Locke and Tea: Re-cipe for a Locke and Key Season 2 Afternoon Tea

REC

Spoilers For: Season one, and for the general tea of season two.

MEET MEETS:

Your L. L. Bean New England Winter Realness MEETS Your Pseudo-Degrassi: The Next Generation Hunger For Half Truths MEETS The Part of You that Never Stopped Believing in Magic

This Thanksgiving, as you are soaking in the vaccine gratitude and the goddamn family angst, look around you and take heart.

Know this: your significant other is most likely not a demon.

Better still, when you turn eighteen, you'll probably not forget that magic is real. For all the moms out there, you can rest easy all the more! You know that the story you tell yourself about your family and the one that's actually true are relatively the same. Probably. Hopefully. You know who's not resting so easy this Turkey Day? Netflix's Locke family.

Season two of Locke and Key, Netflix's supernatural high school fantasy soap opera, delivers. It's lovingly adapted from Joe Hill's brilliant comic of the same name, but what it serves is a steaming plate of intrigue, twisty-turny character motives, and the most abrasive and consistent use of inter-family gaslighting I have ever seen. I love to hate it baby. For the Lockes, mystical keys forged by their now dead father's ancestors reveal a dangerous world of magic--a world that slips into memory and nothingness when you turn eighteen. Puts a whole new spin on the age of innocence.

Want to connect with your own deep buried dark and mystical power? Let's have tea time.

Locke and Brie Tea Sammies & The Perfect New English Tea Bag

Ingredients:

For Sandwiches:

• 1 stellar mid-2000's comic book series foundation, liberally seasoned to taste

• 3 slices of white bread, lightly toasted until they emerge as bemused young adult siblings with a preternatural instinct for wielding magical keys (Watch oven closely---don't let them turn eighteen!)

• 8 ounces of seemingly perfect high school boyfriend, infused with a demonic alter ego, encased in Brie cheese

• 24 thin slices of gaslit Mamma, best sliced with increasingly frustrated strokes of misinformation

• 1 darkly demonic superpower, with three or more artfully Dodged identities

• 2 tablespoons minced fresh keys, plus extra for garnish

• Optional toppings: increasingly helpful dollops of Uncle, ridiculously hot sidekick sauce, fresh lobster, a threateningly large doll house, stale mannequin, fresh feathers, your ignorant girlfriend's tears

For Tea:

• Twinings' Daddy's Secret History New English Tea Bag

• A preciously measured teaspoon of your youthful innocence

• Boiling Water

Directions:

For Sandwiches:

1. Mix your high school boyfriend (girlfriends and non-binary partners will also work well) with your own unrealistic expectations of trust and intimacy. Ask him if you can go inside his head. If he denies your request for vulnerability, cling to him all the harder, until you find his darkest secrets. Stir in minced fresh keys until keys are sprinkled throughout your boyfriend's life and Brie cheese has hardened into a crusty layer of goo.

2. Spread each sibling white bread slice with the key and demon mixture, infiltrating all the most sacred parts of your family history with a corrupting demonic influence.

3. Top each piece of sibling with riotously unclear expectations about magic--all ingredients and undertones welcome. Add helpful, corrosive, and redemptive ingredients until your bread bursts. Lose yourself in the process please.

4. Garnish with a portal to the great magic beyond. Feel very elegant.

5. Insert sandwich directly into your flesh through a hole that will only open on your face when you bring the sandwich close enough to triggers its magics. Ignore the crunching, horrifying sensation as the sandwich spins in your keyhole--erm facehole. Enjoy!

For Tea Bag:

1. Boil that water until it's good and steaming. Murky water from a hidden well on your family's property is best.

2. Add the murky well water to Daddy's Secret History New English Tea Bag, not the other way around. Unless the well water is at a boiling point when it makes contact with a lifetime of secrets and grief, bag will never properly brew.

3. Leave the bag in the water for at least a year and a half between seasons. This will help with press, story development, and exhaustive fan theories. Add a preciously measured teaspoon of your ever-dwindling youthful innocence (more if you have it).

4. Hug your family. They may not be magic, but they're not that bad.

What was your favorite scene from Locke and Key season 2? How are you handling the collective gaslighting of Nina Locke? Is it just me or are Kenzie and Tyler super annoying while also being likable? Comment below!