The Owl House S2E15-17: "Them's the Breaks, Kid," "Hollow Mind," and "Edge of the World" (continued more)

"Edge of the World" contains a mix of intriguing new revelations, and "yeah, no duh"s. Once again, it's also another case of imminently relevant plot stuff just falling into Luz's hands by coincidence with only minimal input from her. She does get to do things in this episode. I actually really like how Luz is characterized in this one. Just, the situations given to her to act upon are really convenient and really arbitrary.

Also, this is the one where Luz and King figure out that he's a titan, and probably the literal son of the god the Boiling Isles peoples worship. Like Belos' identity, this was obvious to the audience long before it was to the characters. And, like with Belos, I kind of wonder if letting us and the characters learn it at the same time might have been a better approach.


The episode starts off with a summary of King's familial anxieties, in the form of a fairly adorable dream he has about his imagined biofamily coming to visit. It's a good move, I think. It's been a little while since King took center stage, so both new and returning viewers could probably use a refresher before this episode dives into that subject.

It's cute, it's touching, and it coming after the audience has most likely figured out what an actual adult of King's species looks like adds a layer of comic irony to it. Efficient start for the episode.

Anyway, King wakes up and the plot kicks off with Luz warning Eda and Co about the imminent genocide of her civilization. A prospect that I'm glad to say the show treats with its due weight. I still am pretty sure that Wittebane would have made it into the Collector vault sooner or later regardless of Luz and Lilith's time travel shenanigans, but given the magnitude of what's at stake I can't fault Luz for being crushed by guilt by even the possibility that she could be responsible.

Also, those sketches of hers - based purely on memory - are impressive. Very "police sketch artist" type of artistic skillset, Luz has got.​

Word spreads through Eda's contact network. Lilith arrives to confer, and is a little bit less insufferable than usual as she puts her head together with Eda to conspire against her old master. In all the excitement, Hooty vomits up the letter from that mysterious larger titanling that he ate and forgot about a while ago, and King finally gets to read it. The letter contains an invitation for this apparent lost member of the tribe to come and join his brothers-in-arms in their ancestral homeland far across the sea.

Eda and Lilith suspect that Belos is aware of the intrusion into his mind, so they might need to send the kids far away anyway. And, if King's people really are a warrior culture like the letter makes them sound, then they could potentially be courted as allies. So, Luz takes Hooty and King to see if the directions in that letter actually lead to anything while Lilith and Eda prepare their own last-ditch plans for fighting the empire.

Eda gets a nice little remorseful breakdown scene of her own as she confronts her responsibility in, essentially, abducting a kid from another world and now forcing her to either fight a genocidal dictator or (more likely) be killed by him. "But the kid consented" is not any more convincing of an excuse in this situation than in any other ones where those words are typically uttered.

Seeing Eda acknowledge her own, frankly, extremely scummy behavior in the pilot is satisfying. Feels like the conclusion to an arc that's been very, very slowly progressing in the show's subtext for its entire length to this point, with Eda confronting her own lingering childishness and realizing that her bad circumstances are more of an excuse than a justification.

It's just too bad it has to be Lilith of all fucking people that she's able to talk to about this, but still, it's good character work for Eda.

So! Luz, King, and Hooty (infesting a smaller wooden structure for traveling purposes) take a ship to the remote island the letter specifies. This island appears to be the severed finger of a different titan entirely, flung far across the ocean from the rest of its body. From there, the group activates a teleportation device - seemingly powered by this other corpse's mystical connectedness - that brings them to another corpse-archipelago elsewhere on the planet.

The sea around these islands seems to be cooler, so "the boiling isles" are still a specific chain, heh.​

So. That's one big, longstanding question answered right there.

The episode has a very strong opening act, and a pretty strong ending. A lot of the middle just drags, though. We're quickly introduced to the inhabitants of Hand Island, and the show just has absolutely no chill when it comes to "hinting" about their true nature.

Lots of bone and skull-mask decorations hanging all over their stronghold. The evidence of plaster workshops being in frequent use. All of them being of similar, human-ish size. I might have started to think that these really were other members of King's species and that I was wrong about what he is, if the episode hadn't been so damned heavyhanded with the foreshadowing. A little bit of foreshadowing as a bonus for attentive watchers is good. This was not just a little bit, though.

Consequently, the entire middle of the episode is spent watching Luz and King stumble around, innocently asking questions and sightseeing, waiting for them to finally figure out what the audience already knows so that the plot can just advance already.

So, surprise surprise, these guys are just normal witches and demons who wear ritual titan masks and black fur pelts when in public. One of them saw King's vlog post, and assumed that this lost orphan of their tribe must have been left with a set (or instructions for how to craft one) by his parents. Another reveal that would have been a shocking twist if it came at the end of this sequence rather than the beginning is that this tribe see themselves as titan hunters. Dressed in the ritualistic likeness of their prey, they scout the world for any signs of surviving titan-spawn, seeking to slay them before they can grow to maturity and become unstoppable continent-sized superbeasts. In particular, there's one rumored titan egg that was never found and shattered in ancient times like the others.

Accompanied by this revelation is the reason why they hunt for titan hatchlings so relentlessly. The clan's leader - an ancient warlock who claims to have been doing this for far longer than Belos' reign over the Boiling Isles - claims that this is a divine task appointed them by their own god, who they call the Huntsman.

Oh look, more Collector lore that Luz wasn't even looking for, literally one episode after she learns about the Collector's importance! Well isn't that just swell! :v

I'll counterbalance that bit of snark here by saying that while I don't like the way the show has been leading Luz around by the nose, I really do like the way she's written here. She has the curiosity, hyper/deficit focus issues, and energy of her early series self, but she's obviously learned restraint and boundaries over the course of the series. That curiosity and voraciousness for information guide her around the island to get the information she needs to save King before the locals find out what he really is, and she has a million opportunities to commit cultural faux pases and violate boundaries that her season one self would have jumped on, but she now knows to pass up. Her putting her escape plan to get herself, Hooty, and King back through the teleporter into action, just as the titan-hunters are learning the truth and turning against the party (fortunately, they aren't nearly as skilled fighters as the group hoped when they originally set out), is inspirational in its maturity and competence.

Luz is great here. It's the way these situations find themselves to her that's the problem.

King ends up traumatized and hurt, but also mind-blown by what his species' enemies have identified him as. As they return to the Boiling Isles, he stares at the corpse of his father, and quietly speaks to it as such.

Too bad the only "answers" he can give at this point are hidden glyph-magic lessons encoded in weather events.

The episode ends with the three of them heading back toward the owl house, just as an army of Imperial Coven troops converge on the same location in response to the inception incident. Whatever Wittebane's been tolerating their freedom for, this was apparently a step too far even for him.


Something else I'd like to compliment this episode on is the portrayal of the titan-hunters. These clearly aren't generally bad people. They went out of their way to help what they thought was a lost child of their tribe's. They were nothing but friendly and hospitable to Luz and Hooty. And yet, when their leader realizes what King is and quietly informs the others, they're willing to trick King - an obvious child who's come to trust them implicitly - into putting on a blindfold so one of them can murder him.

Some of them visibly struggle with this. In fact, it leads to something of a schism in the wake of the gang's escape (the old leader is strongly implied to basically be another exploiter along the lines of Belos, tricking the cult into helping him fulfil his pact with the/a Collector and then walking away with the rewards by himself). Are these really bad people? Well, sort of, yes. You can only judge individuals in the context of the culture that produced them, but collectively speaking...yeah. Good people can still be bad people.

The Collector lore is getting interesting, even if I dislike the way it's being dispensed. Did the collector(s?) kill the titans? The Boiling Isles titan has a vault imprisoning the Collector inside of its skull. Did someone seal him there after the titan's death, or idk, did King Senior eat the Collector before dying? The Collector(s) were hunting this world's fauna, presumably as part of the namesake collection, according to the owlbear's memories, but was that before or after the titans' near-extinction? It's possible that the Collector(s) came after the titans' death, captured samples of everything besides the titans themselves, and have been looking for a surviving titanspawn ever since...but it seemed like those cultists were instructed to kill any that they found, not turn them over for capture.

I guess there's nothing that says that the Collector's specimens need to be alive. Maybe he just wants them killed in a way that causes minimal bodily damage so that they look better pinned to a corkboard or whatever.

Anyway, the Collector/s seem to basically be this world's closest equivalent to a devil figure. Whether or not that means that the titans were in any way benevolent back when they ruled this oceanic world, of course, is still completely up in the air. In either case, it makes Wittebane's actions even more ironic and even more traditionally witchlike in the Puritan concept of witches, corrupting godfearing societies into secret devil worship.

Also, the existence of other titan-corpses with other cultures of witches and/or demons living on them raises some worldbuilding questions. How much contact is there between these archipelagos? Not much, clearly, but seemingly more than zero. Is Wittebane's plan to wipe out witchkind going to necessitate spreading his reign to those other island chains too? Seemingly not, if he's already prepping for the imminent Day of Unity. More information is needed here.


Good trio of episodes. Would be much better without the behind-the-scenes chaos that was clearly going on. "We went shopping and then somehow ended up in the BBEG's brain" is going on my top ten list of worst plot devices ever.