The Owl House S1E4-5: "The Intruder" and "Covention"

This review was commissioned by Aris Katsaris.


It's been a very long time since I reviewed the "Owl House" pilot. I remember mostly liking it, even if I thought that it misjudged some of its distances when it comes to its portrayal of conformity vs individualism. In particular, protagonist Luz struck me as a little too much of an (accidental, but still) danger to those around her to play as an innocent victim of narrow social expectations. However, other than that bit of apparent miscalibration, I quite liked what I saw. It definitely felt like a continuation of the little golden age that American children's animation had in the early 2010's, complete with having some of the same talent behind it as Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, etc, and with more technically impressive animation than most of those.

So. Fantasy-obsessed ADHD middle schooler Luz has been sent to what is basically a straightaway camp for kids who dream too much. While on the way, she ended up stumbling into some kind of interdimensional smuggling operation being conducted by a strange being who calls herself Eda the Owl Witch. Luz ended up in Eda's world of witches and magical creatures, where she helped Eda defend herself from a corrupt police administrator dragon-man-thing who wanted to arrest and/or date her, earning Eda's gratitude. Luz will now be spending her summer break in Eda's world, in her titular domain of the Owl House, where she's going to try to learn magic and stuff. Whether or not said magic will remain practicable back on Earth, I couldn't say. Also, she somehow still has cell phone service in Eda's homeworld (maybe using microportals or something idk), so she can keep her parents assured that everything is going fine at normalaway camp.

We're jumping ahead from the pilot to the fourth episode. Aris Katsaris seems to be commissioning these episodes along the lines of an episode guide to skip the chaff and filler, which...well, that was also very characteristic for cartoons of the aforementioned era. Great story arcs burdened by uneven and often pace-contorting streaks of filler/padding episodes. I've just read some very brief wiki summaries of the intervening episodes 2-3, and the gist of them is that after failing to get any serious magical instruction out of Eda, Luz has finally twisted her arm into letting her enroll at a local school for witches and demons. Eda was hesitant to do this, because she thinks that school is for squares (though that curiously doesn't seem to have motivated her to take Luz's homeschooling seriously), and apparently she herself was a dropout from that very same school in her youth. Luz has made friends with a couple of witch-children, and enemies with another witch-child rich bully girl. However, some sort of shenanigans resulted in Luz being banned from the school almost as soon as she signs up, so she's back to trying to learn from Eda and her new witch kid friends on an unofficial basis.

Witches are apparently a species native to this world. I think? It might be more complicated than that. Anyway, they're not human, and humans are either not present in this world or just not included in this society.

Anyway, the next commissioned episode, S1E4 "The Intruder," sheds some more light on Eda's nature as an anomaly and outsider within her own world just as Luz kinda-sorta is in hers. The one after that, S1E5 "Covention," gives us some more insight into the larger politics and conflicts going on in this realm and presumably what the main plot will be about.


"The Intruder" starts with Luz, Eda, and Eda's pet cat-demon-thing King being stuck at home because of a boiling rainstorm. This is apparently a normal seasonal weather event here on the Boiling Islands, but that doesn't mean it won't kill you unless you stay indoors with your house's heat shields up. Most residents have more simple mechanical or magical sheilding for their homes, but Eda doesn't settle for half measures and uses these energy-intensive magical forcefields to keep the burning rain off of both her house and her self.

Which is cool and all, but it also seems to come with some pretty severe downsides. Especially since Luz has been getting more and more frustrated with Eda's failure to teach her any magic, and while they're stuck in the house together Eda has nothing to stall with. The result being that, already exhausted from shielding the house, Eda actually knocks herself out entirely while trying to do some more magic to teach Luz.

Before Eda passes out completely, Luz is able to get some important information out of her, but it's not encouraging. Apparently, the source of a witch's magic is this weird gland next to their hearts that - Eda herself was surprised to learn - humans do not possess.

Luz and King end up having to drag an unconscious Eda to bed and tuck her in. Leaving Luz, once again, untaught, and now more discouraged than ever that teaching can even help her at all. King tries to fill her time with not-terribly-accurate-seeming lessons about the dangers and horrors of demonkind, but she ain't buying it.

Casting Alex Hirsch as King was kind of a brilliant meta-move. Especially since the lower key, higher-pitch voice that he gives to King really sounds like a struggling Bill Cypher wannabe. Which is pretty much exactly what King is; little kitty cat monster who wants everyone to treat him like a demon dreadlord.

Anyway, eventually King tells Luz about these potions that Eda regularly drinks. They come with a little card that reads "An elixir a day," and the appearance of the fluid inside is somewhat reminiscent of the witch magic-gland thing that Luz just learned about. Eda is also always bragging about how she's the most powerful witch in all the Boiling Islands, so it may just be that she's using an illicit concoction to boost her magic to those levels. So, King and Luz do a stupid and try to steal Eda's nightly potion, but end up spilling it before Luz can even more stupidly drink it.

Shortly afterward, a shadowy monster starts stalking around the house and trying to kill them.

It's pretty effectively tense. Both before and after it becomes obvious what - and more importantly who - the monster in question actually is.

Their struggle against the creeping monster is punctuated by Luz making an incredible discovery. The simple geometric glyphs that Eda and other witches trace with their fingers when casting spells are actually just simplified versions of much more complex runic symbols that are alluded to in some old books and that still show up briefly outlined in ghostly lights around the witch's hands. By drawing out the intricate symbol in its entirety with pencil and paper, Luz actually CAN make magic happen.

The implication seems to be that magic was originally an art developed by humans, or at least human-like creatures, and that the witches with their sorcery-glands were just able to learn it more easily and use it more effectively than its original creators. Either that, or the glands developed over time after the proto-witches started using magic regularly, until they no longer even needed all the knowledge their ancestors had built up.

Using Luz's new light spell to get a better look at it, they realize that the werewolf-owl-ape monster terrorizing them is a mutated Eda, and that the potion they thought was a magic-amplifier was actually a medication for the curse she's under. Apparently, that flyer attached to the package got ripped in half, and they feel pretty dumb when they find the other side of it.

I'm surprised King didn't know about this. I guess Eda only took him in relatively recently and has kept secrets.

Anyway, the resolution comes with the convergence of all the plot threads. With King's encyclopedic (if bombastically presented) knowledge of demons and monsters, he knows that beasts like the one Eda has transformed into are weakened and de-powered by bright light. Luz also knows that the bigger the circle the witch outlines with her fingers, the more powerful the spell will be. So, Luz draws a wall-sized light sigil with all the archaic details that modern witches don't need to bother with, and they lure monster-Eda to it before activating the spell. She reverts to her true form and passes out long enough for them to force feed her another dose of the medicine.

Eda's not thrilled at what they did, but also forced to admit that it's partly her own fault for being secretive about something this dangerous. Luz's discovery about the nature of spellcraft, and its implications about the history of magic and witchkind themselves, also do a lot to make up for it, as Eda is quite fond of obscure lore and knowledge.

Also, I don't think that them breaking the medicine bottle actually caused this incident. Eda was too unconscious to take it anyway, and that's completely her own fault for not pacing her magic use. The transformation would have happened either way.

Fun episode. It let King show some more of his nuances while still being the silly sidekick archetype, revealed a lot about the setting by implication, established Eda being under a wereowl curse, and gave Luz a proper start toward becoming a real magician. Hell, she's arguably succeeded at becoming one already. She can reliably cast a spell. Just one spell, but still, that's infinitely more magic than most of Earth's people can use.

Another thing I liked about this one, and which deals with some of the issues I had with the pilot, is that it makes it clear that Eda isn't exactly a good role model. For all the admirable qualities she possesses, Eda is thoughtless, irresponsible, and self-absorbed in the same ways that Luz herself can be, and these traits make things unpleasant for the people around her despite her good intentions. Luz can learn from Eda, but just as much by taking her as an instructive bad example as by imitation. Eda gets by, but life is harder than it needs to be for her and the people she ostensibly cares about.

That said, the following episode, "Covention," reminds us that "childish individualism bad, adult conformity good" isn't exactly a great ethos either. The society of the Burning Isles is an authoritarian one that seems to only be getting worse as time goes on. With this social model of propriety being the only one available, it's much more understandable why someone like Eda would choose to reject the entire concept of society.

"Covention" brings Luz back to the witch school she got kicked out of in one of the episodes I skipped, so that she can get a look at the Boiling Isles' equivalent to job fair/career day/whatever they call it in your own country.

Luz hears about witch-and-demon job fair from those kids she made friends with previously, and Eda grudgingly accompanies her to the school so she can check it out. Apparently, the autocratic ruler of the Boiling Isles - an Emperor Bellos - has been progressively making it harder and harder for magically educated witches to operate independently, strongarming them into joining one from a menu of state-recognized covens. Joining a coven is being sold as the default expectation for anyone who makes it through witch school, with aboveboard professional opportunities being pretty much limited to members of these state-controlled organizations. Also, when you join a coven, they ritually seal most of your potential magical expression away, restricting your power to a limited number of applications seen as appropriate to your role.

Well, when you join MOST covens they do that. The exception to this is the Imperial Coven, the emperor's elite police and military enforcers. They get to keep their full range of magical versatility and develop it however they want on the side, as long as they meet their bootnecking quota.

This organization accepts only the most magically powerful and the most ideologically pure youths into their ranks, of course.

The big reveal of this episode comes in the form of the chief of the Imperial Coven, Lilith, who appears in person to give a recruitment pitch to the kiddos. It turns out that she's Eda's sister.

And also that Eda's showing her age in a way that Lilith isn't, despite them having been born close enough in time to have gone to school together. The mysterious owlbear-curse that some unknown enemy put on Eda in her early childhood may be related to this. Or maybe anti-aging treatments are a perk of the job for the emperor's favored legbreakers.

The plot unfolds with Luz having another run-in with the bully girl she met in one of the skipped episodes. The bully girl, Amity, has apparently already been accepted into the cop coven and is being trained by Lilith and her lieutenants. The proteges of the two estranged sisters coming into a conflict of their own. Meanwhile, Lilith manages to identify Eda despite her disguise, but she opts not to use this opportunity to arrest her wanted criminal sister. Instead, she decides to use a formal duel between Luz and Amity to prove a point, and hopefully get Eda to renounce her roguish ways so she can try and get her a pardon.

The duel ends up being a draw, on account of both participants being caught out cheating. The irony being that while Luz went into the battle with a plan to have Eda surreptitiously be doing the magic for her from the sidelines, Amity didn't know that Lilith had stuck a mana-boosting patch onto the back of her neck before sending her into the arena.

The failduel ends with the two senior witch sisters having a much more serious, much more spectacular, magical shootout of their own, while their proteges subvert expectations by having a reconciliatory heart-to-heart.

Amity's faith in both her own abilities and the integrity of the Imperial Coven - and the order it represents - have taken visible damage this day. The cracks are only enlarged when Luz is sympathetic rather than smug, and also demonstrates that she's learning more about the nature and history of magic than these proper witch students are. Amity didn't think humans could possibly do magic at all, and even though the light spell is considered thoroughly unimpressive even for children younger than themselves, the fact that a human is doing it at all - and seeming to understand more about the technicalities of its conjuring - does show Amity that the world is bigger and more complicated than the state wants people to think.

There's an interesting contrast with the duel going on between the sisters here. Notably, while they exchange energy blasts and conjured death traps, Lilith is the one trying to be conciliatory, and Eda is the one throwing it all back in her face with a laugh. It's obvious that the sisters miss each other, but while Lilith still hopes against hope that Eda will change her ways and return to imperial society, Eda buries it all under a layer of sneering contempt. Lilith might be the bad guy here, but once again Eda doesn't exactly make herself look like a better alternative to the system so much as a broken, unhappy consequence of the system.

There's a bit near the end of the duel where Eda actually exploits Lilith's desire to show her sister mercy to get the upper hand over her. Which is painful in a way that it wouldn't be if there ideological positions were reversed. Because Lilith is the hand of the state, even a genuine expression of love and forgiveness from her can't be accepted, because the larger, colder creature *behind* her will only exploit that.

The episode ends with Eda and Luz having to flee the scene once again, leaving a humiliated, heartbroken Lilith and a self-reexamining Amity behind them. Lilith resolves to stop giving Eda (or Edalynn, as her full name apparently is) all these extra chances.


So far, Owl House is definitely trending more thematically sophisticated than the pilot primed me to expect. Once again, I like that the show isn't uncritically celebrating speshul snowflake mentalities (for instance, there are some moments during the fight with monster-Eda in "The Intruder" where Luz seems to be halfway treating it like a game, and the show does not take a positive view of her doing this) OR doing a bothsides thing between the rebels and the authoritarians. It seems to be taking the attitude that unhealthy, neotenic personalities are often caused (or at least, not appropriately handled) by excessively rigid, controlling societies. I think I like its ethos, so far.

The humor also mostly lands. I haven't talked about it much, since there's a lot to get through in limited wordspace, but this is definitely a more refined version of the same style of gag that I enjoyed in Gravity Falls, the higher points of Adventure Time, and Over the Garden Wall. Much like the animation itself, it feels like an iterative improvement on the same style by a more experienced team.

On a random note, I'm also amused that Eda's wereowl form reminded me so much of this reimagined owlbear concept that a TTRPG youtuber I'm fond of put out.

They even have the common element of being victims of a curse.


Anyway, there's a bunch more Owl House in queue, and I imagine I'll continue having plenty to say about it. So far so good.