The Owl House S1E7 and S1E12: "Lost in Language" and "Adventures in the Elements"

This pair of episodes reminded me of what was best and worst about the 2010's Cartoon Network epoch. On one hand, I continue to feel like "Owl House" is an improvement and refinement on the earlier shows made by this group of artists, both technically and narratively. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like they got any better at avoiding the annoying parts.

Gems: "Hey Steven, see this thing over here? Don't do this thing."

Steven: *does the thing.*

Gems: "God fucking damnit Steven, why did you do the thing we told you not to do!"

Steven: "Because I just wanted to be cool and powerful like you, and also I suddenly got this new power that mostly lets me undo the damage caused by me doing the thing, so you forgive me now right?"

*repeat x30*

Remember that? Yeah, well, unfortunately we're doing that again. And we're not even going to get any new powers to clean up after ourselves with.

Episode seven, "Lost in Language," is where most of the positive is concentrated. Episode twelve, "Adventures in the Elements," is where most of the negative can be found. Not all, but most.

Granted, out of all of its older relatives, "Owl House" has the most in common by far with "Gravity Falls." Like, not even close. Not just the similar premise and similar-ish character archetypes (in particular, Eda seems to have more in common with Stanley Pines by the episode), but also the themes. The obsession with sibling rivalries. The juxtaposition of inflexible, hidebound institutions with weirdly quirky, put-upon agents of said institutions. The exploration of pride and humility within the arena of social reputations. It really feels like it could be a (better-animated) alternate version of GF just as easily as a successor to it.


"Lost in Language" starts out with Eda sending Luz to return some library books for her, and Luz stumbling into a very weird little adventure. After returning Eda's books (unsurprisingly, they're long overdue, in poor condition, and her library card has been revoked. I'd think it would be revoked anyway on account of her being a wanted criminal, but maybe not), Luz happens to notice Amity doing some civic volunteer work.

She seems to have a way with children, surprisingly for her overall personality. Also, I'm pretty sure one of those little kids is the same species as episode one villain Warden Wrath, which is a nice touch.

Luz tries to talk to Amity once she's done reading to the kiddies, but the heart-to-heart they had back in "Covention" doesn't seem to have made as much difference as one might hope. Things take a turn for the weird when Luz is suddenly approached by Amity's hitherto-unseen older twin siblings. A pair of fun loving, but also very mean-spirited, rebels who love nothing more than tormenting their teacher's pet younger sister.

Seeing that Luz's presence seems to irritate Amity, and also remembering her having been instrumental to the latter's humiliating duel in "Covention," the twins decide that Luz is awesome and want to be her friends. Luz is suggestible enough to go along with this, and spends an enjoyable afternoon playing dumb pranks on the library staff with the twins until they all get kicked out.

They all had fun though, so Luz agrees to meet the twins again that night to sneak into the library during a rare magical event that supposedly reacts with the library and its contents. As soon as the screaming comet goes flying by overhead, the library books all start glowing. And, when opened, the books all start projecting these hard-light holograms of their subject matter. A little experimentation reveals that scribbling in the books, especially illustrated books, can produce amusing consequences for the holographic projections.

Cue lighthearted vandalism shenanigans. Luz has a great appreciation for books though, so she's a little hesitant to scribble in them even for the sake of holographic slapstick. That early tension point between her and the twins is greatly intensified when they find a hidden nook in the library that Amity apparently uses as a secret hideout, and start looking for her diary. Luz might have poor judgement and poorer impulse control, and Amity hasn't exactly made herself easy to like in her latest appearance, but still, this seems a little fucked up.

Several things happen simultaneously now.

First, the twins - physically wrestling the diary out of Luz's hands - open a few pages and cause holographic images of Amity to appear and read out the respective entries. Revealing some very complicated feelings about Luz, her classmates, and her place in the world in general. Basically, she's a committed overachiever who's afraid of ever showing weakness or incompetence, and it just so happens that she's doing this in the context of an authoritarian society where "joining the emperor's unaccountable legbreaker gang" is seen as the goody-two-shoes route. The twins try to convince Luz that Amity deserves humiliation for how she treats her lower-status classmates (not to mention outsiders like Luz herself), but it's pretty clearly just a post hoc justification for cruelty on their part.

Second, Amity herself turns up. I, uh, guess she also snuck into the library in the middle of the night for unrelated reasons? Or maybe she noticed her troublemaking older siblings were missing and went to see what horrible shit they were up to this time? Unclear. Anyway, she stumbles on the group and sees the diary pages in Luz's hands with the twins cackling nearby, and jumps to the obvious, uncharitable conclusion.

This unfortunate misunderstanding is interrupted by the third new development. See, a little earlier, Luz let the twins peer pressure her into drawing angry eyebrows onto a saccharine little children's picture book character. Basically this world's version of the Very Hungry Caterpillar, or Sam-I-Am, or the like. They then accidentally left this book open, and apparently the addition of angry eyebrows was enough to turn Witch Sam-I-Am's hologram into a towering, predatory nightmare hellbent on capturing them all and dragging them back into its book with it forever.

Contrivance aside, there's some cleverly layered symbolism in this monster of the week. The construct was spawned by Luz having succumbed to peer pressure and committed a small fraction of the twins' own sins, which then had its impact magnified by unfortunate coincidence. It's motivation in hunting people down and trying to crush them into book illustrations is rooted in a desire for companionship (corrupted from the storybook's original topic), mirroring Luz. Turning them into picture-book illustrations as a karmic punishment for opening the diary and drawing the eyebrows in equal measure. The way they end up defeating it, managing to get the vandalized picture-book out of its grasp and erasing the angry eyebrows, has to come with Luz giving up her attempts at being one of the cool kids and embracing humility. It's not super subtle or deep or anything, but it's clever how many details they were able to get to line up.

The episode ends with a sort-of reconciliation between all parties. Amity and Luz take repeated risks to save each other, and the older twins...well, they might be assholes, but they never wanted their younger sister to die. The ending note is one of reconciliation and self-examination for all of them. Including Amity; she might not have done anything especially bad in this episode, but her behavior in previous ones was a big contributor to Luz going the route that she did at the beginning of this one, and she's now aware of this.

Also, Luz's favorite YA fantasy series appears to have made it through the dimensional barrier, and Amity is also a big fan of it. To the point where she draws embarassing fanart of it. Luz has the most recent book in her possession, and said installment doesn't seem to have made it to witchworld yet, so Luz lends it to Amity as a conciliatory gesture.

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Eda and King have to babysit some ornery Studio Ghibli bat monster infants.

Not a lot to say about this sideplot, but it was amusing and kinda heartwarming-ish. And also the main reason that I drew parallels between Eda and Grunkle Stan in this post's intro, as the main reason these two plotlines are separate is because Eda wants Luz out of the house tonight so they don't have to split the payment with her. Cue Luz being the only one awake when she arrives home, on account of the bat babbies having run Eda and King ragged and exhausted them.

Turns out the mother bat demon is super loaded, though in that case I'm not sure why she was stuck using Eda of all people as a babysitter lol. Maybe she's another outlaw or something.

Anyway, there's another bit of mirroring in the B-plot, this time between Eda and Amity, with Eda putting on a mercenary front when it comes to batsitting but then actually missing the little hellions once they've been taken back by their mother. In fairness, they did become much better behaved once she handed them apple slices and read their favorite books to them.

So, good episode. Felt like a two or three parter with all the stuff that happened in it, even if the story was pretty much self-contained. It's hard for me to adress these in a broad strokes review, but the humor in this show continues to be spot-on more often than not. The gags are free-flowing throughout, and nearly all of them land.

On to "Adventures in the Elements" now. Unfortunately.

There IS a lot to like in this episode. There's some nicely paced and well-conveyed worldbuilding, excellent art and animation, and plenty of solid gags. The problem is that it also made me hate Luz, and that's a hard thing to make up for.

Apparently, Luz has managed to get herself accepted into the school in the time between episodes 7 and 12, despite being a human from another dimension and being known to be hosted by a wanted criminal. However, there are placement exams she needs to take, and apparently if she hasn't mastered at least two spells by the time she takes it she'll be sent to the remedial classes. Separating her from both the two kids she's made friends with, and (even further) from Amity who she's also kinda sorta made friends with.

I'm not sure why she hasn't learned another simple spell by now, considering how quickly she mastered the light-summoning thing once putting her mind to it. Reflects poorly on Eda, but it also reflects even more poorly on Luz herself to be frank. Well, I'll generously assume something's been keeping them super busy since "The Intruder." Anyway.

After some more arm-twisting, Eda is persuaded to actually spend a little effort on training Luz again. She doesn't try to repeat the methods that worked last time, though. Instead, she decides that she needs to take Luz to the most magic-suffused location on the Boiling Islands to continue the process of reinventing witchcraft from first principles. On one hand, I totally agree that this is a worthy path to pursue, given the implications that have already been turned up by Luz's discoveries in "Intruder." On the other hand, if Luz really just needs to learn a second spell right now in order to pass an exam, I really feel like they should do that first and try the first principles stuff afterward. That said, hooo boy does the magically suffused location drop a worldbuilding bomb on us.

"The Knee" has more magic accumulated in it than any other location on the Boiling Islands, seemingly by virtue of it being the highest point on them. And, Eda goes on at length about the islands being the source of the witches' power, and it having a will of its own that tries to teach spells through the local natural phenomena. And, well, the islands are apparently the corpse of a colossal god-thing, which strongly implies that this magic is the remnant of its own power, and that this will is something along the lines of its ghost.

So, that's pretty fucking wild.

As for the plot though...it turns out that Amity and her jerk older siblings are also up on the knee sparring for their own exams. Jerk older siblings are still jerks, but less so than before; they did just recently almost get their younger sister killed after all, and they seem to be taking that at least somewhat seriously and self-reflecting. Luz is ashamed of letting these three see how little magic she actually knows, and even more embarrassed for them to see her trying to learn magic Eda's way by tasting snow and sniffing mosses and stuff.

Luz sees Amity practicing with a "training wand" that has a built-in power supply and can sort of cast spells for its user. And, despite being told not to do the thing, Steven wants to be cool and powerful like the gems, so he does the thing. Luz unsurprisingly loses control of the wand, resulting in a misfire that antagonizes a powerful monster lairing nearby. The Knee is a safe place as long as you don't provoke the snow monster, and it's easy to avoid doing that as long as you exercise the barest modicum of care, but now Luz went and provoked it.

Long story short, Amity sticks Luz in a forcefield cage so she can't do any more galaxybrain shit while the other four try to deal with the monster. It beats them, and prepares to eat all of them while Luz is stuck in the cage. However, playing with her light spell and seeing how it interacts with the repeating patterns within the falling snowflakes, and how that pattern is mirrored in the stars overhead, Luz figures out another arcane glyph. This one for cryokinesis.

She icebends herself free, helps the others out of a hard spot in turn, and then they manage to collectively stun the monster and escape. And everyone forgives Luz since she's learned a valuable lesson now. Also, look at how quirky she is, talking to her hands like that, you can't hold this stuff against her uwu.

Yeah. So. Here's the thing.

Luz is an impulsive 13 year old space case. It's believable that she'd do this. It doesn't assassinate her character or the like. But, it does mean that she is an extremely flawed character, and that those flaws have weight and consequences to them. The story treating her actions here so lightly here, and all the other characters brushing them off so quickly without Luz having to show any serious contrition or demonstrations of having learned better? That bothers me. In large part because, like I said, these shows all KEPT DOING THIS with their precocious pre/teen characters, over and over again.

It kind of reinforces the issue I had with the pilot. Luz isn't just a misunderstood free spirit. She's dangerously self-absorbed, reckless, and oblivious to boundaries. These aren't unforgivable flaws, but the story barely seems to realize that they're flaws in the first place, or that Luz really needs to get serious about becoming better than this. Like, ARE we supposed to agree with the human school principle from the pilot? DOES Luz need to be separated from her peers for their safety until she develops some basic self-awareness? It seems to me like she does, but I don't think the show intended that.

Also there's a B-plot about King doing existential horror with his stuffed animals. Eh, okay. Not a great episode, even if it had some great stuff in it.


Next time, more Owl House.