The Owl House S2E4-7: "Keeping Up A-Fearances" and "Through the Looking Glass Ruins"

This review was commissioned by Aris Katsaris.


The first two of four episodes in this order. The same patron commissioned much more indepth reviews of some subsequent Owl House episodes, so I'm inferring that these four are important for following the story but also not terribly interesting in their own right. We'll see if they end up exceeding my (admittedly, somewhat unfairly come by) expectations!


First on the list is S2E4, "Keeping Up A-Fearances." Can also be referred to by its alternate title of "I Want Lilith Clawthorne to Die Slowly and Horribly."

If that was the feeling that the writers intended me to walk away from this episode with, then they did a good job. Unfortunately, I don't think that that's what they were going for.

This episode introduces us to Eda and Lilith's elderly - but very healthy, active, and powerful - mother, Gwendolyn. An early flashback sequence shows that after exhausting all conventional options for lifting the curse of the owl-beast from her daughter, Gwendolyn wanted to resort to hghly dangerous experimental surgery to try and cut it out of her witch heart, and wouldn't allow Eda to refuse. This prompted Eda to run away from home, and subsequently to discover the earth-portal while squatting in an old ruin in the woods.

She fled through it, and spent an indeterminate amount of time hiding on Earth before returning to her homeworld and using the portal to start the human artifact business that's supported her ever since.

...

This context definitely makes her loss of the portal to Belos sting much harder; that portal wasn't just her livelihood, it was also her independence and her refuge. A symbol of her self-sufficiency.

...

Gwendolyn tracked her daughter to the ruins, at which point her footprints disappeared. Rather than taking this as a sign that she should do some introspection about how much she values her daughter's agency and safety, she decides that this just means she needs to work even harder to find a cure on her own and have it ready by the time she finds Eda again.

I guess that's not THE worst takeaway she could have had from this, as long as the solutions it leads her to aren't "cut her chest open and hope for the best." Not the best, but also not the worst. Unfortunately, the road it ends up sending her down is less than ideal.

In the present, Gwendolyn pays an uninvited visit to the Owl House and declares that she's found a cure for the curse. Eda brushes her off; apparently, she's been claiming to have found a "guaranteed to work" new cure every year or two for decades, and Eda is sick of having her hopes dashed. Additionally, the failure of conventional healing methods to help her daughter has driven Gwendolyn into the arms of the Boiling Isles equivalent of the antivax movement. She's come to believe that the elixirs that help Eda manage the curse are actually making things worse, and is slowly but surely burning through the family fortune to buy "real" cures from pseudoreligious grifters.

He's actually three goblin scammers in a kasaya.​

She ends up roping an unaware Luz into her latest attempt to get Eda to try new age quack remedies and separate her from the scientifically vetted magical potions she's used until now. Which ends up causing both Eda and Lilith (the latter of whom Gwendolyn didn't know the curse had spread to) to have owlbear episodes, and Luz forcing Gwendolyn to realize that it's her own fault this happened. There's a nicely cathartic (if a bit wish fulfillment-y, looking at Gwendolyn's real life inspirations...) scene of Gwendolyn attacking the scammers' lair and stealing back their ill-gotten treasure hoard, which she promptly invests in a large supply of the functional elixirs. Followed by a tearful admission of hubris, and of caring more about the appearance of wellness than her daughters' actual lives.

That's the A-plot, at least. It's decent, if a little too saccharine given the real life movements it's commenting on. The B-plot though...

So, this whole time, Lilith is sitting around feeling sorry for herself because of how Eda's curse has been monopolizing their mother's attention.

When King observes the abrupt return of Eda's mother to her life, he wonders aloud to himself if that might mean his own father might one day return just as suddenly. Lilith responds by reminding King that his father didn't even bother attending King's own hatching, which means he probably doesn't care about him any more than Lilith's own mother cares about her.

During this scene, King is literally clutching his stuffed rabbit to his body and talking about his hopes to it. Just to remind us that, whatever age he is chronologically, King is mentally and emotionally a small child that Lilith is saying this to.

-___-

Early on in the episode, Lilith expresses shock and renewed regret when she learns just how much the curse dominates Eda's life. But then, as soon as Gwendolyn arrives, she sinks into this utterly narcissistic cocoon of jealousy and resentment. Being angry at her mother for spending her whole life trying to save Eda from the curse that LILITH PUT ON HER and ignoring poor, lonely Lilith as she miserably went about persecuting minorities for the dictator like a good girl to no avail. And taking it out on King's own childish hopes too.

Gwendolyn has her wake up moment at the end of the episode. The way it's written, structured, and framed, though, there's no indication that the writers even realized that Lilith looks way worse and is in much deeper need of introspection than Gwendolyn.

Lilith is realizing the degree to which she destroyed the lives of both her sister AND her mother, and her response is to be mad about how no one is paying attention to her. A significant portion of the episode's runtime is devoted to Lilith sitting around being butthurt about this. And there's no payoff for it.

...

I think we're supposed to infer that Eda was the golden child and Lilith was chronically ignored before the curse as well, and that this was what motivated Lilith to curse her sister in the first place. There are a couple of problems, though.

First, and most importantly, we're never shown this. Or even told it, for that matter. We know that Eda outperformed Lilith academically as a kid, and Gwendolyn's personality seems like she'd be the type of parent to disproportionately favor a higher-achieving child, but it's purely implication. Which means we have no idea what the extent of the favoritism was, how badly Lilith was or wasn't treated, etc.

Second, it's been decades since this incident. Even if the first few years of Lilith and Eda's lives were blemished by uneven parenting, the overwhelming majority of their lives have had that attention imbalance be caused entirely by Lilith's malicious actions. Whatever legitimate complaints she could have made about this as a teen aren't relevant anymore. For most of their lives, Eda's gotten all the attention BECAUSE LILITH CURSED HER.

...

There's also an incredibly fucking weird moment during the reconciliation at the end, where Gwendolyn tells Eda that she should have realized that the curse was a part of her, and loved and accepted her despite that. And like. Show? Show, I think you've mixed your metaphors a little bit. Think about this, show, what did you mean to say with this part, and what did you actually end up saying with it? Show? Showwww?

Yeah. It's not great.

The episode ends with Lilith deciding to catch up for lost time with Gwendolyn, and moving out of the Owl House. Good, fuck off Lilith, I don't want you back on my goddamned screen unless you're on fire. Before leaving, Gwendolyn tells Luz some ancient rumors about another human who crossed back and forth between here and Earth, and where she might want to look to research more about this. Additionally, there are natural crossings between the two worlds that take place near large titanblood deposits. As far as anyone knows, these natural portals are short-lived and only let small objects through; however, it's possible that there's a connection between these two phenomena. Hopefully, folowing these leads will let her discover a way home. Luz hopes she can find it soon, because she knows her camp is supposed to have ended by now, and she's wracked with guilt and worry about what her own mother must be going through right now. Seeing what Eda's misfortune did to her mother has gotten Luz rightly fearful.

Which helps the stinger land with a real, well, sting.

The fake letters that Luz's mother received from normal-away camp have been followed up with a fake Luz. It's a very convincing doppelganger; she hasn't suspected anything amiss yet.

Really chilling ending. Too bad about the stuff before it.

There are very few fictional characters who I've ever hated as much as I hate Lilith right now, and the episode framing Gwendolyn as more of an imminent antagonist than Lilith is infuriating. Again, if this is supposed to be what I'm feeling now, then that's fine. But I don't think it is.


Next up, "Through the Looking-Glass Ruins." This one is...I don't want to sound overly negative about this show. There's a lot about it that's really good, but that don't lend themselves to description. The humour, for instance. Both this episode and "A-Fearances" had a ton of good gags in them. But the style of humour isn't something I can capture in a text review, and jokes don't usually have much to analyse.

But anyway. Aside from some good gags and one or two key moments, this episode is a pretty unmemorable one.

The A-plot has Luz trying to get her hands on the journal of the mysterious Phillip Wittebane, the last human to have immigrated to the Boiling Isles. The B-plot is about Gus finding an elder illusionist to mentor him, and also mending bridges with an old friend-turned-enemy. Both of these plotlines have issues, and most of those issues come down to "people acting out of character and/or picking up idiot balls to make conflict happen."

Luz has determined that a personal log of Wittebane's was donated to a public library, but since the donation was made over two hundred years ago it's got to be locked up in the archives and only shown to accredited academics. It happens that the library in question is the same one Amity works at, so Luz enlists her help in trying to get access.

It's good to see Amity again. Kinda been a while.

There are a few things that frustrated me in this storyline. The biggest being that the show is really weirdly dragging its feet on Luz and Amity's relationship. After they confessed their feelings and danced together at grom, I sort of figured they were just dating now. Instead, they're both blushingly nervous around each other, like they're still struggling with unconfessed crushes on each other, with almost every conversation devolving into both of them staring at the floor with red faces and then running away from each other. It gets old fast. Even if it didn't feel out of order with the events of "Grom Fright," it would get old fast. As is, it gets old fast AND it's out of place.

Anyway, Amity decides to help Luz sneak into the archives, even though it could cost her her job if they got caught...but the library administrator turns out to be a really reasonable guy who very much likes his employee, and Amity is the high-performing daughter of a prestigious family, so why didn't they just try asking? When they find the book, it turns out it's been eaten by this weird ratlike creature. Amity knows that these rat-things can recite the contents of any book they've eaten, but she doesn't immediately TELL Luz that, letting Luz have an enraged reaction that gets them caught. And then, when Amity gets fired because of Luz's inability to keep her mouth shut, it's not used as an opportunity to take Luz to task for how she *keeps fucking doing this* to people who she's wheedled into trusting her.

In the end Luz does some labor for the librarian to get Amity her job back, and Amity shows her how to get the rat to tell what it's eaten, all is well. A frustrating, artificially complicated road to "Luz gets to read the damned journal."

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Phillip Wittebane was a previous owner of Eda's portal-door.

Kinda figured that was the case, once it was mentioned that he lived a few centuries ago and we saw Eda find the portal in a ruin that looked about that old.

...

Also, Wittebane seems to be very hostile toward the magical world he discovered. And...I could be mistaken, but his accent and speech patterns sound a lot like...yeah, I went back and listened to some key parts of the season 1 finale, and he sounds a lot like Emperor Bellos. Not exactly the same, but similar in a way that seems intentional. Bellos' rise was supposedly fifty-some years ago, though, so if it's the same guy then he's extremely old.

...also, if it IS the same guy, then that does explain why he wanted his old portal back. In his mind, it should still be his.

Well, that could certainly turn out to be interesting once it's explored. Doesn't do much for this episode, though.

...

I do like the scene at the end where Amity decides to dye her hair a different color from the family's traditional one.

On the other hand, it's followed by a bit where Amity short-circuits yet another mutual blushing fit by giving Luz a tiny peck on the cheek and then running away in fear at what she's just done.

Sigh...

That should have happened IN the Grom Fright episode. Not after it. Definitely not this long after it.

...granted, actually showing an active lesbian relationship instead of endlessly dragging their feet about starting it would probably have gotten the show immediately cancelled and its creators fired, blacklisted, murdered, and eaten by the Disney suits. So, this was probably the best they could do.

The Gus plot...involves him being tricked into helping some bullies who were pretending to be nice for...some...reason? I don't know. It's not like they actually needed him for anything. Anyway, he ends up reconciling with an old friend, meeting the ghost of an ancient illusionist and getting some training from him, and also demonstrating that Luz has been teaching her friends glyph-magic and that they're all getting pretty formidable with it. The latter is probably going to be very important in the show's final conflict.


I can see why Aris Katsaris didn't think these episodes merited a higher wordcount. Important things happen and details are established in them, but they're not great.

I'm also starting to notice how pretty much *all* the characters in this show tend to go off on these narcissistic spirals where they thoughtlessly hurt everyone around them, and then aren't really held accountable for it afterward. This sort of behavior bothered me in the show's pilot, with Luz. It had its nadir with Lilith in "A-Fearances." But almost every character in the show goes through some version of this at least once or twice, with Luz being the biggest repeat offender and Lilith having the worst incidents. And...just...why? I'd normally think it's exaggerated bad behavior for the purpose of teaching a lesson to the show's child audience, but the lessons it seems to be trying to teach are almost never the ones that the situation calls for. As a child, I think I'd just be baffled. As an adult, I'm irritated.

I still like "The Owl House," but god damn do some aspects of it frustrate me.