The Devil’s Hour Season 2: Isaac Explained – The Ending, The Watch & His Powers
Scratching your head about Isaac and the season two ending? With major finale spoilers, let's unpick it all.
Warning: contains FINALE spoilers for The Devil’s Hour season 2.
In the final moments of The Devil’s Hour season two, Sylvia tells DS Taylor that her grandson Isaac is a special boy. “Special how?” asks Taylor, getting the reply “Well, that’s the question.”
Sylvia’s not wrong. Isaac’s specialness has been the question of The Devil’s Hour since the start. Benjamin Chivers’ character sees and hears things that nobody else does, has an echoic memory for overheard speech, rarely displays emotions – though he’s perfectly able to interpret those of other people -, often says that he’s not supposed to be here and complains of feeling cold, and sometimes, he vanishes out of thin air.
In season one, we learned the reason for all that, and in season two, we saw Isaac begin to learn how to control his special abilities. In the already-filmed season three? Who knows what Isaac will be able to do. For anyone who’s already binged season two, let’s dig in to what we do know. Final spoiler warning!
Isaac Unbound
Some of the people whose lives Gideon Shepherd saves find themselves unable to cope afterwards. After Gideon stopped Evelyn and Sylvia’s deaths from happening, they were both too aware of the existence of the loop in which they’d died to stay rooted in their new ones. Isaac is different. As Gideon says: “Isaac isn’t like us, he’s not bound to this lifetime. Where you can see the echoes of previous loops, Isaac can reach out and touch them, talk to them.”
Isaac also struggles to stay fixed in his loop, but instead of – like Evelyn and his grandmother – simultaneously experiencing one loop where he’s dead and one where he’s alive, he flits between one where he exists and one in which he never existed. (Because Lucy never married Mike and had him.) That leaves Isaac “unbound”. Because his existence is contingent on Gideon’s interference, he’s grown up with an awareness that he shouldn’t exist.
As a result of Gideon’s meddling, Isaac “slips” between simultaneously occurring loops, and experiences two (perhaps more?) realities at the same time. He struggles to stay fully in one loop or the other and can see and hear people and places from one loop while he’s in the other. A neat explanation of Isaac’s perspective comes in the season two scene in which he’s sitting on his bed in the open air, surrounded by trees. Because the house Lucy buys for them hasn’t been built in the loop where he never existed, he can’t see the house until he returns fully to his original loop.
Interestingly, Isaac’s dual perspective can be captured by technology. With a digital camera, he takes a photograph of his teacher from both loops at the same time, and when Sylvia poses for him, she’s not in the resultant picture because he’s “slipping”. When Dr Bennett (Meera Syal) uses a Dictaphone to record her one-on-one session with Isaac and he slips into the other loop temporarily, the sound is recorded from her session with another child in the other loop (the one we see hiding behind the curtains in her office).
The Kidnapping That Wasn’t
In season one, Isaac slipped between two realities for several days, which was (understandably) misinterpreted as him having been kidnapped. In truth, nobody had taken Isaac. He’d simply vanished from his loop and appeared in the loop where he doesn’t exist. Because the Warren family lived in Lucy and Isaac’s season one house in the alt-loop, they found him in daughter Meredith’s bedroom and called the police. He was picked up by Lucy (who didn’t recognise him and protested at his insistence that she was his mummy) and Ravi, who were driving him to the police station when they got a radio call about the discovery of the remote rural house where Harold Slade had been keeping two missing schoolgirls imprisoned.
In the police car parked outside Slade’s secret house, Isaac slipped back to his original loop but in the same geographical location. In that reality, the police hadn’t yet discovered the house and so he was left stranded there alone and – as he explains – slept there on the floor for two nights. When original Lucy ended up at that very house with her mother in the car, Sylvia found Isaac in the woods by the lake where the missing girls’ bodies were found. He was reunited with Lucy, and cried with happiness because this version of her recognised him. “She knew me,” he told Dr Bennett.
In the same way in season two, Isaac was menaced by a rabid dog that only he could see, and which eventually bit him when he slipped into its loop from his own. Gideon identifies the dog as one he’d culled a year earlier because it was going to kill a child: “I think that the dog that bit you was the dog that lived. It saw you through the veil, caught the scent of a threat, of another life, of a world in which it no longer existed.”
Isaac’s Watch
Certain objects can act as “anchors” for people like Gideon, Sylvia and Isaac, helping them to stay in touch with reality. Sylvia uses a brass button that fell from Gideon’s coat on the night he sabotaged the shotgun she was going to use to take her own life (she gave it to Isaac, who passed it on to Ravi in season one). Gideon has a small tin of his childhood memories, including a photograph with his brother, the bus ticket he bought after going on the run as a nine year old, the bolt he took from Sylvia’s shotgun, etc. Holding these objects grounds the afflicted and stops them from mentally drifting between loops.
Isaac’s broken blue wristwatch (which is stuck permanently at 3.33 aka the mythical “devil’s hour”) doesn’t appear to be quite the same as the other anchor objects. He says it “keeps the ghosts away”, but instead of using it to stay grounded in one loop, he can also use it to move between the loops. In season one, he put the watch on and transported from his bedroom to Meredith Warren’s. In season two, he start to use it to move at will between loops, and more. When Sylvia is catatonic and unresponsive after getting mentally stuck in the other loop in season two, Isaac takes her hand, holds the watch and uses it to pull her back into reality, where she regains her memories and becomes fully present. “I made grandma better,” he tells Lucy.
In the season two finale, Isaac uses the watch to save Lucy from being arrested by DS Taylor. He touches it while hugging her and transports them both into the other loop. Lucy experiences pain from the transition and they slip back into their original loop, but a little distance away from the police, enabling them to escape.
Lucy’s Death and the Final Scene
After leaving Isaac with Dr Bennett, Gideon and Lucy run but are tracked down by the police. Instead of letting the police take them, Gideon shoots Lucy (and is presumably then shot himself) to “reset” and start another loop so he’ll have another chance to stop the Rigby’s bomber. He tells Lucy that if the police arrest them, they’ll be drugged and lose all their memories of the other loops, effectively removing their power to avert catastrophes.
After Lucy’s death, Isaac goes to live with the Warren family in their new house (their old one burned down when the fire Isaac started “followed him” from one loop to the next). Right at the end, we see Lucy appear to him and say “Hello darling”. “Mum?” asks Isaac. Barring a change of the show’s rules in season three, because his mother is dead in this loop, that must be Lucy from the other loop in which Isaac doesn’t exist. He’s met alt-loop Lucy the detective before – once during his ‘kidnapping’ in season one, and once when she bandaged his leg after the dog bite in season two – but it is unusual for her to call him “Darling”…
Future Isaac and the Prison Flashforward
In the season two finale, a flashforward shows Isaac as a grown man visiting Gideon in prison. Still wearing his loop-slipping watch, he introduces himself as Isaac Chambers. His whole life is impossible, Isaac tells Gideon. “You played with the chaos and the chaos spat me out, not a life exactly but something adrift, unbound.”
He says he’s there to find out why Gideon killed his mother (instead of letting the police take them, Gideon shoots Lucy and is presumably then shot himself to “reset” and start another loop so he’ll have another chance to stop the Rigby’s bomber. He tells Lucy that if the police arrest them, they’ll be drugged and lose all their memories of the other loops, effectively declawing them of their power to avert catastrophes.)
Season Three: Isaac vs Yellow Hoodie?
Isaac’s flashforward creates a tantalising prospect for the already-filmed third season. If our speculative theory about the identity of Yellow Hoodie proves to be correct, then the next season of The Devil’s Hour could come down to a fight between two lost, impossible boys – one monstrous and motivated by hate, the other driven by a son’s love. Bring it on.
The Devil’s Hour season two is streaming now on Prime Video.
Written by
Louisa Mellor is the Den of Geek UK TV Editor. She has written about TV, film and books for Den of Geek since 2010, and for…