Here’s everything that happened in Season 1 of Dead Boy Detectives

Dead Boy Detectives centers on Edwin and Charles, based on characters from The Sandman comics, and their new psychic friend, Crystal. After the trio travels to the sleepy town of Port Townsend to solve a case, they find themselves rather trapped there. Edwin and Charles soon learn that Port Townsend is as plagued by supernatural activity as any place and has a bonus resident witch named Esther. Here is an episode-by-episode summary of everything that happened in Season 1 of Dead Boy Detectives. 

Episode 1 – “The Case of Crystal Palace”

Edwin and Charles are two best-deceased mates running the titular Dead Boy Detective agency where they help fellow ghosts while avoiding Death, as she would force them into the afterlife. One such case is psychic Crystal’s unexpected demonic possession. After her exorcision, Crystal seems to be suffering from severe amnesia. To Edwin’s dismay, Charles invites her to crash at their office while she recovers her lost memories. 

Crystal’s psychic powers prove handy when the boys take on a missing girl’s case across the pond into the U.S. town of Port Townsend. Still alive, the little girl is held captive by the evil witch Esther. 

While working on the case, Edwin and Charles learn more about Crystal’s demon possession. She made the mistake of falling for David the demon and she was the one who let him in. Now, David continues stalking Crystal and reveals he was the one to steal her memories. 

We also learn that Edwin spent 70 years stuck in Hell due to a prank gone wrong at his boarding school in 1918. Some boys in his class kidnapped him and pretended to offer him as a sacrifice to a demon but inadvertently summoned the real thing. 

The trio eventually rescues the little girl from Esther, but Charles is forced to possess the witch so they can get away. While his plan somewhat works, the possession gets the attention of the Afterlife’s Lost and Found department who’ve been searching for the two detective boys. 

Episode 2 – “The Case of the Dandelion Shrine”

The episode starts with the dead boy detectives trying to leave town and head back to London with Crystal. Unfortunately, Edwyn’s use of magic on a cat leads to an unforeseen complication from the Cat King himself. The King places a bracelet on Edwyn, trapping him inside the town. To escape, Edwyn must either provide the king with erotic favors or he must count all the cats in town. 

Crystal keeps finding herself in hot waters with her landlady, Jenny the Butcher, who is suspicious of the new tenant’s penchant for chatting to the walls. A more pressing matter is Crystal’s next-door neighbor, Niko, who is showing rainbow-colored signs of paranormal infection. 

The dead boys figure out that dandelion sprites have infected Niko. The trio remove the two foul-languaged sprites and traps them inside an enchanted glass jar. Thanks to her near-death experience, Niko can also see Edwin and Charles. 

News of the ghosts’s arrival spread among the town’s ghosts, who form a long queue outside Crystal’s room waiting to hire their services. 

Meanwhile, the Night Nurse at the Afterlife’s Lost and Found department starts her investigation into getting Edwin and Charles back from Earth. 

Bent on revenge on the dead boy detectives and their medium, Esther turns her beloved pet crow, Monty,  into a beautiful young man. 

Episode 3 – “The Case of the Devlin House”

In the series’s third installment, Charles, Edwin, Crystal, and their newest team addition, Nikoi, have their choice of ghastly cases like the mystery of the evil seagull scattering body parts across the beach. They eventually take on the case of a recently deceased lady who wants to make sure her sister and nieces have moved on after being brutally murdered by the family’s patriarch. 

When Charles, Edwin, and Crystal go inside the house to investigate, they learn that the family has been stuck in a loop constantly reliving the murder for the past 29 years. The father is an abusive control freak who reminds Charles of his upbringing. Charles’s emotional investment in the case gets him also stuck in the loop. Making matters worse, David the demon picks the most inconvenient time to pull Crystal into his mirror universe for a chat. 

Edwin manages to break the loop by recording over the VHS tape it was on, thus freeing the family. The trio has to run before Death can claim the boys too, but it’s clear the murderous father is going to Hell, where he belongs. 

Monty the crow inserts himself into the friend group and immediately starts flirting with Edwin while snubbing Charles’s attempts to befriend him. 

At the Lost and Found department, the Night Nurse struggles to get through the bureaucratic nightmare of securing permission to travel to Earth after Edwin and Charles. She does catch a break when the two girls the pair of dead detectives just freed pass by her office on their way to the afterlife. 

Episode 4 – “The Case of the Lighthouse Leapers”

Our Dead Boy Scooby gang has to investigate a sea-based supernatural force making people jump to their deaths from the local lighthouse, annoying the building’s resident hermit ghost. It sounds like the group may be up against mermaids, but they’re facing a less pretty but far hungrier sea creature. With a little help from Tragic Mike, the cursed walrus, Charles, Edwin, Crystal, and Niko come up with a plan to get the monster to swallow a giant music box that should lull her back to sleep. 

Having finally received her Earth visitation permit, the Night Nurse finds the boys and tries persuading them to go back with her. She tortures Charles with flashbacks from his life, including his death by hypothermia and internal bleeding after his “friends” turned on him. Infuriated, Charles quite literally pushes the Night Nurse into the belly of the sea beast, thus solving the case and postponing his and Edwin’s afterlife. 

Meanwhile, as Edwin grows closer to Monty, the Cat King ups his seduction attempts. Unfortunately for the Cat King, Edwin is far too inexperienced in that area (he died before having had the chance to kiss anyone), and this little love triangle is hilariously confusing for the poor dead boy. 

The beast did use Crystal’s mom’s voice and almost got her to jump, so she was also a bit rattled at the end of the day. Episode 4 ends with Charles and Crystal finding solace in each other’s arms. 

Episode 5 – “The Case of the Two Dead Dragons”

Dead Boy Detectives | Image via Netflix

Love can be very complicated. At least that’s what the Dead Boy Detectives and friends learn in this episode. The team investigates the murders of two seemingly beloved by all high school jocks. As it turns out, the two murdered boys were awful people who had no qualms about spiking friend’s drinks and distributing a girlfriend’s nudes to the entire school. The scorned girlfriend is revealed as the killer and she decides to turn herself in. As for the jocks, they are quite literally dragged into Hell in a scene that’s more satisfying to watch than it deserves to be. 

Crystal friendzones Charles because she feels her life is too complicated for a relationship. After all, he’s a ghost with repressed anger issues, she’s an amnesiac with a stalker demon ex who refuses to get out of her head. 

Niko learns that Maxine, the librarian has been Jenny’s secret admirer all along and tries to play matchmatcher. The date goes brilliantly until Maxine reveals she’s a creepy stalker and tries to kill Jenny before ultimately ending up dying in a freakishly brutal accident.

As for Edwin, he’s finally ready to at the very least admit to himself that he has a crush on Charles. That’s unfortunate for poor Monty who was developing real feelings for his mark. The episode’s final scenes feature Edwin ending things and breaking poor Monty’s heart.  

Episode 6 – “The Case of the Creeping Forest”

Dead Boy Detectives | Image via Netflix

Esther puts her grand revenge plan into action and gets Monty to lure Edwin, Charles, and Crystal into a forest where a giant mushroom monster awaits to devour them. One minor complication is Crystal losing her powers after trying a new spell to get rid of her demon, forcing her to improvise on the job. 

Despite his broken heart, Monty spends the episode conflicted about doing Esther’s bidding. Ultimately the Cat King exposes the poor crow and Esther kills him for failing the mission. 

As the mushroom monster is about to devour Edwin and Charles, Crystal learns more about the origins of her powers and taps into the ancestors living inside her head to retrieve them. She saves the two dead boy detectives and traps Esther into another dimension.

After spending some time inside the belly of a sea monster, the Night Nurse catches up with the boys and is determined to force them into the afterlife. However, she pauses when Charles explains that Edwin was only sent to hell because of a technicality through no fault of his own. The Night Nurse agrees his case is bizarre and agrees not to separate the pair. Before the Night Nurse can take them to the Lost and Found Department, a creature sprints out from Hell and drags Edwin with it. 

Episode 7 – “The Case of the Very Long Stairway”

Dead Boy Detectives | Image via Netflix

In a bid to rescue Edwin, Charles makes a deal with the Night Nurse and promises to go with her to the Lost and Found department if she opens a door to Hell for him. She reluctantly agrees but Charles refuses to take Crystal with him on his quest. 

Instead, Crystal seeks out her demon ex. and demands he opens a door to Hell so she can save Edwin. However, David can’t just open a portal to Hell. If he could, he’d just go back home. During the confrontation, David makes the mistake of possessing Jenny. So Crystal uses her new shiny powers to take her memories back from him and bury him under the magical tree in her mind. 

After the Cat King lets slip that Edwin “survived Hell,” which is an interesting way of putting it, Esther comes up with a brand new and even more diabolical plan to destroy the dead boys. 

In Hell, Edwin is tormented by a giant spider monster made out of babydoll heads that chases him around before tearing him apart limb from limb. It’s grim, but thankfully, Charles finds his friend, and the two eventually find their way out, but not before witnessing some of the place’s horrors. Edwin does find the courage to confess his feelings to Charles. While Charles doesn’t feel the same, he reassures Edwin that their friendship is the most important thing in his existence. 

As soon as Edwin and Charles walk out of Hell, the Night Nurse wants to collect on the deal. Thankfully, the Night Nurse made the mistake of allowing Niko to read her Standard Operating Procedure booklet and is forced to leave the boys alone due to a technicality; As the boys just got back from hell, she needs to fill in yet another form to remove them from Earth. 

Episode 8 – “The Case of the Hungry Snake”

Dead Boy Detectives | Image via Netflix

The finale starts with Crystal learning how much of a terrible person she was even before David’s possession. She decided to leave Port Townsend and her new friends to return to London and sort her life out. However, she’s stopped in her tracks by Esther, who blows up Jenny’s shop and kidnaps Edwin and Charles. 

The witch built a ghost torture device meant to extract power out of tortured souls. She uses it on Edwin and wants to eventually take over Port Townsend. Crystal and Niko go to Esther’s house to try to stop her. Tragically, Niko is killed during the battle. 

Charles vanquishes Esther’s youth-giving snake, while Crystal summons the goddess Lilith, who doesn’t seem to approve of the witches’s beauty regime of feeding little girls to her snake. With Esther defeated, Crystal decides to continue her work with the Dead Boy Detective Agency. 

In London, Edwin and Charles are surprised when the Night Nurse’s superior decides to let them continue their work on Earth. To the Night Nurses’s infinite dismay, she’s now stuck on Earth as their “minder.”

The episode ends with the two sprites meeting with a mysterious person underneath the northern lights. 

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