The Owl House S2E10: "Yesterday's Lie"

This pedantic ultra-high excruciatingly detailed autistic review was commissioned by Aris Katsaris.


The halfway point for season two of "The Owl House." So far, this season has been up, down, and all around. Some great stuff, some really frustrating stuff. Honestly, it's really just a couple of specific ball-and-chains holding the series back that it seems like it could easily kick off, but keeps choosing not to. The wanted-fugitive-attending-school paradox. The other characters not even hating Lilith as much as I do, let alone as much as people in their positions should. Etc. Cut off those couple of weights, and this season would be soaring high above its predecessor instead of only being incrementally better. Meanwhile, there are some plot threads that could be building up to

Anyway, Aris Katsaris wanted me to give this episode the full blow-by-blow overanalysis treatment, so I'm guessing it's either a really good one, a really important one, or both. At least, in his opinion, but historically we've usually tended to agree on this stuff.


We open on Luz's house, back Earthside, and her suspiciously squeaky-clean and perfectly organized room. Not that I expect Luz to live in filth, necessarily, but I absolutely do *not* expect her to be the type who keeps her room looking like this:

Huh, bunkbed. Did she used to have a sibling as well as a father? There's some serious formative tragedy that Luz's story has been dancing around making explicit.​

Just to drive the point home, we see her doppleganger collecting all of Luz's toys, fantasy novels, and even old baby photos and throwing them in a giveaway box. Extra chilling is the moment where she stops, looks herself in the mirror, lets out a relaxed sigh, and then *doesn't* flash an evil grin or momentarily revert to her true form, or any of the other creepy things that the show had you primed to expect.

It leans heavily on the audience's genre expectations to make it work, but if you do have those expectations it really works well. It ends up being much creepier than her actually doing something creepy would have been. This isn't an overconfident villain drunk on power and complacent in being an OCP for magicless humans. Whoever and whatever Luzn't is, she's giving the role her all even when she knows she isn't being observed.

The fact that she's being so straight-laced and keeping her personal spaces so "perfect" actually adds a whole other tragic dimension to Luz's home life. Like, is this Luzn't trying to act like her notion of a "normal human child" and overshooting it, or is this her playing on Luz's mother's expectations of what that normal-away camp would do to her?

Is this sterile perfection what Luz's mother Camila had been hoping for? If so, then it's fair to ask if she ever actually loved her daughter at all.

Well, happily, it turns out that she does love her daughter, because Camila is actually a bit disturbed by the sheer scope of the change and the extent of what she now sees Luzen't throwing away.

Credit to the artist for capturing her subtleties of facial expression here. On one level, she's affecting benign curiosity and maybe mild concern for what she sees "Luz" doing. On another, she's clearly wondering just how badly she fucked up by sending her to that brainwashing camp.

...

It's been a long time since I saw the pilot, but this forces me to once again muse about the double-edgedness of Luz's portrayal in it. Luz's behavior that led to her mother's decision was legitimately destructive and dangerous to the people around her, and she seemed either unable or unwilling to understand why she needed to change it. At the same time, the framing of it as a "just doesn't fit in" problem, and the obvious 1:1 analogy of gay conversion therapy, just...it makes it hard for me to actually judge Camila's choices.

The two different wires being crossed call for very different degrees of sympathy.

...

The two of them also find a rabbit caught in a bizarre, over-complicated snare right next to their house. Apparently, this is the most recent of several such cases since Luzn't's arrival, and Camila hasn't been happy about the apparent poaching. She's a bit of an environmentalist, it seems (or else just has a soft spot for bunnies), which might actually be the first bit of characterization not directly relevant to her being Luz's mom that she's received thus far.

The placement of that characterization is important, I think. We're now being shown Camila as a person, rather than as a disapproving authority figure. The real woman, as opposed to Luz's mental model of her. Having that first new character quirk be something as sympathetic as "doesn't want bunnies getting poached" is also an important contrast to, eg, Luz's worst vision of her in "Enchanting Grom Fright."

Makes the doppleganger's presence a brutal irony. Now she's the one being tested by a two-dimensional image of what her daughter *could* be.

If Luzn't is the one behind the rabbit traps, she doesn't show any sign of it. The first indication of her not honestly believing herself to be Luz comes a bit later, when she goes back to her room and sees an angry Luz glaring at her from a mirror.

She screams, in what seems to be genuine fear. Roll OP.

Alright. Seems like Luzn't either genuinely believes that she's the real Luz, or she's in a very precarious situation and afraid of anything jeopardizing it. In the former case, some powerful malicious actor probably created her for this purpose. In the latter case, she's probably a lone operator; some opportunistic Boiling Isles entity that may have bitten off more than it can chew.

I guess the latter was always the likeliest explanation, even before now. The only major antagonistic force with minions at its disposal we've got so far is Belos, and I doubt he cares about Luz's mom lol.

After the intro, we cut back to the Boiling Isles, and also seemingly rewind a little bit. Using the information recovered from the bookmouse, Luz and Eda have managed to jerry-rig and attempt at a new portal device. The actual door wasn't ever the complicated part, it turns out. Most of the magic was actually in the key, and most of the key's magic was in the titanblood. Still, this is just their first attempt, so there may be some adjustments needed before it works properly.

Going through this thing is risky, but not riskier than literally everything else they've been getting up to lately, and Luz is willing to put her life on the line to assure her mother that she's okay (lol). So, Luz goes through, wearing a rope harness that Eda and King can hopefully pull her back with if something goes wrong.

She ends up in this weird liminal realm that...well, kudos to "The Owl House" on this front. It's one of the more creative fantasy liminal realms that I can recall seeing.

I'm vaguely reminded of the webcomic "Unsounded." Only vaguely, but still.

After being thrown around trying to get the hang of this realm's subjective gravity and getting frustrated by the interdimensional window-cubes' habit of only *sometimes* hovering toward her when commanded, Luz manages to peer through into the human world. Turns out those cubes let you look out at either Earth or the Demon Realm from any reflective surface near the portal site or the other world's counterpart of it. Basically, she can grab those cubes and find herself looking out from a glass pane either in the owl house, or in her Earth neighborhood.

Her mother doesn't seem able to see or hear Luz through the mirrors, but Luzn't can do both, and reacts with fear when she realizes she's been caught. Which brings us back to where the teaser left off.

Luzn't leaps out the window and flees the house, but makes it no further than the abandoned place next door that Eda used to beam in and out of before getting caught in another of those snares. This one looks a bit suspiciously large to be meant for rabbits. Hmmmmm. In a desperate attempt to get free, she shifts into her squigglier true form, which turns out to be a sort of mermaid-ish snake/eel type of body, but even that isn't able to wriggle free.

It looks like she should be able to just loosen it with her hands, but apparently not lol.

Fortunately for this imposter icthyoid, Luz has a nearby mirror she can talk through. And, having seen the fear and panic in her doppleganger's reactions, she's changed tac and is willing to hear her out before going back to treating her as an enemy. She even talks the kelpie(?) through the process of getting out of the snare as a show of good faith, and it pays off. The creature, which names itself as "Vee" (with a moment's hesitation before saying it that suggests it isn't her real name, but I mean, this thing is obviously fairly duplicitous by nature, so that's no surprise) explains that it's a refugee from the Boiling Isles that fled through Eda's portal during an inattentive moment. It assumed Luz's form simply because it didn't know how to survive in this world, so it took the shape of a person who it knew would be taken care of.

At least, that's the story it's telling at the moment. Vee is very clearly still keeping some secrets, so I'm not trusting this just yet. Also, we're not even halfway through the episode yet, so there's bound to be another shoe dropping. Still, I'm willing to believe that she really is a refugee from Belos' regime rather than a predatory spirit that feeds on the suffering of grieving parents or the like.

For the time being, Luz is willing to work with this. It seems that the portal device isn't able to actually get her through to Earth in person, and magicless humans can't perceive her reflection images, at least for now. Luz's main goal was to make sure her mother doesn't think she's dead, though, and Vee seems to be doing a pretty decent job of that. It's not the most ethical choice she could make, but given the limited options I'm not going to judge Luz too harshly for thinking it best to encourage Vee to keep doing her thing for now. When Luz can travel to Earth for real, she'll explain the real situation to her mother and see to it that Vee remains accommodated and safe (which would be less stressful for Vee, so she should have no reason to object to that when the time comes).

There's a problem, though. Vee's magic has been running out, and her frantic, panicked shapeshifting just now used it up. She doesn't have enough power left to fully turn herself back into Luz's likeness; only most of the way.

Iiiiinteresting.

...

Assuming that Vee is a demon humanoid with a bile sack to fuel her magic just like the witches have, that suggests that witches don't generate their own magical energy after all. Their bile sacks just allow them to store it. Eda and Lilith were shown to use their magic just fine on Earth, but it may be that if they stayed there long enough they'd eventually run out and have to return to the Boiling Isles and absorb more of the dead titan's radiation.

With Luz's glyph magic, there's no energy storage mechanism. The glyphs draw on ambient energy to make the spell work, so it doesn't work at all outside of the titan's proximity. Witches and demons can use magic until their internal reserves run dry, at which point they run into the same problem.

Now. If King actually is a titan (which, again, I'm less sure of now than I was at the end of "Echoes of the Past," but IF he is) then I'd be very curious to see what would happen if he came to Earth. Granted, it may only be adult titans that generate magic, and it may only be dead titans that release it in a form other creatures can use, but still, I'd be curious.

...

So, for now, Luz and Vee decide to try and find a way to recharge the latter enough for her to resume Luz's appearance and keep up the charade. Vee says that she can absorb that energy by consuming magical creatures or artifacts, so if they can find something that Eda left laying around the town then that ought to do it. So, it's time to go to places where Eda has spent a lot of time during her garbage-hunting expeditions to Earth. It's fortunate for them that she's bad at going incognito.

That paper would have probably been dropped by Eda's palisman when it dragged that bag of trash through this house during the pilot.​

So, it's off to the cafe.

Of course, given the hints that we've been given of Camila starting to suspect something amiss (or at least, to worry that she's really harmed her daughter by sending her someplace that changed her this much), I suspect that this plan will backfire and Luz and Vee are going to need to come clean. The charade is already starting to break down, and there's an obvious lesson to be learned for both Luz and Camila about caring about who each other really are rather than just an idealized (or demonized) image of one another. And, of course, there's still what Vee hasn't told us.

Also, as Vee leaves the abandoned house, we pan up to a video camera. Looks like this street is bugged as well as trapped. And whoever did this probably was never interested in rabbits. Dun dun duunnnnnn!


I think two posts should be enough to cover this episode, unless things get way more complicated in the second half.