The Owl House S2E10: "Yesterday's Lie" (continued more)

Camila doesn't respond to Luz's confession the way I'd have expected her to. There's a lot of subtext in how she plays this, but I wish at least a little bit more of it was text.

Outwardly, she reacts to Luz's story like it's some elaborate game of pretend that she's playing. And...she actually seems to be happy to hear this, and seems almost eager to play along.

Like I said, I wish there was either more delving into this now, or that there had been a bit more foreshadowing for it earlier in the episode. Like, I *think* Camila's reaction here is supposed to be one of relief. We know she's starting to be sort of quietly disturbed by Vee's behavior, and maybe she sees this outburst of imagination from Luz as a sign that the camp didn't completely kill her daughter's personality. Or else, maybe she thinks that Luz was scared into keeping anything atypical about herself away from her mother's eyes after the camp, and now she's interpreting this as a sign of trust and forgiveness (and also confirmation that Luz still has her imagination and interests, but that she's just learned to switch it off when it isn't socially appropriate, which is probably the outcome she'd been really hoping for).

We'll see if it comes out in a cathartic release when she finds out that Luz is being serious.

...

Also, since Luz is using Camila's cell phone screen to talk to her, Camila thinks that it's just a videocall. But...there's no UI. And she not only didn't answer the phone, but it never rang in the first place. And, uh, shouldn't the background still be visible behind Luz's reflection-image?

It makes sense to me that Camila's mind would paper over these individually small impossibilities. But even so, shouldn't Luz point them out when it's clear Camila doesn't believe her?

Eh, I guess she's enough of a spaz to not think of that at the moment, especially preoccupied as she is. Not out of character for Luz now that I think about it more, heh.

...

Anyway, Camila arrives at the town historical society right after sunset, and...okay, her reactions are starting to get a little harder for me to rationalize.

She comes into the front room, and finds this strange (she explicitly hasn't met him before) adult man frantically rummaging around like a tweaker through this box of really dangerous-looking sharp objects. He doesn't introduce himself. Doesn't say how he knows Luz, or why he'd be giving the town history museum over to some silly demon-hunting roleplay with her and her mom. She doesn't ask him why she didn't get a call about this much earlier in the day, either from him or from Luz herself.

I get that she really wants to believe that this is confirmation that all her worries about Luz were unfounded, but even so, and even with the usual allowances I'd normally make for exaggerated gullibility of cartoon characters in these types of situations, I think this is making Camila look worse than the show wants her to look.

She does start to get visibly uncomfortable as the guy unabatedly acts like a total freak. His freakishness is pretty great, too. My favorite bit is when - after deciding she must be a federal agent sent in response to his highly credible request for one in the email he just sent to whitehouse.gov - he makes her record a verbal promise that he'll get to publish the dissection (if they sent a veterinary doctor to him, then *obviously* they want to do the dissection right here at his place) on his YouTube channel before the government releases anything. And thinks that the voice recording of her saying "uh...sure?" is legally binding.

Because of course he's a sovcit lmao.

Camila, for her part, comforts herself by fake-smiling down at her phone and telling Luz she's flattered that she and her friends even worked Camila into their game. Luz apparently doesn't answer, but uh...she's probably starting to worry that she's just gotten her mom murdered.

Camila manages to keep herself mostly convinced that this is a surprise LARP that her daughter, some friends, and this creepy adult man who she's never mentioned before have put together, as he gives her a full rundown of his investigations up to this point. I'll give the show full marks here for capturing both the nature of superstition in general, and the process of conspiratorial radicalization in the modern world specifically (technically, some of this also happened in his earlier villain ranting to Vee, but this bit makes it more complete). It started when he happened to spy Eda in her owlbear form some time ago; presumably, she had one of her attacks while she was earthside. He knew what he saw, and thanks to his work as a local historian he knew that the town had a long history of witch-panics and alleged monster sightings (I'm guessing we're supposed to be somewhere in New England, from this and other context clues). For want of any other source of answers, he started scouring internet conspiracy and paranormal believer communities, and eventually became what he is today.

It's pretty good. Start with an unanswered question, one framed by fear and frustration. Go looking for answers in an environment full of grifters, fascists, and fascist grifters. Following their lead, and using his pile of anecdota, he's free to build whatever narrative his personal biases and the people who he finds most impressive on teh interweb lead him to wanting to build.

Obsession leads to isolation from the people around him, which in turn makes him retreat deeper into his carefully curated bubble of online weirdos. And, in that environment, the most successful and respected people are the ones with the big YouTube channels, making them the most obvious role models.

There are so goddamned many of this fucking guy. This guy might actually be a major contributing factor to the threat of human extinction.

So, well done on that front show. Especially how you managed to keep it generic enough and avoided explicitly saying any political buzzwords that would have brought down the wrath of the mouse, while still getting the message across so clearly.

Anyway, while rambling at Camila, he also gives us some of those local historical anecdota that might actually mean something. Apparently, back when the town was a fledgeling colony in the late 1600's, there was a major fire that was blamed on witches. In the wake of the event, two of the settlers - a pair of brothers - made contact with someone who they believed to be a witch, and subsequently vanished off the face of the Earth.

I...thiiiiink Wittebane might have mentioned a brother, in his first journal entry? Okay, I'm going to go back to "Mirror Ruins" and check, actually.

...Okay, checked now, and no brother is mentioned. These two brothers might have included Phillip/Belos, or they might have been unrelated.

Well, regardless! This region of New England has been a hotspot for Demon Realm crossovers for a long time. Why that might be...well, the most obvious explanation that comes to mind is actually a fairly mundane one as these things go.

If you'll permit me to geek out even beyond my usual parameters for a bit...

...

We don't know how big the Boiling Isles are, exactly. The titan's knee is tall enough to have snow on top of it despite being above a boiling sea, but there might be weird atmospheric factors at play here that reduce the necessary altitude for that (I don't *think* the knee is supposed to be taller than, eg, Mars' Olympus Mons). Even if it beats Mount Everest at 8.8 km apex, it might not be that huge as overland distances are measured.

Given the Titan's roughly humanlike proportions, it's possible that the Boiling Isles are less than 60 km from head to toe. And since it's islands, plural, with parts of the body submerged, and not all regions of it are habitable, the actual witch civilization could be concentrated in a couple hundred square kilometers. That's still plenty of space for the multiple large towns and fortresses we've seen in the series.

So. If physical distance on either world corresponds to its counterpart, the region of Earth that the Boiling Islands civilization overlaps with could be a pretty small one. And, since towns in the United States are pretty spread out, it's conceivable that there are only one or two of them in the equivalent area.

...or else the titanblood that powers the key used for all portals seen so far just happens to have locked onto a particular part of Earth. That might be a simpler explanation lol.

...

Camila's wilful disbelief lasts until he shows her the restrained Vee.

Especially when the basilisk moves in her cage in a way that an animatronic or a puppet never could.

Camila finally starts actually listening to what Luz's cell phone reflection tells her. And...she takes it surprisingly well, all things considered. There's a moment of shock and horror when she realizes that she's been living with a shapeshifting monster instead of her own daughter for the past several months, but it passes remarkably quickly. Which is good, because the guy now has a scalpel all picked out to start the dissection with.

The fact that Camila is a veterinarian (oh, heh, in retrospect that actually further explains her reaction to the rabbit traps earlier) is probably helping here. She's used to empathizing with things that don't look human. And doesn't like to see them get hurt, which Inquisitor InfoWars over here is very clearly planning to do. When Camila can't talk him down, she resorts to just blowing up on him for everything he's apparently been doing (including setting illegal game traps on her private property. You'd think he of all people would be respectful of property rights lmao). And then beating him unconscious with a shoe.

It's less impressive when you consider that he'd just finished putting on this ridiculous cosplay armor suit and could barely move at the time.

But still, even taking that into account, this is a younger and bulkier man she just beat down. Camila's pretty damned tough.

She frees Vee from the cage, and leads her outside to WAIT HOLY SHIT CAMILA.

Vee asks him if it's really okay to just leave him in there. Camila assures her that he'll be fine, he needs some time for self-reflection anyway, and then changes the subject.

....bruhhhhhh.

That guy seemingly is running the historical society center by himself. It could conceivably be a long time before anyone goes in there looking for him. And also, the guy is obviously dangerous, knows where Camila and her daughter and/or Vee live, and now has a grudge, and holding illegal game traps over him isn't much of a deterrent in light of how unhinged he is. Camila seems like the type who would understand all this, and who would act accordingly.

So, yeah. I don't think he's ever leaving that building.

If we end up seeing Inquisitor InfoWars again, I'll take that back. Looking at the situation and thinking through the likely consequences, though, I really do think Camila might have straight up murdered this dude. Either leaving him there to starve or (more likely, and more mercifully) coming back to finish him off and hide the body under the floorboards or something.

Like I said. We'll see. If he doesn't reappear though, then damn. I wouldn't blame Camila in that instance, to be clear. I would probably end up deciding I had to do the same myself in her place. But still, daaaaamn.

As Camila brings Vee back home, it starts raining, which allows Luz to projecWAIT A MINUTE IS THAT A JOJO REFERENCE?

Oh my god I think that might actually be a jojo reference hahahahaha holy shit.

At Hanged Man Luz's instructions, Camila feeds Vee some cards she took from the museum, giving her enough juice to take Luz's form again. Camila agrees to let Vee continue living with her until Luz can finish a fully functional portal, and will go along with the ruse in public. Camila finally has her tearful breakdown now that the danger is passed, telling Luz how frightened and confused she is, how much emotional trauma she's been barely managing to keep a lid on since finding out her daughter hasn't actually been her daughter for the last several months, etc. And then, Luz lets slip that her decision to flee to the demon realm was initially a choice that she made, even if circumstances beyond her control have since prevented her return.

And...Camila starts to blow up at her. Starts to ask her if she really hated living with her mother that much, that she would run away from home. But...her voice cracks midsentence, as she realizes that Luz didn't run away from home at all. She ran away from juvie, after being sent away from home. Luz didn't reject her mother; her mother rejected her.

Well, sort of. The school pretty much twisted Camila's arm into it. Now that we've seen more of who Camila is, it's pretty clear that she's not all that conventional, and doesn't really care about conventions that much. If anything, Luz's problems might in part come from trying to be like her mother without first developing the maturity and restraint necessary to do so without being a menace to those around her.

...

Which, again, brings me back to my mixed feelings about the pilot and how they frame Luz and the human world's treatment of her ever since then.

I'll talk more about this at the end.

...

Before the exchange can go too indepth, unfortunately, the portal starts to become unstable, and Eda, Hooty, and King have to pull Luz back out. Luz just barely has time to say goodbye and promise her mother she'll come back and never leave her again - and for Camila to apologize for pushing her daughter away - before the Hanged Man winks out and Luz exits the portal seconds before it violently self-destructs.

Looks like they're going to need more titanblood.

The final shot, after Luz and the others congratulate each other on the partial success, make sure Luz was able to tell her mother what she needed to tell her, and start making plans for the next portal experiment, has Luz looking away from them and doing this:

Vee didn't end up turning on her, in the end. However, the points she made when it seemed like she was going to turn on her were inarguably correct.

Luz didn't have a good reason to do what she did. She didn't have a good reason to lie to her mother. Now her mother has to cope with the trauma and paranoia that taking care of Vee has left her with - while also having to continue taking care of Vee - and keep worrying about her daughter, and coping with the guilt she must be feeling for trying to send Luz to that camp...all because Luz did what she did on a whim.

It's actually very important that we now learn that Camila was about to come back out of the house and offer to drive Luz to the camp herself. That she realized she was being too harsh and cold in complying with society's demands here, and wanted to make sure Luz understood why she had to comply with them despite really not wanting to.

The fact that Vee was so eager, so willing, to do whatever she thought those social expectations were - overshooting them and weirding Camila out in the process, when she threw the old toys and pictures away - in order to safeguard her new status quo also helps drive the point home. Vee might have thrown away some memorabilia, but Luz threw away the life that they symbolised. And I don't just mean that she chose to hide out in another dimension for a couple of months instead of going to that camp. I mean when she decided to bring a bunch of fireworks and biting snakes to school. Luz has seen REAL persecution of REAL innocent victims now, and people like Vee would give absolutely anything for the chances that Luz squandered.

Society wasn't actually at fault for Luz's situation there. She was. The school wasn't being intolerant. Luz was being intolerable.

And now, as always, her mother suffers for it. The probably-about-to-die Inquisitor InfoWars isn't the only one who needs to do some self-reflection.


That guy really was a strong foil to Luz, the more that I think about it. Not caring how his escape into fantasy - harmless on its own - makes him unpleasant to innocent Starbucks employees and dangerous to innocent basilisks. The paraphernalia-hoarding. The self-righteousness. The impulsiveness.

...his little private fortress far from anyone else where he hoards weird junk and spies on the surrounding community via hidden cameras also makes him a parallel to Eda, come to think of it.

And that, I think, brings me to why this show is about witches and witch-hunters.

For all that Inquisitor InfoWars fancied himself an early modern witch-hunter remade for the information age, his lifestyle, reputation, and interests are much closer to those of an actual witch (all the way down to kidnapping children). The posthumans of the Boiling Islands might be literal witches, but conceptually, thematically, sociologically, they have their own witch-hunters and their own witches to hunt. And, I mean, Luz. Weird girl who isn't like the others. Causes misfortune to the people around her. Singled out and sent to a reformatory in a form of (deserved or otherwise) persecution.

When I rewatched the ending of "Mirror Ruins" just now, I was struck again by how negative Philip Wittebane's perception of the Boiling Isles was. He describes it (at least in his first couple of entries) as a horrible place, benighted and plagued, a hell which he is determined to escape. Not too surprising for a 1600's Puritan, they were kinda infamous for their antipathy toward anything foreign and anything magical to more or less equal degrees. And yet, somehow, in the time since then, he's ended up ruling the realm that he hates so much. Like believing that witches and demons are a threat to humanity, but also wanting to exploit them for YouTube stardom instead of fighting back as efficiently as possible. And both of these men ended up becoming very witchlike themselves, in different ways.

Lilith turning her sister into a shunned monster to get ahead. And then feeling sorry about it, while nonetheless leading the hunt for people like her and reaping the social and professional proceeds of that hunt. Just, like, sadly reaping it.

Misfits and the persecution thereof. The harms caused by not fitting in, the harms caused by *reactions to* people not fitting in, and the weird opportunism and social zero-sum competition that these dynamics create for people who exist on the margins. That's the main theme of The Owl House. And...while I still am not sure it quite understands how much of a genuine problem Luz actually was in the pilot, I'm starting to believe that it's at least more aware of it than I initially thought.

I don't know what the thesis statement is yet, or even if it has one. So far, the show's left room for a lot of nuance, showing us weirdo outsiders who are unjustly persecuted, weirdo outsiders who are justly persecuted, the social insider counterparts to both, and how organizations twist themselves into pretzels around all of the above.

That said...through this lens, sending Luz to an obvious parody of gay conversion camps is a really, really bad misstep. This is why I said that I'm still not sure how much of my reading is intended by the show and how much of it isn't. There are PARTS of Luz's story that are really strongly telegraphed as her being the innocent victim of an intolerant, oppressive society in ways that *aren't* rugpulled by the reframing here in "Yesterday's Lie."

So yeah. I dunno.

As for this episode on its own? I think I can encapsulate all of its merits and all of its flaws in the sentence "This needed to be a two-parter." There's an incredibly wealth of subtext crammed into just a few frames' worth of Camila's body language and a few words' worth of voice tone. And a whole other incredible wealth of subtext in Luz's reactions to what she's seeing and hearing. There's so little actual text for this stuff, though, and they could be explored in so much more depth and fleshed out in so much more humanizing detail if only there was time to do it in.

Likewise, the incredibly imaginative and well-drawn liminal realm that Luz spends twenty seconds exploring before the Earth stuff starts. Likewise, the villain having to talk really fast in really inappropriate situations in order for us to get enough detail to figure out his deal. The final dialogue between Luz and Camila is cut so short that it feels almost more like a copout than an intentionally tragic writing choice. Vee having so little to say when she gets captured and tells Luz to leave her alone, after having just gone on a tirade about her will to live freely.

Everything good about this episode (and there is a LOT of good stuff in it) would be made even better by it having 22 more minutes' worth of space. Everything bad about this episode...really only exists because of the overcompression. They could have probably made a movie out of this episode's plot without it dragging.