The Owl House S2E20-21: "Clouds on the Horizon" and "King's Tide"

Good god did the show need another dozen episodes before this two-parter. I almost feel bad just watching it, let alone critiquing it. It's kind of weird that I'm saying that, though, because it's not even bad. It's just so much less good than I know it could and should have been, and was clearly trying to be.

Also, holy shit does the Fullmetal Alchemist inspiration keep getting less subtle with every passing one of these final episodes lol.

At the beginning of "Clouds on the Horizon," the CAT leaders come up with a plan to sabotage the Day of Unity. Since the spell requires a rare solar eclipse, they'll only need to fuck things up for long enough that the opportunity is missed. After that, all the egg on Wittebane's face when his big ritual doesn't do anything will combine with the corner-cutting and can-kicking that his regime has been doing in recent years, and his empire is all but guaranteed to tear itself apart even without further action from CAT.

It helps that Belos is quite a bit less personally powerful than Father, so they can just kick over the big ritual and rest assured that the genocide will have been prevented. No need to worry about a temper-tantruming demigod killing everyone anyway out of spite. Makes this whole thing much easier.

The first proposed idea, courtesy of Eda, is to abduct or assassinate some of the coven heads. They apparently play a central role in linking all of the rune-marked witches to the big life-draining spell that will use their own sealed-up magic to kill them. The insiders ixnae that, though; Wittebane has foreseen this possibility, and has second and third in commands of each coven already drilled on what to do if they need to step up at the last minute. Darius, predictably, wants to just start blowing things up and releasing deadly creatures around the Titan's Head to chase everyone out of position and make civilians flee the ritual area until the eclipse is over; the casualties will still be worth it, no one important is likely to die from this. Heh, like I said, I appreciate that Darius didn't stop being a bad guy just because he doesn't want his people to get exterminated. In the end, the idea that they go with is an elegantly simple one. In the current advanced state of her owlbeast-possession, Eda's magic is not only corrupted, but also corrupts any group spells that she tries to participate in. So, if they can get her into the middle of the transmutation array in place of one of the coven heads, marked and sealed the way that coven head should be marked and sealed, her curse will corrupt the spell, and the other participants probably won't realize there's anything wrong until it's too late.

I, uh...honestly, I feel like this plan is at least as reckless as Darius'. Haven't we seen Eda's spell corruption cause things to randomly wilt and explode and the like? Who's to say that a corrupted version of this life-draining spell won't kill everyone just as efficiently as a proper version, just in a different way? It's not like Eda or the others understand the curse very well, or have a proven track record of predicting how it will interact with things. Eh, whatever.

Also, Luz apparently finished carving her palisman overnight. She decided to just carve an egg, and let it hatch into whatever form it chooses. Or stay an egg forever, if it prefers.

Do palismen work like that? Maybe they do. Eda just accepts it in stride, so I guess that means that Luz probably isn't completely off-base at least.

For the bulk of "Clouds on the Horizon," we split our attention between the infiltration plot going off suspiciously well on one hand, and Luz, Willow, and Gus doing a very low-stakes rescue of Amity from being grounded at her parents' house on the other. The latter DOES end up being critical, but only toward the end of the episode, and until then it's just Luz spinning her wheels trying to feel useful while the grown-ups do the actual plot.

...

If this show had a cleaner track record, I wouldn't have doubted that Luz's mission would end up being crucial, and it wouldn't have bored me until that point. "The Owl House" has a less than perfect history with its b-plots, though, so I didn't have enough faith in it to not be a little frustrated at first.

...

Long story short, Eda uses one of those impersonation charms that we've seen the Illusionists use throughout the series to take the place of Raine Whispers, and - in a fairly nail-biting conclusion to part of her character arc - accepts the brand of the Illusionists' Coven.

All of her magic save illusionism is now sealed away and unusable. Not that she could use nearly any of it anyway at this point, but still, this was always a big personal identity signifier for Eda. It's not likely that she'll be able to get that owlbear out of her soul before the end of her life, but it is possible, and if she does then she still won't get most of her powers back when she does it. So, while she tries to put on a brave face and pass this sacrifice off as no big deal, the severity of it for her can't really be hidden.

So, a disguised and coven-marked Eda switches places with Raine, while the real Raine hides invisibly nearby. The Illusion and Abomination coven-masters are meant to stand side-by-side during the ritual, so Eda will have Darius right next to her to help cover for any slip-ups. The biggest weakness of their plan is that the illusion doesn't disguise Eda's voice, just her appearance, so she needs to keep her mouth shut and lean into Raine's recent illness to explain why they're not talking.

The twist is that Wittebane already - through unspecified means, but with the sheer amount of resources at his disposal and the haste with which CAT threw their organization together I can readily accept that he could manage this - learned of the plot, and has the other coven-heads primed to counteract it. The only reason he ends up losing is because Luz, King, and the other kids get caught breaking into the Blight residence while Amity's mother is having a business-related meeting with a certain imperial official, and dumb stupid idiot Kikimora can't keep her mouth shut when she has an opportunity to gloat.

This confrontation actually comes at the end of a weird little side-plot about the gang trying to sabotage the Blights' production of souped-up war abominations for the Imperial Coven (I guess they're hoping to make the "empire tears itself apart" part of the plan a little less painful?). Which in turn gets into the decaying marriage between the Blights' meek, technically-gifted father and their domineering corpo-fascist mother. It's a whole thing that kinda just takes up space without really going anywhere.

Also, um. There's this weird, halfhearted...thing?...where the show suggests that some of Belos' top people are in on the true nature of the "unification" spell, and think that they'll be spared and rewarded after the fact while everyone else dies. I think this is another FMA-ism, but it makes infinitely less sense here than it did in FMA (for more reasons than I can even start getting into with this wordcount). And it's also not applied consistently. Like, there's this one scene that reveals that Amity's mom knows the truth, and then another scene a bit later acknowledges this and has the characters imply that Wittebane's other elite supporters are in on it too, but then this never gets referred to again for the rest of the two-parter. During the scenes with Eda, Darius, and the other coven-heads, it seems to be outright forgotten about, as the good guys resort to trying to convince the others of the truth after they get caught, and are silenced with a "we don't believe you" rather than a "we already know."

The show forgets about this as soon as it establishes it, so I guess I'll just be happy to do the same myself lol. And, on the bright side, this subplot DOES also give us a Luz-Amity kiss. Like, full on Frenching. You can't see the tonguework, but it's pretty clearly happening.

Disney might have been fuming, but still. We've objectively come along way since Korra and Asami had to just suggestively hold hands during the final shot.

Anyway, dumb moron Kikimora lets slip that Eda and Raine are walking into an ambush, and then nabs Hunter to bring back to Belos and collect the reward. Erm...isn't there also a reward for catching Luz? We saw fresh wanted posters a couple episodes ago. Hunter is obviously more important, but still, why would Kikimora only take one of them when she could have just as easily nabbed both? Eh, whatever. She tries to grab Hunter, but Luz manages to disguise herself as him and Hunter as her so that Kikimora drags her off instead. Belos hopefully won't be expecting this, and Luz with a generous supply of glyph-papers can cause a lot more trouble than an unarmed Hunter.

Which, um, again. Since this is apparently something that the plot depends on now. So. Why didn't she arrest both of them?

While all this is going on, we occasionally cut to Wittebane in his sanctum, conspiring with the Collector. Their relationship shows some further nuances. Specifically, one of the two is screwing the other over, and it's not the Collector doing the shenanigans.

Apparently, the partnership between the two has the Collector granting Phillip powerful magic above and beyond what he can do with glyphs alone, as well as the knowledge of how to arrange big stunts like this genocide spell. In essence, Philip has been telling the truth about being empowered by a god, just a different one than everyone thinks. In exchange for all this, the Collector has been given Philip's promise that he will release him from his imprisonment as soon as his work on the Boiling Isles is complete.

How does the Collector know that Wittebane is good for this? Well, he made him pinkie-swear. There's no going back on a pinkie-swear. Everyone knows that.

...

So, yeah, the Collector isn't just childlike, or childish. My hunch was correct; he's a literal child of his species, just like King. Collectors just get their godly powers a little earlier in development than titans do, I suppose.

Likewise, the Collector really doesn't seem to understand the consequences of his actions anymore than he understands that he's being played. Regardless of who the good guys and the bad guys were in the implied prehistoric titan-collector war, this specific Collector is clearly an innocent child. Perhaps a traumatized, half-maddened child after his long imprisonment, but no less innocent for that.

Watching a predatory adult take advantage of him and play on his bright-eyed childish hope and trust is pretty effectively disgusting. The show gets this across really well. Like, Belos was a perfectly effective and hateable villain up until now, but it's not until you see him essentially torturing a young child who trusts him that he comes across as downright vile.

...hmm. Back on the titan-collector war note, it seems like both species might have been gunning for each other's children. The Collector is imprisoned inside the skull of King Senior, in a manner that suggests the titan might have basically eaten him. In turn, King Senior is heavily implied to have died defending his son's nursery-tower, and the "Huntsman" cultists believe - perhaps accurately - that their gods want baby titans found and sacrificed. Yeah. Not nice people on either side of the conflict, from the looks of it. "Just a normal guy" might have been giving these god-creatures more charity than they deserve.

...

"King's Tide" has the trap sprung. The emperor makes a last minute change to how the coven-heads will be positioned during the ritual, and then has them pounce on "Raine." Wittebane didn't actually know that Darius was a traitor too, but he kind of suspected.

Eda and Darius put up a fight, but surrounded and outnumbered they don't last long. Raine, meanwhile, is grabbed by other imperial agents in their nearby hiding place.

The eclipse begins. The spell is cast. The marked witches and demons all start dying. It's a pretty slow death, surprisingly. It leaves them somewhat able-bodied for a good few minutes. But still, they WILL die by the end of the eclipse. It keeps going even as the coven-heads and those around them succumb and start to collapse on the ground.

It's all on Luz now. Conveniently, she's just been brought to Belos, in the guise of Hunter.

For his own part, after getting the draining spell started, Phillip Wittebane has changed out of his royal regalia and into a 1700's style Anglo-American dress suit. With the witches mostly eradicated (or...maybe? We don't know how many other witch civilizations there are on other titan-corpses. There's at least one other, and Phillip has to at least suspect this...), he's preparing to return home and declare mission accomplished. And, of course, he's not letting the Collector free.

He makes a point of throwing the little disc-thingy that the Collector is sealed in down into a pit with the skeletons of a bunch of long-dead Hunter clones. Just to make sure no one else finds it and bargains for magical powers on par with Phillip's.

The Collector screaming in despair at the prospect of enduring yet more millennia of loneliness and isolation all the way down.

Anyway, Kikimora brings the disguised Luz to Phillip just before she too starts being effected by the draining spell. Wittebane sees through Luz's disguise easily enough. There have been enough impersonation shenanigans going on today that he's started to expect it, and - like with Eda's impersonation of Raine - Luz doesn't have a way of disguising her voice, so it's easy enough for Phillip to test. They have a rematch of their duel from the end of season one, and Luz lasts quite a bit longer this time. Wittebane even openly admits that Luz has learned glyph magic much faster than he did himself, and claims that her raw potential skill is probably greater than his own.

...

Tellingly, it doesn't occur to him that Luz might have also had the advantage of teachers and colleagues rather than spending painstaking years doing it all herself. Because why would a person trust anyone else with a new power that they'd discovered?

It also doesn't occur to him that some witches, like Eda, might retain ancestral knowledge of glyph magic even if most witches have forgotten it. Presumably because he doesn't want to give his enemies that much credit, or entertain the possibility that his own power isn't as special or unique as he initially thought.

This, in turn, probably ties into whatever mental gymnastics this man has been performing to redefine "witch" in a way that includes all other magic users but not himself.

...

However, at the end of the day, Wittebane has literal centuries of experience with this, plus whatever extra bullshit the Collector gave him. Luz might have higher natural aptitude and greater potential than him, but he's just too damned practiced. She lasts longer than last time, but he knows all along that he'll win eventually, and he's right.

So, Luz does a final ploy. It's similar to the one she used on him last time. He expects her to do something similar to what she did last time. But, she still manages to pull it over on him. She distracts him for a moment by offering to be his guide to modern Earth and help him integrate back into human society, if he'll just spare her unmarked friends from a slow, sad death of starvation by bringing them all through the portal too. Phillip realizes that, yes, that actually IS a part of his plan that he was less than confident about, and Luz's offer makes sense as a last ditch capitulation from her.

She also, channelling a bit of what she learned about Phillip's type from his modern-day counterpart in "Yesterday's Lie," points out that he'll need living proof of the demon world's existence if he wants any credit for crushing it. So, saving a few witch-children and bringing them back to Earth as prisoners of war is in his interest, and Luz prefers that to them all being killed. Again, makes sense.

But, she was just trying to get close enough to him to stick him with the rune-brand she'd picked up and was invisibly holding.

Now he's got to turn off the life-draining spell, or he'll die along with all the others.

It was a good plan on Luz's part. A great plan, even. Simple. Clever. Karmic. There was just one tragic flaw in it, and one which she couldn't possibly have accounted for.

Once the life-draining spell has started, Phillip doesn't know how to turn it off.

The final battle as Wittebane loses control and reverts to his warped, semiliquid palistrom-mutant form is a miserable one. He's just lashing out in rage, no hope left for his own survival, determined only to take Luz down with him. Luz, joined by her friends who have been slowly making their way up here while the adults all started panicking and/or collapsing, are just trying to save their own lives; they have no hope left for their parents, friends, and the Boiling Isles civilization in general. For a little while, it looks like an "everyone loses, some people just lose more" ending.

Except for King and the Collector.

Following the others up to the skull, King happens to find a dying Kikimora. Who tells him that she saw Belos throw the Collector's disc into a certain pit. All those betrayals finally catching up to Phillip; he really had been planning on there not being any baggage left to deal with by this point. So, King scampers down there, and eagerly offers the Collector his freedom in exchange for reversing the genocide spell.

The Collector isn't in a great mood right now, to put it mildly. And not disposed to trust offers. And also recognizes King as a member of the same species as "that bully who ate me" (looks like I was right on point with that inference). But, King proves he's good for it by making a leap of faith and a show of trust and freeing the Collector first, without any way of ensuring he'll help him in turn.

Apparently, it's very easy for a titan to free him. Belos would have needed a titansblood-powered contraption to do this, had his intentions been genuine. King just needs to reach his hand into the disc and literally pull the Collector out.

He turns out to be a lot more humanlike than I expected, once he can manifest physically.

Now I'm starting to wonder if the collectors are a cosmic progenitor or something. Humanity created in their image. Maybe they're the gods of the universe that contains Earth, just as the titans are gods of the demon world's realm? That would be some crazy shit.

Anyway, Belos gets the most anticlimactic villain death ever, as the Collector's first act after being freed is to literally smear him across the cavern wall. I'm pretty sure he'll be back in some form in the season 3 miniseries, because otherwise that's some seriously jarring BBEG death. As for his next act, well...

The Collector is still too sulky to save everyone though. So, King - picking up on the Collector's boredom and desire for friends to play with, gleaned both now and from the dream visions - convinces him that he has a game in mind, but with the draining spell in effect they're not going to have enough players. So, he turns the spell off.

By altering the position of this planet's moon.

He then proceeds to alter the geography of the Boiling Isles to better suit his idea of a perfect game-playing environment.

King has to literally blast Luz and the witch-children back through the portal to Earth to save them from the collapsing rubble that was once his own father's petrified skull. He knows there's no going through with them, though. The Collector wants to play with him, and who even knows what he'll do if King doesn't play back.

The fate of literally everyone else on the Boiling Isles? Unknown.

As they fly through the portal, some of the goo that used to be Phillip drips with apparent purpose down onto Hunter's clothes, unnoticed. I'm guessing his survival will take the form of possessing Hunter's body or something. Well, anyway, Luz, Gus, Willow, Amity, Hunter, and probably-Phillip go flying through the portal, which runs out of titanblood fuel and closes behind them.

I assume King could use a little of his own blood to open it again, but only if the Collector lets him. And, like. Doesn't smash the portal apart without noticing or caring.

Season two of "The Owl House" ends with Luz and her Boiling Isles peers knocking on the door of her mother's house. Unsure if there's anyone left alive in the world behind them. Unsure of what to do now. Unsure if they'll ever hear anything more from the other side. And also one of them is probably possessed by Belos.


Talk about a cliffhanger jesus fuck.

Anyway. Very rushed. Very compressed. But the quality of the plotting shines through. Even if it's a little too derivative at points, there's enough original twists and surprises to make up for that. I wish I could have seen the version of this story that the creators intended to make, but even this version of it is pretty intense.

Yeah. No idea what the hell is supposed to happen in season 3.

What a ride.