The Owl House S2E1-3: "Separate Tides," "Escaping Expulsion," and "Echoes of the Past"

Season two, episode three, is a game changer of an episode. And also, arguably, as big of a genre-changer as the season one finale. "Echoes of the Past" calls back to details that were established but then never touched on again since the pilot, and pulls on those strings to bring the entire series into a new motion.

It's also one of the best episodes I've seen so far purely on its own merits, just as a standalone 22 minute story.

Now that Lilith is living in the owl house, her presence is shaking up the social dynamics of their little group. For instance, Lilith is apparently the only person in the universe who doesn't find Hooty the house-demon annoying, and he's been much happier since she moved in. She also is proving a surprisingly enthusiastic student of glyph-magic, quickly mastering the spells that Luz discovered and helping to improve on them much faster than Eda has been doing. However, there's also plenty of friction (obviously), and one minor recurring issue has been her lack of patience for King. Luz has been easing up a bit on the childish shenanigans since the end of season one, but King hasn't, and Lilith just does not into kiddy shit.

The catalyst for "Echoes of the Past" comes when King makes one of his frequent boasts about being the king of all demons, seeking to restore his original form and power so that he can bring this world under his heel once again. Lilith, who isn't willing to humor such fantasies, laughs in his face about how demonkind has *never* been organized under a single leader, and their social structure is such that even the suggestion that they could have anything like a kingdom of their own is preposterous. This motivates King to bring her (and Luz, who offers to come along) to the place here Eda originally found him, where the proof of his claims should be self-evidence.

Lilith starts getting a little less dismissive when King guides them to an island some distance from the Boiling Isles chain that isn't on any maps. That *shouldn't* be on any maps; this region of sea has been surveyed, and the island wasn't here at the time. It apparently appears and disappears out of the steam banks as it wills.

Lilith still doesn't believe that there was ever a demon king, much less that King was him. But she definitely believes that there's *something* worth looking into in King's origins.

King leads them to the broken-roofed tower at the center of the island, which proves to be some sort of tomb or temple. Lilith eagerly confirms that its construction predates that of any known Boiling Islands civilization, and that some of the symbols engraved and painted on it appear to be precursors to known ones (while others are wholly unfamiliar). Wall murals depict a monstrous being that seems to bare a passing resemblance to King doing godly deeds and fighting godly enemies.

King claims that - while his personal memories of the depicted events are hazy - he knows that his legions of worshippers created these artworks of them out of fear and respect. He goes on to say that his last memories of his original self - or perhaps, the first memories of his weakened, amnesic incarnation - are of a fall from a great height, and a mighty roaring sound.

It occurs to Luz that the fall he remembers may be related to this tower's broken top...but before they can do much more investigating, an ancient construct reawakens and begins attacking them. It's not especially big or powerful, but it's extraordinarily resilient, and it doesn't give up no matter what they throw at it.

The main chamber is, incidentally, filled with rubble-piles arranged in a crude likeness of the construct. Seeming to postdate the building's fall to disrepair..

They get a brief respite from the construct when Eda shows up and helps them fend it off, and they eventually manage to escape the building, which the construct isn't able to leave. It turns out that Eda had been following them to warn them not to go here, both because of the troublesome guardian and because she wanted to protect King from an unpleasant truth.

Eight years ago, Eda took refuge from a boiling rainstorm on this island that appeared out of nowhere. She found a friendly stray demon-cat-thing in the ruins, and was subsequently attacked by the guardian construct, from which she rescued the creature. When she brought him home and saw how he played with the toys she gave him, she pretended he was the "king" of a little kingdom, and joked about how his occasional violent toy-throwing tantrums were him terrorizing disloyal subjects and the like. It was only after this that King started saying his first words, and she realized he was closer to person than animal.

So. Everything about him being a dread king of demonkind? False memories that Eda accidentally gave him by playing with him early on. She never had the heart to tell him afterward, largely for fear of what removing that pillar of his identity might do to him. The fact that she only realized how much closer he was to "child" than "pet" over time made it harder for her to course-correct.

Well, if King *is* to be treated like a person, then his wishes to brave the dangers and go back into the tower to look for more clues about his true nature must be respected. They return, evade the construct again, and follow Luz's hunch to explore the top area of the tower where King might have fallen from (his one early memory that *doesn't* appear to have come from playing with Eda). They find a hidden room, whose door only reveals itself when King comes close. And, inside that room, they find the fragments of the egg that King hatched out of.

His memory is jogged. He remembers the roar he heard when he was first born from his egg, and he remembers knowing - instinctively - that the roar was his father, and that its meaning was "son." He also remembered the tower shaking with a violent impact, and the construct grabbing him and protecting him as he fell, cushioning his landing at the bottom.

When that construct catches up to them again, King orders it to stand down. It obeys.

This whole time, in Eda's original visit to the tower and in both subsequent ones, the construct had been trying to protect its charge from perceived intruders.

In King's earliest days, before he had anyone to teach him language and before he developed the capacity for longterm memory, the construct tended to his physical needs. The crude rubble models of the construct littering the floor below are the work of a baby stacking the only toys he had into the shape of the only other thing he knew.

King might not have ever been a demon king. But he is clearly the child of someone immensely powerful and wealthy, to the point where monarchy may not be far off. And, with Lilith's observations about the age of this structure and the ancestral nature of its markings to those of the Boiling Isles' earliest written languages, there's something else that becomes apparent as well. Something truly wild.

There's no sense of scale in the stylized drawings on the walls, so it's hard to tell how big the vaguely King-like creature is supposed to be. But, now that the hints have been given, I realize that it also somewhat resembles the titan corpse that makes up the Boiling Isles themselves. Which, by extension, forces me to realize that King somewhat resembles the dead titan.

Emperor Belos claims to speak for the titan's spirit. However, it may just be that Eda has stumbled on its real last will and testament, as well as the intended recipient of it.

Of course, the questions this raises in turn are so much bigger than anything else. Why did the titan die? Were there other titans? What broke the tower and (presumably) prevented King from receiving the education and upbringing that had been meant for him? How much time (and what sort of stimulation or nutrition) does a cat-sized titan hatchling need before it can grow into a continent-sized, reality-warping god colossus?

Also...does King have enough magic power within him to equal all the ambient magic of the Boiling Isles? Or, at least, does he have the potential to develop that power as he grows and develops?

The fact that the implications here are so much bigger and so much older than the main plot the characters are dealing with is actually a thematic boon. It makes Belos look so small and pathetic, trying to pass himself off as the heir to this. Which, I suppose, is just a representation of every government that claims to "own" a land just because all the microscopic humans living on the outer skin of that land listen to it. Pretty clear that King will be instrumental in humbling Belos and ending his regime. Just as the glyph-magic that Luz, Eda, and Lilith are learning from the Dead Titan will defeat the "innate" magic of the people who forgot where they originally got it from and simply think of it as theirs by right.

Also, this is coming right after Luz has been indefinitely separated from her own world and parent by dimensional gulfs. Just as King has, it appears, been separated from his by the passing of ages.

...

Now, it may feel like I'm forgetting something. Two things, actually. However, I haven't forgotten them. I've just been putting them off.

Season 2 episodes 1-2, "Separate Tides" and "Escaping Expulsion," all but killed my interest in The Owl House.

All the problems I had with season 1's frustrating character writing and indecisive worldbuilding are still here, and they've gotten worse. Much worse. Right when it seemed like they were about to solve themselves as the show kicked into high gear.

A great example of what I'm talking about is the role played by Lilith's replacement in Belos' army, a guy who goes by "the Golden Guard."

He gets a chance to establish himself in S1E1, where he does the following:

1. Track Eda and Luz to an isolated island where he has them at his mercy.
2. Tell them that he'll let them live a bit longer if they can help him collect a bigger bounty than theirs, on a creature that can be found on the island.
3. Leave *without the creature's body or any other proof of its death* after they tell him they've killed it.

This isn't treated as some baffling anomaly of incomprehensible motives by the other characters.

Speaking of bounties, um...apparently Eda no longer has one? Except for when she does? And...I'm not sure if Lilith does or not herself? Or Luz? Somehow, in S2E1, everyone on the Boiling Isles knows that Eda and Lilith have been de-powered. Even though that only happened at the very end of the season one finale, after they'd escaped from Belos, and literally no one was there to see it happen. And, after personally foiling Belos' plan and blowing up a valuable artifact in his literal hands, Luz is still going to that fucking magic school.

Like, I'm not sure I can even articulate how much this completely fucks up *everything.*

Luz has the personal enmity of the emperor now. She and her housemates are guilty of capital crimes, in some cases several times over. Their names and faces are known. Hexside School is government run, and its administrators answer directly to the regime, with the literal chief enforcers of Belos' police force coming over for job fairs and demonstrations and being on first-name basis with the teachers and principle.

They simultaneously are and aren't wanted criminals. The Boiling Islands simultaneously are and aren't a totalitarian dictatorship. The show wants to keep its cozy, Gravity Falls-ish vibes, and it wants to be an adventure story about resistance. I'm fine with tonal compromises being made, especially in a show aimed at children, but this goes further than just tone. And, the jarring oscillations don't just happen within the same episodes, they happen within the same scenes.

It isn't just the setting that's like this either. It's also the characters' relationships.

Two episodes into the season, and Lilith's most focused on traits are "likes learning" and "isn't annoyed by Hooty." Everything the season one finale was promising, about the magnitude of Lilith's crimes against her sister, and the even greater magnitude of her crimes against the people of the Boiling Isles as the emperor's right hand? Well, we might engage with that eventually, but after three episodes' worth of season 2 we still haven't even started. No serious heart-to-heart scenes. No signs of starting a character arc about unlearning her bad lessons or reexamining the instincts and sensibilities she's developed in her years as Belos' legbreaker. Again, there's still plenty of time in the season, but to have not even started any of this after three entire episodes is just *bizarre.*

Lilith isn't even feared by the commonfolk of the Isles for who she used to be. Everyone treats her with the same hot-and-cold sort of quantum disrespect that they treat Eda and Luz with. Nobody seems to remember how scary she was up until a week ago. Nobody is coming at her for revenge for things she did as chief enforcer, either. It's like she's retroactively been turned into another small town ne'er-do-well like her sister.

Meanwhile, the show periodically goes out of its way to remind us of how scary and evil Belos and his minions are, how he's still working on rebuilding the portal to Earth for nefarious reasons, how he allegedly wants to execute them all, etc.

And, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to take his threat seriously if the show itself can't be assed to do it.

I could go on and on about these problems. Like the characters trying to do a little bounty hunting of their own to make ends meet now that Eda can't sell Earth junk anymore, and - in the same damned episode - them trying to protect innocent creatures from bounty hunters sent by Belos. Without that contradiction ever being acknowledged. Not even is there no "are we the baddies," moment, there's also not even any acknowledgement of what they'd been doing for the first half of the episode at all in the second half of it. Or Eda being frustrated and impatient with glyph magic, and Luz and Lilith needing to get her enthusiastic about it now, without any acknowledgement of this complete switch by Luz herself. Or. Or. Or.

There's also this recurring thing where nobody ever tells anyone else where they're going. Like, almost every episode, the plot wouldn't happen if the person who decides to go off and do a dangerous mission just told at least one other member of the cast where they were going. This happens over and over again.

Also, when we finally see Amity again in episode 2, her and Luz's relationship "develops" by having each of them blush when the other one shows appreciation for them. It gets old fast, and there's virtually nothing else to build off of where they left off in "Enchanting Grom Fright." Granted, the show does up its gay game in other places when it briefly introduces us to Willow' parents in episode 2, but that's not the same thing as exploring the main character's first-ever romantic relationship.

These episodes have some decent humor throughout, and some somewhat interesting elaboration on the magic system as Luz, Lilith, and Eda continue experimenting with the glyphs. It's not enough to make up for the incredibly watered-down character drama, the schizophrenic status quo, or the tiresome idiot-ball holding.


"Echoes of the Past" got me interested in The Owl House again, but I'm not sure if that interest is going to be able to hold on through multiple more episodes of whatever the hell the two previous episodes were supposed to be. I wish the entire show was about that, and not about this.

Maybe the entire show actually does become about that. Or maybe it just gets better and more decisive about stuff in general. There's plenty of season 2 left to go, even before getting to the specials. But, as things are, I really don't have high expectations. Or high enthusiasm.