third act explains where Lucifer’s key to Hell came from.

Basically, Mary Locke made it with her cousin Chamberlain’s locksmithing kit and forge. She made it specifically to rescue her twin, who lied about his age so he could enlist as a teenager, later to die in WWI and end up in Hell (sounds like a ‘Sleep of the Just’ subplot).

It was made in the forge of universal keys to break the permanence of Hell. In both the Silver City and Hell, all time is simultaneous and an angel manages to place it around the neck of Lucifer before his fall.

Mary Locke, meanwhile, only made her own key to Hell because she heard the gates of Hell were locked. And why wouldn’t she? Lucifer had it when he fell, after all.

Yes it’s paradoxical. I don’t know if this is meant to tie in to the Overture world-building, with the Gemworld and multiple timelines interacting with each other but it would fit in with it.

Unless the “first draft” of the universe had time loops written in from the beginning. That nuance could also leave room for the Gemworld. It also reminds me of some themes from the SU Lucifer (he’s in this as well, looking like nineties Bowie at the turn of the century, roughly eighty years before he looked like late-sixties Bowie in ‘A Hope in Hell’). Lucifer is always himself and nothing else: perhaps because God made him before discovering time loop editing.

I don’t think the ending would have the same pathos if it wasn’t for the first act, though (marked ‘issue 0’ on the cover).

That vignette concerns Ian, who died in childhood. The Locke family patriarch decided to house his soul in a pocket dimension, with other recently deceased family members, inside the moon. Without any broader context from Locke & Key, this could be an ephemeral state, the Locke family ghosts could be “squatting” between worlds or both.

In any event, the shelter seems to depend on its obscurity. The only reason the moon-door held against Lucifer was probably because Mary still had her key. Shortly after seeing Jack home, Mary hears that a pair of angels named Duma and Remiel would like a word. She journeys to the Silver City, followed by Fiddler’s Green, and hands over the key to Hell when asked; just in time for a certain moment in a certain timeless, recurring war of the angels (speaking of SU Lucifer).

Lucifer was only thwarted at the moon-door by a technicality. A technicality that disappeared as soon as Remiel and Duma asked for it. The rescue of Jack is all the sweeter for it being a series of gambles which could easily have failed. The winches and ropes and pulleys behind the moon add a bit of turn of the century romance. A vague association with the silent film A Trip to the Moon, perhaps.