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The Key is the thirteenth, and final episode released, of Tremors: The Series.

In Universe Perspective[]

Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography From NASCAR to Nowhere: The True Story of Tyler Reed, by Tyler Reed:

It was an ordinary day in Perfection: Burt was in Montana, Nancy was brainstorming a new Graboid souvenir, Jodi was busy at Chang's, I was fixing Rosalita's truck, and Larry was running around town claiming that an "invisibat" had attacked him in the abandoned Jessup barn.

Since we were all busy and Rosalita had no intention of helping King Geek track down an invisible bat, the new guy was on his own.

Then a lovely lady named Delores lured me out from underneath Rosalita's truck. She paid extra for a special Graboid tour, so I wasn't complaining, even when she asked some funky questions about how long El Blanco waits before taking a dump.

That night at Chang's, Larry surprised a guy trying to steal Jodi's big seismo-monitor. The guy pulled a gun and locked Larry in the freezer.

When Larry described the robber the next morning, I got worried. I was sure the perp was Frank — a loser wannabe-gangster from Vegas. A while back, he'd stirred up some big problems after El Blanco ate his friend Max.

Frank had a reason to hate our albino Graboid, and now he had a seismo-monitor with which to track him. Rosalita and I jumped in her truck and headed out to check up on El Blanco.

When we found El Blanco he was lying on the ground, unconscious. There was no sign of Frank, but we didn't dare leave El Blanco alone. Whoever had attacked our Graboid obviously wasn't finished.

Twitchell brought in a couple of experts, who decided to truck El Blanco to my garage so they could set up their fancy equipment and tell us what had happened to him.

Once we loaded El Blanco onto Rosalita's flatbed truck, Twitch and his posse set off for town. Rosalita and I were about to get in the truck and follow with the Graboid, when Frank and Dolores appeared and stuck guns in our faces. We were being hijacked.

They took us to the old Jessup barn, then ordered me to cut open El Blanco with a chainsaw. That, along with Dolores's questions on my tour, told me that they were looking for something El Blanco had swallowed. Maybe Frank's dead partner had been wearing some kind of valuable doo-dad when he got eaten. Whatever. I had bigger problems: If I didn't kill El Blanco, Frank and Dolores would kill me and Rosalita.

Then I saw Larry, hiding up in the rafters where he'd been trying to snare his invisibat. While I stalled Frank, Larry stealthily grabbed the weird gun that Frank and Dolores had brought along.

The gun didn't shoot bullets but sound waves. It's probably what they'd used to incapacitate El Blanco. More important, when the dust settled in the barn, I was using Frank as a human shield while Dolores aimed a shotgun at us.

Frank must've been bummed to realize that his girlfriend was perfectly willing to kill him to get at me. I know I sure was.

Then Larry lured his invisibat into Dolores's face. She staggered backward, El Blanco ate her, Frank ran away, and everything was cool once more.

The big question now is, who gets the credit for the save? Forced to choose between singing the praises of El Blanco, Larry or the Invisibat, I have to be honest — I'm leaning toward the bat.

Plot[]

Frank, encouraged by Max's widow Delores, has come up with a plan to retrieve the key that El Blanco swallowed. When Delores arrives in town, Rosalita is immediately suspicious of her and shanghais a local tourist to go on the Graboid to go on the tour with her. Using an experimental soundwave gun (and the demise of the gun's inventor when El Blanco eats him), Frank manages to stun the albino Graboid. But before he can go over and cut open El Blanco, Tyler and Rosalita bring a truck to remove El Blanco to where a vet can study him to find out what is afflicting the Graboid. He and Delores immediately kidnap the two of them, in order to take El Blanco to where they can open him up without being disturbed. However, unknown to them, Larry is also in the building, investigating a mysterious batlike creature he has discovered.

Larry steals the soundwave gun and uses it to shoot Frank. He then entices the batcreature to attack Delores when she attempts to shoot Tyler. El Blanco then wakes up and the first thing he does is to eat Delores. In the confusion, Frank manages to escape. Or so it appears. He flags down a car on the highway on the way out of town, only to picked up by the tourist, who actually isn't a tourist. He's a hitman who was hired to kill Frank. Although Frank's fate is not revealed (the screen fades to black), we do hear a single gunshot. The episode ends with Larry finding the locker key that Frank had tried to retrieve on the ground and he puts it into a storage jar with other metal objects, blissfully ignorant of it's significance.

Trivia[]

  • Frank's idiocy comes full circle. Thanks to his inability to accept Graboids are real, he caused a major loss for his criminal gang and was marked for death.

Cast[]

Victor Browne Tyler Reed
Gladys Jimenez Rosalita Sanchez
J.D. Walsh Larry Norvel
Vivica A. Fox Delores
Nicholas Turturro Frank
Richard Riehle Helmut Krause
Michael Albala The Hitman
Invisibat
Marcia Strassman Nancy Sterngood
Lela Lee Jodi Chang
Dean Norris W.D. Twitchell
Michael Rooker Kinney (archive footage)
Troy Winbush Max (archive footage)
David Grant Wright Dr. Towne
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