The Devil’s Hour ending explained: Does Lucy die?

The Devil’s Hour follows a woman waking up from nightmares every night, right at 3:33 am, without fail. When she’s connected to a string of murders, she must solve the surreal quandary that has usurped all her life until now.

Warning: The article contains heavy spoilers

Plot Summary

Lucy Stevens wakes up every night, without fail, at 3:33 am from some nightmare or another. She has been doing this for as long as she can remember.

She is the mother to Isaac, a young boy utterly devoid of emotions, staying still and gazing/staring without blinking. He seems detached, with all but scant hints of any form of expression.

Lucy is estranged from her husband, Mike, who has not yet divorced her. Mike loves Lucy but doesn’t extend even a speck of that love to his child — the reason he moved out of their life, except for occasionally sleeping with Lucy.

She also has an old mother who suffers from schizophrenia and dementia. Lucy works for the child protection service and is a dedicated worker.

While she wants and tries to get her son’s condition diagnosed and treated, she herself keeps experiencing bizarre glitches in her perception of reality.

Meanwhile, DI Ravi Dhillon is hot on the trail of a serial killer who hasn’t been caught for years, but a recent case helps the DI make a connection that also results in some crucial leads.

Dhillon, along with his colleague, DS Nick Holness, digs deeper and eventually makes a chilling discovery. The new leads connect Lucy and her son’s name to the case and the serial killer, without any explanations behind it.

Meanwhile, Isaac is kidnapped and Ravi is assigned the case. They eventually track down the site where he could be, with some inexplicable and supernatural-ish help from Lucy’s visions, which she claims are memories.

However, Lucy claims that she has never lived these memories. Isaac returns to Lucy and later on tells a bizarre and confounding story about how he ended up in the woods.

Meanwhile, the connection between Lucy and the serial killer unravels more cases taking place in the present. Lucy and Dhillon come a bit closer while they gather some important leads regarding the serial killer suspect Gideon.

They eventually nab Gideon but he doesn’t say anything for three days, demanding to have a session with Lucy Chambers, who’s the only one he’ll speak to.

Lucy arrives at the room, curious to know why all the things that happened to her have happened and continue to happen, and how her son and Gideon factor into all this.

What Gideon reveals to Lucy and Ravi is absurd, unlikely for even the most gullible to believe in. He tells them about this thing called Recurrence and how he keeps living the same life in the same body, over and over again.

However, the special thing about him is that he remembers all the memories from the past lives he’s lived. He also tells Lucy that she’s not supposed to live the life she’s living right now.

Amid all the bizarre and absurd explanations, Lucy does believe in all of it, but in the meantime, Isaac is in trouble again. Lucy has a quandary in front of herself again, to either try and escape her suffering or embrace it.

The Devil’s Hour ending explained in detail:

What is Recurrence?

Recurrence is the progenitor of all the conflict in The Devil’s Hour. Throughout the series, inexplicable and spooky events take place and affect Lucy and her surroundings.

There’s no logical explanation for any of it, besides the safe assumption route that entails some clinical/scientific answer. However, Gideon explains the concept as best as he can.

He explains that everyone dies and is reborn the same, as in, their lives all repeat over and over, only they don’t remember any of it once they die and are born again.

What are Gideon’s power and speciality?

Gideon explains that even though everyone lives, dies, and then repeats the same life, with the chain of events recurring over and over, he’s a special case.

Gideon claims he can remember all his past lives as well as reset his life at will. Whenever he wants to start anew, he simply kills himself but one sense after another, he comes back to life.

He started recurring on will and retaining all his memories of his previous lives when he was a little child. It was his father who first committed suicide along with him and his brother following a failed marriage.

However, over the course of several recurrences, Gideon starts retaining memories of what always happens to him.

To not be a constant victim of his fate, Gideon alters the course of his life, killing his father before he could ever do the same to him and his brother.

Gideon lives and dies innumerable times after that, gaining a knack for the deaths and resetting his life.

Why does Gideon kill and torture?

Since Gideon could remember what happened previously, he starts becoming more and more knowledgeable of world events, and even events related to specific individuals.

To alter other people’s fates and save them from suffering, Gideon would kill the perpetrators beforehand so they can never do their reprehensible acts.

He confesses to Lucy and Ravi that he’s been making a list from long ago, and in it, he writes all the names of the people he wants to die so that he can save their victims-to-be.

As to why he tortures Connor Larson, he has an answer. Larson is a peculiar case as Gideon wanted to do an experiment with him.

Instead of killing him before he can sexually assault five women, Gideon wants to change him as a person altogether, so that his reprehensible acts never transpire.

He surmises that since fear is a great tool to change someone’s personality, he would torture him to alter his proclivities for rape or sexual acts, even.

Why does Lucy wake up during the Devil’s hour?

Lucy keeps having little sneak peeks her of previous lives as visual echoes in the real world. She always has this sense of Deja Vu throughout the show.

Later in The Devil’s Hour, it’s revealed that she can remember fragments of her other loops as well. It explains why she always gets woken up at 3:33 am and the little glitches she suffers while wide awake as well.

Her mother was supposed to die by suicide when she was young. She used a gun to shoot herself in the head, the sound of which had woken a little Lucy from her sleep.

Following this, little Lucy went downstairs and beheld the harrowing scene. This was the worst experience she ever had in her life.

She grows up to be a detective, along with her husband and colleague, Ravi. They eventually catch Gideon who tries to convince them of his absurd powers but Ravi never believes him, which is not entirely the case with Lucy.

Gideon is locked up and waits 25 years in prison for her to tell him the worst experience she ever had, which was her mother’s death. After learning this, Gideon resets his life.

He then uses the information to change Lucy’s mother’s fate; she can’t fire the gun and lives; Lucy leads a different life and grows up to be a Child Protection agent and not a detective.

Gideon wanted to continue his saviour efforts of decreasing suffering, but he always gets caught by Ravi and Lucy.

No matter how many times he tried, he could never sway Ravi and so to not get caught, he instead went for Lucy, waiting more than two decades to do so.

He eventually stops her from suffering her worst experience by preventing her mother’s suicide, therefore changing her life and creating huge ripples that then haunt her for the rest of her life.

The 3:33 am daily spiel is because she involuntary harkens back to the day her mother died in the original timeline, unaltered by Gideon.

Do Lucy and Isaac die in the fire?

The Devil’s Hour ends with a tragedy wherein Mike intentionally lets the fire keep burning the house down, along with Isaac in it.

As he’s ensnared by flames, he calls for his mother one last time, with a truly heart-wrenching and moving cry for help.

In the voice message, Isaac says “I love you” to his mom, absolutely wrecking her emotionally and making her all the more resolved in putting her life on the line to save him.

She rushes into the fire and keeps probing inside, with extreme flames and soot making it impossible and painful for her to breathe, with her consciousness slowly slipping away as she seemingly dies.

There’s no onscreen death that Isaac suffers, it’s only implied. Meanwhile, the recurrent timeline that follows has Lucy as what she’s originally meant to be — a detective.

In this timeline, Lucy has worked on the Gideon case for years, along with Ravi. Here, she never lived in the no. 7 house, instead, it’s home to the Warrens who kept haunting her and Isaac in the previous loop.

Lucy’s death in the house fire is surprisingly more evident than Isaac’s. Lucy seemingly chokes to death and the unaltered Lucy has another Deja Vu when she sees the burned-up side of Mrs Warrren’s face.

Since Gideon explains early on that the little child can travel between the worlds on his own, it could be that Isaac simply disappeared from the Chambers household to the Warren household.

However, if he teleported to Warren’s household, he would’ve been met with the same fire and flames, unless he found a way to get out of the fire in the previous world where Mike left him to burn.

Lucy has a sketch of Isaac hanging on the wall at the station, meaning that he was able to travel to this world, most probably when he disappeared from the previous loop for two days. Being an anomaly, Isaac’s fate has all the right to be ambiguous.

Who is the reason behind all the chaos?

Gideon, without a speck of doubt. While the Isaac timeline may have partially come into existence because of Lucy, it’s Gideon who has been the instigator of all the alterations in his quest to attenuate suffering, giving rise to other forms of suffering.

The moral crux of The Devil’s Hour is in the sixth episode’s title — ‘Amor Fati.’ A Latin phrase meaning “love of one’s fate”, it is also associated with the Nietzschian philosophical thought experiment of ‘Eternal Recurrence’.

It is a hypothesis that over a period of time, everything in this universe must recur.

Gideon becomes aware that all beings must go through Eternal Recurrence, the loop of existence that keeps going on forever and infinitely.

Where others are blissfully unaware that they’re a part of this perpetual return, Gideon is not. The question is if one were to know of Eternal Recurrence, would they embrace their fate and its infinitely perpetual nature? Or would they dread it?

Gideon’s response in The Devil’s Hour is clear. He can’t bear to let fate have its course. He dreads it and wants to run away from the suffering it causes or will cause.

The awareness of predeterminism has given Gideon free will, but suffering takes its toll one way or another, no matter how hard he tries and how much he tries.


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