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Warning: contains spoilers for The Devil’s Hour season two finale (and speculation that, IF Right, MAY spoil a season three revelation).
When The Devil’s Hour first introduced Peter Capaldi’s character Gideon Shepherd, it was as a child-kidnapping serial killer whose next target appeared to be Isaac Chambers, the young son of social worker Lucy. So far, so villainous.
Then in a twist of the kaleidoscope, everything shifted and a new perspective emerged. Gideon did indeed turn out to be a child-kidnapper and serial killer, but he was doing it all as a force for good. He took a little boy from his home before his parents murdered him, and killed other people (and dogs, and tumble dryers) who took innocent lives. Gideon’s rare ability to remember his previous lifetimes or “loops”, allowed him to learn about terrible events in one lifetime, and then come back to correct them in the next. Think of him as a Dexter-like vigilante, stepping outside of the law – and the laws of reality – to right wrongs and dole out justice.
In season two, Gideon enlists the help of Lucy to foil a mass killing at a toy shop. They work together to identify the bomber so that Gideon can stop them on his next loop. The bomber avoids their face being seen on CCTV, and is only ever seen wearing a zip-up yellow hoodie. Gideon needs to see their face so that he can research their identity and stop them from carrying out the bombing in his next loop. If Den of Geek’s theory is correct (speculation alert!), then it could be a face that Gideon knows well…
The Bee Foreshadowing
In season one, Gideon revives a dying bee while sitting on a bench in the same park where the bomber later fed broken glass to the ducks. The woman sitting next to Gideon jokes that her sister is allergic to beestings, so if the one he’s just saved flies off and stings her, then he’d be responsible.
That exchange could prove illustrative of (the already filmed) season three, if our Yellow Hoodie theory turns out to be correct. What if one of the people that Gideon saves in his many lifetimes turns out to be a monster? Then, like the bee, Gideon would be responsible for their actions and share the guilt for their crimes.
In the season two finale, Gideon pursues Yellow Hoodie to the car park and is knocked unconscious but not killed. It’s not as though Yellow Hoodie has any reverence for human life, so why not murder Gideon when he’s on the ground? Perhaps because they have a pre-existing relationship.
Jonah Taylor and Evelyn Wiseman
In 2009, Gideon rescued a boy named Jonah Taylor from being murdered by his parents. While Jonah was playing in his garden, Gideon kidnapped him and took him to live with Evelyn Wiseman in the isolated rural cottage where she’d been since leaving home in 1986.
Evelyn couldn’t cope with everyday life because she was beset by echoes, ripple and “ghosts” from other loops. After Gideon saved her life and that of her family in 1977 by sabotaging the car that was to have killed them all in an accident, Evelyn never regained her grip on reality. She was unbound in her current loop, haunted by multiple simultaneous realities. Only in the cottage Gideon found for her could she live in relative peace.
What kind of life would that make for a little boy? To be taken from everything you know and raised by a haunted woman who constantly slips between realities in the middle of nowhere would be destabilising in the extreme. And then to be told that you have to live there because your parents were going to kill you and bury you in a shallow grave? It would send anyone mad, especially somebody with the same genetic material as their abusive, murderous parents…
We could be wrong, but it adds up that Yellow Hoodie is Jonah Taylor, who’d be somewhere in his early 20s now. Twisted, perhaps by nature and certainly by nurture, Jonah grew up to become a monster. As another “anomaly” whose loop, like that of Evelyn and Sylvia, was irrevocably changed by Gideon, perhaps he too was haunted by echoes and ripples. Perhaps that what sent him on his cruel and inhumane killing spree.
It’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, but one season two clue in particular could suggest we’re right.
The Teddy Bear
At Evelyn’s cottage in season two, Gideon discovers some drawings on the kitchen table. There’s one of Rigby’s toy shop – the target of Yellow Hoodie’s bombing – and one of a teddy bear wearing a t-shirt and dungarees. Evelyn is a keen artist, so we might assume that she drew them. We know that she knew about the Rigby’s bomb because of her memories of previous loops.
But either Evelyn drew the teddy bear pictures based on Jonah’s descriptions, or the artist behind those particular drawings was Jonah himself.
In season one, we see Gideon driving Jonah away from home and explaining why he had to take him. Jonah is holding a teddy bear, which is dressed in a little t-shirt and toy dungarees. He drops the bear out of the van window, and it was later discovered by the roadside as a major clue in his kidnapping case. Look again, and it’s obvious that this is the same bear as in the drawing. Those pictures connect the Rigby’s bomb to Jonah’s disappearance, which must be why Gideon folds them up and puts them in his pocket – perhaps Gideon already suspects that Jonah is Yellow Hoodie, and is trying to keeping his suspicion a secret from Lucy and the police because of his own guilt. Perhaps the teddy bear was originally bought from Rigby’s (est. 1926, says the sign on the door), and Jonah has a twisted explanation of why he decided upon that particular target?
How Yellow Hoodie Gets Away With the Bombing
Usually in the case of a mass bombing, the police and intelligence services would uncover the culprit’s identity – information Gideon could wait for and then act upon in his next loop. Yellow Hoodie though, isn’t found by the police, hence Gideon’s need to see his face and identify him personally.
How could somebody get away with such a terrible crime? If they didn’t officially exist. When Gideon rescued Jonah, he took him out of society. No ID, no national insurance, no passport, no way for him to be traced. If Gideon was trying to create the perfect criminal, he couldn’t have done a better job. It stands to reason that Jonah could slip away after the bombing and never be found, thanks to the life Gideon gave him.
After finding the burnt out car that is wrongly assumed to have been used by the Rigby’s bomber Lucy even theorises: “Or he’s a recluse, lives in the middle of nowhere, cut off, faceless.” That would describe Jonah, wouldn’t it?
The Devil’s Hour season two is streaming now on Prime Video.
The post The Devil’s Hour Season 2 Theory: We Think We Know Who “Yellow Hoodie” Is appeared first on Den of Geek.
