The future of Lodge 49 began in the final moment of Season 2, which ended with one of the most disorienting, jaw-dropping and strange moments this side of Twin Peaks. In his anxious impatience for the happier future Dud (Wyatt Russell) sees before him, he abandons plans to visit Catalina with his sister, Liz (Sonya Cassidy), instead returning to the faded camper he calls home. He begins to dig until he’s struck by lightning.
So far, this is Lodge 49 upholding a tradition of Dud’s outlandish injuries, which, like the snake bite and shark attack before it, usher him into a new state of being. But then, as his unconscious body sinks into the mud and disappears, we return to the back side of Lodge 49 itself, where a mysterious door — set high and uselessly in a brick wall above the parking lot — has puzzled Lynx members throughout the series. In the last shot of the season, the door opens and Dud’s unconscious body tumbles out. It’s not the first brush with the supernatural on Lodge 49, adding to other open questions left for future seasons, but it is one of the most confounding moments yet, in a series which, with a few exceptions, prefers mystic synchronizations and serendipities to the outright paranormal.
“We have an answer, but I think it does kind of deflate it to lay out our thinking,” Ocko told Newsweek. “We’re kicking Dud forward, into a new chapter.”
“Our first season was our water season, our second was our fire season and the third season is our earth season,” Gavin, Lodge 49’s creator, added, aligning the structure of the entire series with the alchemical esotericism underlining The Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx. “So we see Dud kind of enter, transition into this next element.”
The elemental structure of the Lodge 49 seasons is one of several indications that the series’ sprawling world of secret societies, occult corporations and esoteric insight isn’t just a feint at a splendid, structured reality but part of a larger plan.
“There’s absolutely a giant vision board. It’s not something we’re improvising on and hoping we can tie up,” Ocko said. “That being said, we’re letting the characters guide those stories in directions we didn’t expect. We set out to understand the mythology of our show before we wrote it. But it’s important we’re not just taking people on a jazz improvisation ramble. There is a method to the madness.”
“Everything is there for a reason,” Gavin added.
With seasons themed by alchemical element, Lodge 49 also has a definite endpoint, with many more adventures ahead before the series reaches its intended conclusion.
“I think the honest truth is that Jim and I would rather be writing a story that comes to an end, rather than crossing our fingers it never ends,” Ocko said.
Ocko and Gavin mentioned several threads likely to be important in Lodge 49 Season 3, including Dud and Ernie’s newfound coworker relationship at West Coast Super Sales, but some of the biggest surprises ahead were likely predicted by none other than El Confidente (Cheech Marin), who fills canvas after canvas with the prophetic content of his dreams. Throughout Season 2, El Confidente’s predictive paintings would become reality, but it was often because the characters went out of their way to fulfill their own prophecies (even as a joke, like Ernie’s mariachi outfit). The paintings defined Lodge 49’s approach to mystic insight, which embraces both the mundane and the extranormal as equal parts of the same whole. And there’s still one notable painting that has yet to come true.
“There’s an El Confidente painting that Connie sees that depicts three dragons attacking the Lodge,” Ocko said, referencing one of the more outlandish predictions made by the dreamer. “In our bigger story, we do see antagonists arriving to threaten our king in the upcoming season.”
While Janet (Olivia Sandoval), the Elizabeth Holmes-ian CEO of the Omni restaurant group, will be heading to prison in a Lodge 49 Season 3, Ocko says, she will remain a dangerous variable in the Lodge’s future. Could she be one of the three dragons threatening the Lynx?
But Lodge 49 is always more than the sum of its plot points. “The Door” is a quieter denouement than the penultimate episode “La Reve Impossible,” which featured Ernie (Brent Jennings) jumping through a flaming hoop to secure mythic artifacts, but just because the finale is set in the afterglow of a glorious adventure doesn’t mean it’s a less exciting episode for it. Instead, the Lodge 49 Season 2 finale upends the series by confronting the promises and discomforts of contentment, even making a pointed joke of the former episode’s high stakes, with Dud blithely explaining how it all worked out — even larger-than-life author Lamar Marvin Metz (Paul Giamatti), who caused the episode-ending plane crash, landed safe and sound.
“Mexico,” Dud says wistfully, before hopping in the van with Ernie to join the day-to-day sales work at West Coast Super Sales.
“That’s the thing about a quest,” Ernie tells Dud. “It ends. Then you’re back on the order desk.”
In “The Door,” rather than struggling to live, Dud is, for the first time, in a position to reflect, leading to the pinnacle of Lodge 49’s emotional narrative so far, as Dud shares with Ernie the dark flipside of joy, which is necessarily haunted, just like everything else in human experience, by its vulnerability to the passage of time and the choices made to bring us to that place.
“It’s weird. I couldn’t be happier than I am right now. Truly. I knocked on a door and it changed everything. I feel so lucky,” Dud tells Ernie, just before the ceremony to coronate Ernie Lodge 49’s Sovereign Protector. “And I am so excited to see what happens next. But, right now, I don’t know. All I can feel is the shadow. And I wish my dad were here, to see where I am, to see where I’m going. But I know that the only reason that I’m here is because Liz and I lost him. And I don’t know how to square that.”
“I think Dud in that scene embodies an overall vision of the kind of bittersweet quality of time itself,” Ocko said. “Time is one way. Things get left behind and Dud has a relationship to time that is different from other people. In alchemy, there’s a notion that time might not be what you think it is, that it could be possible to go back and see and remember the place you want to be. In that moment, it’s Dud accepting reality, but it’s also that he has this vision of the world that allows for a different possibility that he might be willing to chase.”
A Lodge 49 Season 3 may delve into cosmic mysteries and uncover the hermetic underbelly of Long Beach, but “The Door” assures its viewers that Lodge 49 will always focus first on the emotional and existential consequences for its characters, who still have much to do if they’re to discover the True Lodge and beat back the dragons breathing fire at the door.
