The Devil’s Hour (Season 1) Review, Recap & Ending, Explained: Amazon Prime Video works with Hartswood Films to bring us a six-part series titled ‘The Devil’s Hour’ where three generations are tied to a secret or a loophole in physics and re-live memories of past lifetimes in the present to simply survive. Lucy Chambers is an externally hardened Child Protections officer trying to survive a failing marriage and her son Issac, a child lost between many realities unbeknownst to him and his psyche. While his innocence confuses many, the answers always lie with him until a deadly killer, Gideon Shephard makes sense of it all.
DI Ravi Dhillon arrives at a bloody murder scene, he struggles with nausea, and his partner, DS Nick Holness, understands that this may not be his line of work. While Dhillon makes every effort to uphold the stereotype of a rough and harsh English policeman, Lucy steps in to take command, if necessary, when his presumptuously firm hold becomes shaky. The writers leave clues about what Lucy’s real life should be while simultaneously letting us experience a lie alongside her. This fragmented narrative covers expansive ground regarding concepts of time, life and death, rebirth, and many others. Without any delay, let us take a journey with Lucy Chambers as she begins to piece together an uncomfortable and unexpected truth while making us viewers feel stupid right to the end.
The Devil’s Hour (Season 1) Review:
A Supple Stroking of the Dark Side Within The Human Psyche
Creator and writer Tom Moran with executive producers Sue Vertue and Steven Moffat (who previously worked on Doctor Who and Sherlock) introduce us to a six-part series that masterfully covers different concepts of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. While it is a tense fragmented narrative, it is impossible not to understand it if you are familiar with past life regressions or the idea surrounding it. While some therapists use it as a powerful tool to find answers for why a person’s purpose in the present life does not make sense, Tom Moran takes us through a tale explaining the concept in fragments while misleading us to believe that we know everything there is to know about Lucy Chambers, our protagonist.
With the viewer’s every instinct reminding them they have seen it before, they are not wrong. Just like when supernova Director M. Night. Shyamalan explored the concept of the in-between with the timeless classic ‘The Sixth Sense’, this narrative shares a similarity in a different avatar. With the nature of the background score being fortune-telling and ominous by The Newton Brothers, each fragment of the story has a shell of curiosity attached to it testing your patience. Editors Joe Randall-Cutler and Mark Trend beautifully bind the story with cinematographers Stuart Biddlecombe and Bjorn Stale Bratberg. With each cut shuttling between each character’s lives in the past, present, and future, they systematically link us, as viewers, through memory with flashes. It is all you need to understand why it is such a bad dream for the characters.
Directors Johnny Allan and Isabelle Sieb rally a dangerous force with actors Peter Capaldi as Gideon Shepherd, the killer and antagonist, and Jessica Raine as Lucy Stevens/Chambers, the protagonist at the helm of the series. While it is dialogue-heavy as a series, emotions sway everywhere and the series is an intense viewing with Nikesh Patel portraying DI Ravi Dhillon as a medium between the former. With acting performances at an extreme high, this tense psychological drama will remain a masterpiece and nothing less can be expected with the executive producer’s past portfolio.
The Devil’s Hour (Season 1) Recap:
A Frantic Mother With A Placid Son & A ‘Wonder-Kid’ Cop Hunting An Over-Zealous Killer
Season 1 of The Devil’s Hour is about Lucy Chambers, a woman who wakes up every night at exactly 3.33 am every morning with a start. The person sleeping next to her is Mike, her husband who is sharing a difficult marriage with her due to their son, Isaac, a complicated child who is expressionless and overtly receptive to the outside environment while nurturing a compulsive disorder. This strains Lucy’s relationship with her son and husband while balancing her job as an officer with Child Protection Services.
With certain powers in her hand to depose and restrict access to abusive partners of troubled women, Lucy is fighting to protect Chloe, a single mother of three. In doing so, Lucy is experiencing visions and vivid memories that seem hers and not hers at the same time.
We cannot make sense yet of her visions and the series begins with little making sense until we learn of DI. Ravi Dhillon, a new addition to the English Police Force with his colleague DS Nick Holness, a robust Policeman. Ravi experiences deep discomfort when he sees blood and visiting a crime scene is troublesome with the need to constantly vomit. On investigating an old case of a missing child, a new crime scene grabs their attention. Harold Slade is murdered in his house and both officers begin a joyride together.
An unexpected bond develops between Lucy’s mother and Isaac, despite Lucy’s mother having dementia. When Isaac disappears, things take a turn for the worse. This forces Lucy to work with a certain memory she isn’t entirely confident of. She decides to take the initiative and contact DI. Ravi Dhillon to follow up on a specific address, confident that her instincts are leading her in the correct direction. Because Harold Slade’s wife is deaf, Lucy takes the lead to take a few documents after visiting the wife by recalling the safe’s code.
With a boy missing, Chloe’s boyfriend dead after trying to visit Chloe despite warnings and Harold Slade’s vicious stabbing, DI Dhillon and DS Holness have a killer on the loose. They have found his hideout that has notes plastered all over the hideout with scribbles of poetry and drawings of certain objects that relate to the current killings. This worries them as he is ahead of them every step of the way. Funnily enough, Lucy is catching up without them knowing.
When Isaac goes missing, both policemen stay on the case to find that Harold Slade and Chloe’s boyfriend are connected to her case with the same killer they are trying to find. When they visit Slade’s property, Lucy rescues her mother from wandering off and takes her to the property. When Lucy finds Isaac’s old watch on the table on Slade’s property, Lucy’s mother has wandered off into the woods trusting her instincts to find Isaac sitting alone on a stone.
Every child missing is a serious case for Lucy and she must find the child at all costs. When Aiden Stenner’s mother calls Child Protection Services, Lucy answers the call and visits the mother’s house to understand why Aiden is missing. As Lucy begins to understand Ravi with her marriage falling apart, she begins to bond with him. She asks him for a small favour which is to track a known association with Aiden named Mia Thomas. When Ravi and Nick find her, she is stuck in an apartment with dangerous men that riles up Nick. Nick decides to take matters into his own hands when Mia is almost strangled in her apartment and he fights off a gang of drug dealers narrowly escaping being stabbed. Somehow, his fight is not over yet.
When Lucy visits Mia in her apartment, Mia tells her where she can find Aiden. Lucy takes action immediately and goes to the location only to find out that someone is about to kill Aiden and she saves his life. Ravi happens to be on the same road as the location and spots a black car coming out from the place he was driving into. He remembers that one of the leads was a black car and he has the number tracked. His colleague at the station informs him it is not registered. He follows the car in the hard rain and he meets Gideon Shepherd, the over-zealous killer, for the first time. But Gideon gets away.
Aiden still has a score to settle. His senior is angry with him and assigns him with killing Nick in his house if necessary for retaliation after Nick arrested a full gang of dealers. On the night when Nick and his wife Bella are about to retire for the night, two boys break into the house and stab him and his wife to death. Suddenly, Ravi’s world has turned upside down. Lucy maintains her demeanor and comforts Ravi while she can. But she continues her sleuthing. She looks up Gideon Shepherd on the internet and finds an article describing a nine-year-old Gideon having stabbed his father and disappears.
Learning that he has a brother, she calls Ravi and tells him they must go together and meet the younger brother, Malcolm. Malcolm meets with them to give them the last voice message that Gideon sent to him on his birthday to which he did not respond. That voice message lends a clue to Lucy that Gideon could be near railway tracks. Ravi follows up and finds an old warehouse. When he does, he finds a boy being tortured. He releases him and meets Gideon to engage in physical blows, knocking him unconscious until Lucy turns up and rams into Gideon’s car before he can escape. After arrest, Gideon unravels the weirdest story of how his life came to be what it is today.
The Devil’s Hour (Season 1) Ending, Explained:
What is Lucy’s Current Reality?
Gideon Shepherd begins telling his story. As a child, he always experienced his death and rebirth in the same lifetime with an abusive father who kills him and his brother by driving the car off a cliff, after his mother cheats on him. After experiencing his death, in the same way, a couple of times, he learns that he remembers it’s always the same sequence of events that leads to his brutal death. His instincts guide him to stop repeating the recurrences and things begin to change radically. One event always leads to a complex end for him ending up in prison meeting one person. Lucy Chambers. Every single time he is born again, he meets her and Ravi. What is it that ties them both to the moment he is in the questioning room?
When Ravi and Nick find Gideon’s hideout, the words ‘Where is Lucy Chambers?’ is found on a glass window. This leads them to find all the Lucy Chambers till they find her and find out her son is Isaac, the same name scribbled on all his obsessive notes. Gideon always looked for a way to prevent a drastic end of an individual if he could prevent it. By being re-born again, he began to find purpose in trying to extend his life by saving other people before their untimely end. Not only did this save them from impending doom but it connected him to a long life in the strangest fashion.
In his case, heightened pre-cognition of learning of events in one life and remembering it in the next life allowed him to alter their lives and in turn his to see it to a fulfilling end. Lucy Chambers. The concept of Déjà vu is thrown around casually but it is something more serious. It is rebirth in the same life again and again with the soul never exploring a new body with free will and a new path ahead. While this may seem strange to us as a concept, discomfort is apparent for the viewer viewing this series.
Lucy’s visions begin to come full swing as she begins to listen closely to Gideon’s confessions that sound remotely close to what she is currently experiencing. When Gideon tells her that Isaac missing is not his fault or hers, she is puzzled and Ravi intently reminds Lucy not to be entirely convinced by Gideon’s jargon. Nevertheless, when Gideon finally makes sense of a certain memory that wakes her every night at 3.33 am, everything makes sense and she locks herself in the room with him. Gideon tells her, her mother could not commit suicide because he saw what it would do to Lucy as a child completely altering her life for the worse. In one of his lifetimes, he found the rifle that she would use and removed the bullets so it would shoot blanks.
But when he did, a button from his coat fell to the ground. This button remained his mother’s grounding for the rest of her life to come back to the current circumstances in this reality. Her mother did shoot herself once which has disastrous consequences for Lucy’s life. Lucy, as an adult in one lifetime before the one she is currently living, had informed Gideon to remove those bullets and that is why they sit before each other today.
When in parallel realities, there should be one grounding force. With Lucy experiencing split realities, our first clue is when she sees Meredith, a girl who runs in front of the car. Isaac keeps talking about Meredith being in the house when she can never see Meredith. Lucy smells a vape in the house when Mike does not smoke but Meredith’s father smokes a vape. Meredith’s family live in House number 14, right opposite Lucy, who is in House Number 7, with Issac. With memories flashing that Lucy is married to Ravi, who has grown a beard, we see Nick, alive and well with his wife at the wedding and that’s when we know something is not right. Meredith running in front of the car is the first hint of another reality as a form of external stimuli that Lucy has no control over.
The laws of physics state clearly in many ways that there is a balance to maintain no matter what our brains wish us to perceive. Gideon slowly reveals that Lucy’s reality is about to change. With Mike having a difficult relationship with Isaac who is unresponsive and expressionless, we see for the first time Isaac’s intention to tell Lucy that he loves her as her son. In our current moment, while Lucy is talking to Gideon, Gideon explains we move through lifetimes like a loop with a shoelace that he borrows from her. She leaves and learns of a voice message on her phone. It’s Isaac telling her he wants her to come home soon (after Mike has poured beer all over Isaac portraying his disgust with him).
Lucy comes home to find that the house has caught fire and Isaac has burnt to death with Mike standing outside and lying to her. She runs inside and chokes on all the smoke around and the rising flames. She calls for Isaac but falls to the floor coughing hard. Suddenly, she sees a split reality and we suddenly see a turn of reality where she is not on the floor anymore. Instead, she is standing outside the house, a Police Officer overlooking the fire. Lucy looks to her left and sees Meredith on a stretcher and her mother, who has serious second-degree burns on her face. The house that burnt down was Number 7 and the tenants were The Warrens. Not her and Isaac. But when the reason for her previous reality died, we remain with a different reality from Lucy’s, an alternate world. The Real one. Ravi is her husband. Nick and his wife are alive. We just came full circle.
Final Thoughts:
There is nothing to say except that for a series like this, you would have to sit with yourself for 24 hours and remember everything you saw to make complete sense of it before you reach any conclusion. Creator and Writer Tom Moran leaves enough clues for you to tie it to the end. When the grandmother and Isaac behave in the same fashion, it becomes the first clue to an alternate reality we are not willing to admit to. As the series unfolds, it embarks on a steep slope toward the dark side of the psyche that many wish to pick apart.
The Devil’s Hour (Season 1) shall remain etched in the minds of many. Its masterful form of storytelling captures the mind differently and turns the narrative upside down just at the right moment and makes the viewer question everything they know so far. It would be offensive to say anything else but to have as many people watch this at the soonest.
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The Devil’s Hour (Season 1) Trailer
The Devil’s Hour (Season 1) Show Links – IMDb, Wikipedia
The Devil’s Hour (Season 1) Show Cast – Jessica Raine, Peter Capaldi, Nikesh Patel
Where to watch The Devil's Hour
