Lucy Carlyle grows up surrounded by people who are already dead.
Jacobs and Lucy’s mother are both dead in one way: fear. Jacobs is afraid of ghosts, the enemy that he can’t see and can’t fight. He covers up his fear with drink and he places others in the line of fire, and the more he does this, the more the losses he does suffer are unable to touch him. He offers Lucy a job because another boy just died; this is lucky: she can have his uniform. The boy who died is left nameless; his possessions are passed on without any sentimentality, his whole existence is just an open slot to be filled with another nameless child who will, more than likely, ultimately meet the same fate. When Lucy feels that everyone is in danger, Jacobs doesn’t pull them out, because their peril doesn’t have the power to move him anymore. When he’s listening to the children scream and die, he does nothing, because his fear for his own skin outweighs anything that could happen to anyone else. He shows no remorse. He lived, and that is all that matters to him.
Mrs. Carlyle’s fear is less obvious, but just as much a driving force. The only thing she is shown to care about is the pursuit of wealth, which is all about security—the idea that no matter what happens you’ll be able to fix it because you will have the money for it, that you’ll never be caught unprepared or left helpless because you have the means to take care of yourself. But like Jacobs, it’s clear that the more she nurtured this fear and tried to protect herself in this one way, the more she became blind to what she was already losing. She so desperately wants the false security of money for her family that she sells her daughter—sells her into an apprenticeship that is the very opposite of secure, that all but guarantees her death at a tragically young age. What is the use of money if her daughter dies? But when Lucy tells her she doesn’t want to be an agent because she’s afraid, her mother cannot have compassion. She has allowed her own fear to consume her so much that she sends her thirteen-year-old daughter to face death without blinking. Only her own fear is real and important. When Lucy is the only survivor of her team, Mrs. Carlyle doesn’t wake up. She cannot be grateful her daughter survived, because she killed the part of herself that would be capable of feeling that loss in her quest to never be afraid.
In both cases, their fear makes them set out to make themselves invulnerable. They cannot let themselves be affected by anything outside them, because that way lies loss and hurt and danger. There are two other groups that appear to us in this way, unable to be affected by anything outside them: ghosts, and the ghost-locked. The ghosts cannot hear Lucy when she tries to make contact with them; they’re trapped in a loop of their own fears and anger, unable to break out, unable to be invited out. This is why the only option is to hold them at bay with iron. All they can do is hurt you—all they can do is trap you in your own deadened state, lost to every external sensation. Norrie meets this fate. She is swallowed up by the ghost-like world of the dead adults that surround them, and she can never feel the touch of anyone else ever again.
Lucy walks away from this world, and straight into Portland Row.
Lockwood obviously has issues around vulnerability. But actually, he is not dead in this way. He does care for George and Lucy. We see that constantly on display, and it’s not a front. Lockwood’s weary gratitude when he’s just been interrogated by DEPRAC and asks George to make dinner, promises to love him forever—that’s real. Lockwood’s panic when Lucy is channeling Annabel—there’s no selfishness or self-protection in that, that’s him worried about her, concerned about her safety. He’s openly desperate when he thinks Lucy is leaving the company; he rushes in with no dignity at all when George is cornered by Barnes and Kipps’ team. Clearly, Lockwood is not afraid to let other people have an effect on him—from the moment Lucy walks in the door he’s letting her write her name on his heart. He literally welcomes George and Lucy into his home.
But the thing is, precisely because he cares about them, he is afraid of losing them—afraid of losing them because he has already suffered loss and knows exactly how devastating it is. But instead of reacting like the deadened adults, instead of refusing to let himself be affected by others, he tries to shield them from being affected by him. He gets close to them; he doesn’t let them get close to him. He doesn’t use them as tools so as to protect himself from feeling their eventual loss; he sees them in all their glory as full human persons and loves them as such. But he won’t appear as fully human to them, in an attempt to protect them from feeling his loss. He tries to be larger than life, he keeps his plans to himself until they’ve already worked, he’s literally always wearing a costume. He is vulnerable to them, lets them into his heart—but he hides his vulnerabilities from them, hides the things that would give them the context to understand him and love him back on equal footing. He lets them into his home, but he doesn’t let them into the room on the landing. He’s not dead, but he’s not whole.
Jacobs and Mrs. Carlyle try to protect themselves at the expense of everything else, even those they should love; Lockwood tries to protect those he loves, even at the expense of himself—even at the expense of his own life. He interposes himself between Lucy and George and danger. He cares about their fate so much that he makes it his own. He doesn’t want to be a person, a friend who can be cherished and lost. He wants to stand between the people he loves and death, running faster than them so he crosses the finish line before them, so they never have to. When Winkman tells him, “I’ll kill her last, so you don’t have to watch,” that is, in a way, what Lockwood’s goal is. He’s horrified and heartbroken by it, but that is what succeeding looks like, according to the way he arranges his life. This is why the DEPRAC agent’s death absolutely breaks Lockwood’s composure, undoes him so thoroughly. Lockwood’s job, his whole purpose is to jump on the grenade. He cannot let anyone else do it. He cannot let anyone take responsibility for him, he cannot let anyone value his life above their own, or the pressure of their sacrifice falls on him like a weight too heavy to carry. When the agent dies for him, Lockwood cannot be larger than life “Anthony Lockwood of Lockwood & Co” anymore, the image starts to choke him. He can’t pull himself back together until Lucy asks him to, until he remembers that she still needs him, that there is still someone for him to save.
He can accept his own death, but he cannot fathom someone else’s. Everybody knows that everybody dies—especially Lockwood. He’s accepted that incontrovertible fact that everyone else is running from. The only part that he’s still running from is the meaninglessness—his family’s deaths were senseless to him and so he’s running headlong toward death in action, because if he has to die, he’s going to do it for a purpose. “There’s ghosts and there’s us, and it’s kill or be killed,” he tells George, and he means it. Those are the terms Lockwood has set for his life and death.
And so, Lockwood appears as a walking memento mori, a reminder of death—not to himself, he needs no reminder, but to everyone else who would rather avoid that reality. Barnes, Flo, Kipps—these are the people who call out his recklessness. They do care about him, to different extents, but they have all also deadened themselves somewhat. Barnes has seen too many agents die, and there’s only so much he can do to protect the ones under his supervision. Flo ran from the ties of society and set up on her own where she wouldn’t have anyone else to lose. Kipps wants to believe that Lockwood & Co are ridiculous amateurs, that the prestige and orderliness of his world at Fittes make him superior to all the agents who lose their lives in the line of duty. They aredeader than Lockwood, because they have not faced the truth of the world the way he has, have not let themselves feel it. He’s a spectre of everything they’re trying to avoid—but because his invulnerability goes the opposite direction, he doesn’t appear dead himself the way Jacobs and Mrs Carlyle obviously do. He’s outwardly fearless of everything that terrifies them, and so he appears alive, even as they’re wondering how he hasn’t died yet.
And here’s the kicker: it’s not completely off base that he seems alive. What makes people dead is fear—and Lockwood has the capacity to be courageous. Chesterton has a salient quote in Orthodoxy: “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die….He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.” The show isn’t an arc of Lockwood learning not to risk himself, learning to fear for his life and become a coward—it’s an arc of learning true courage, which requires that he value his life enough to only risk himself for things that are really worth it.
This is what only Lucy can see and understand, and this is what she means when she asks Lockwood to be the right amount of reckless—she understands that they have to take risks, that they can’t let themselves become deader than dead in their endless pursuit of self-preservation. But she doesn’t see Anthony Lockwood the walking reminder of death, or Lockwood of Lockwood & Co, the competent and fearless leader. Despite everything Lockwood does to hide from her, she sees him as a person, and a person worth protecting. Facing the Hope House ghost without any iron chains wasn’t worth it—if they lost the job they could have gotten another one. Infiltrating the Winkmans’ shop and then the auction wasn’t worth it—it wasn’t their job alone to retrieve the bone glass, the bet with Kipps was stupid. But if Lockwood had died in that last battle in the cemetery, holding back Winkman and his thugs so Lucy could save George from the bone glass, it would have been a noble sacrifice. He and Lucy agree: if there’s anything worth dying for, it’s George. With her to hold him back, Lockwood has learned not to chase after death in the line of duty—but rather, to chase after loving sacrifice.
By the logic of fairytales (and Christianity), because this time he is really laying down his life for a beloved friend and not throwing it away for an excuse, he doesn’t lose his life, doesn’t become more deadened. He really gains his life. He falls into the grave, and the friends he fell for are there to catch him and bring him back up to the surface. He gets to see the sunshine again, as if for the first time.
Before, his sacrifice couldn’t really be sacrifice, because the two ways that he tried to protect Lucy and George were incompatible. Because he tried to hide himself from them, it was impossible for his placing himself in danger for them to be understood as an act of love. It couldn’t be a gift of self, because he was doing everything possible to ensure that there was no one who knew him well enough to receive it—he was trying to make a gift of that which he had intentionally hollowed out.
But once he chooses real sacrifice, the logic of self-gift is not the logic of death, and so it can guide the whole of his life, not just the dramatic last stand. Lockwood finds himself capable of making a gift of himself: he can let himself be seen. He can place his heart in their hands. He can finally let them into the room on the landing.
Spoilers for books 3 through 5 follow below the cut.
