The Owl House S2E13-14: "Any Sport in a Storm" and "Reaching Out"

After the last two plot-heavy instalments, these are a couple of breather episodes. "Reaching Out" ends up having some emotional weight, and some potentially important character development at the end, but for the most part it's just lighthearted fluff. "Any Sport in a Storm," meanwhile...basically lighthearted fluff from beginning to end, apart from one minor plot development that might be instrumental later.


Our main protagonists for S2E13 "Any Sport in a Storm" are - of any two characters that you might have expected - Willow and Hunter.

We open on Hunter in the imperial palace, not having the best day. His archnemesis Kikimora might have gotten herself onto thin ice, but his own track record in recent times hasn't been too great either. It was always an uphill battle for himself as a magic-less individual to rise through the ranks in his uncle's court, and his recent failures are starting to chip away at his nepotism bonus. The frayed state of his custom "golden guard" Imperial Coven uniform serving as a sort of totem of his fallen state.

Awww, he still has the cardinal palisman that followed him home a few eps back.​

Belos is having Hunter preside over a routine meeting of the covenmasters in his stead while he takes care of weird secret stuff, and implied that Hunter proving he can at least run the empire's day-to-day for him when needed might go a little ways toward redeeming him in his uncle's eyes. Unfortunately, said covenmasters always disliked the magicless little upstart, and in his current disgraced state they're bold enough to outright blow him off when he tries to get them to brief him.

There are a few names and faces we know, by this point. Tara is there, still leading a groggy-looking Raine around by the nose. So too is Darius, the head of the golem-creating "abomination" coven that Amity's parents are prominent members of. I don't think I named him at the time, but Darius and his souped-up war constructs were heavily responsible for hunting down Eda and Raine's rebel group in "Eda's Requiem." He didn't get a chance to show much personality in that episode beyond being a competent tactician, so this episode is a more proper introduction to the character.

When Hunter keeps ineffectually trying to bring the covenmasters to heel, Darius is the one who gets rid of him by telling him to go do something useful instead of trying to tell the grown-ups how to do their jobs. Maybe go do a recruitment drive for the Imperial Coven or something, isn't that supposed to be your department?

...

Hmm. I'm remembering Lilith's contemptuous reaction to learning that Hunter had taken her job at the start of this season. Seems like that was a common sentiment among her (and now his) peers.

I also wonder what the exact deal is with him being Belos' nephew. Hunter not having innate magic definitely makes sense if he has baseline human ancestry. And...there WAS a mention of Philip Wittebane having had a brother who he disappeared from Earth with, though I don't recall exactly when we learned that. Hunter has the pointy witch-ears, but then, so does Belos nowadays, so that's presumably something you can do with cosmetic treatments.

Given what we learned about Wittebane's memoirs last episode, it seems distinctly possible that he killed his own brother (or at least allowed him to die) at some point. What this in turn suggests about his feelings toward Hunter, and the sort of manipulative, exploitative "parenting" he's been giving him...hmm.

You know, come to think of it, why hasn't Philip been teaching Hunter glyph magic? We know that he's been practicing that for centuries himself. Is it just a matter of him wanting to keep that for himself? But nonetheless, he's ALSO putting Hunter in a position of authority that this lack of magic is making him struggle with. I wonder if that's some kind of weird power trip, for Philip? Forcing witches to take orders from a completely magic-less individual, as a weird way of punishing them for having innate powers that humans lack?

...

Anyway, the main gimmick of this episode really doesn't make sense. Instead of taking some PR people and doing a normal recruitment drive, or doing anything that acknowledges the fact that the Imperial Coven is already a prestigious class that we've seen students competing with each other to try to get into...Hunter for some reason goes undercover as a transfer student and tries to find worthy candidates by...uh...just meeting them. And he ends up joining a new competitive palisman-stave flying team that Willow is starting.

Questionable premise aside, the meat of this episode is entertaining enough to watch. Hunter is only slightly older than these middle schoolers, but he's so lacking in normal socialization with his age cohort that he's basically a walking embodiment of "how do you do, fellow kids?" Amusingly, Gus clocks him as an undercover agent from the very beginning, but reluctantly goes along with Willow bringing him onto the team when they see what a skilled stave-flyer he is (we already know that Hunter is an aerial combat specialist, and many of the same skills apply). Cue lighthearted shenanigans and attempted state abduction attempts!

Well, the state abduction attempt turns out to be a...prank? Object lesson? Something like that?...carried out by Darius.

Hunter tries to convince the kids to go along with it, despite his own growing misgivings. And even the misgivings of some of the soldiers taking part in this operation, once he chats with them about what they're doing (special shout-out to Icepack Steve the imperial coven trooper. I hope this guy shows up again in a later episode). When Hunter eventually decides he's heard enough and moves to free the kids and put Darius in his place, the latter congratulates him.

Apparently this was his way of getting Hunter to go out and interact with normal people for a little while so that he'd hopefully learn to be a little bit less insufferable. And then he moved to forcibly abduct his "recruits" for indoctrination to see if he could get Hunter to actually grow a spine and take personal initiative rather than letting any adult with a uniform walk all over him. Basically showing him some tough love at the negligible cost of traumatizing some random schoolchildren.

He even approves of Hunter keeping a palisman without telling Belos; he hadn't caught a glimpse of it before now.

...hmm. That detail definitely supports my read that Belos' grip is slackening as his plans approach fruition. The personality cult he's used to control the Boiling Isles for most of his reign has grown hollow, if his top lieutenants are all seeing how much they and each other can get away with.

Well, regardless.

Darius might have a softer side to him, but he's still a high-ranking official within a brutal dictatorship, heh. This weird game of his does backfire pretty badly, too, as it has the effect of further shaking Hunter's faith in his uncle's regime once he sees its arbitrary oppressive power from a street-level civilian perspective.

...

Granted, I kinda have trouble believing that Hunter didn't see through this. This spontaneous forced recruitment shit is not how the Imperial Coven has ever been shown to work prior to this. I feel like Hunter should have known that?

Also um...why are the rank-and-file Imperial Coven troops taking orders from Darius instead of Hunter, given their respective positions? There are a whole bunch of smaller questions hanging off from these, too.

This season has a recurring issue with SoD-breaking premises required to enable otherwise good stories. Honestly, it's a flaw of the show as a whole, but season two seems to be doing it in different ways each episode instead of the same way over and over again like the first season did.

...

Meanwhile, there's a b-plot about Luz and Amity realizing that more books of the fantasy series they both read have been coming out both on Earth and the Boiling Isles, and wondering if there's someone else who has a working portal. Alas, it turns out that it's just those goblin scammers doing Chinese Bootleg Sequels (which explains the bizarre plot developments and decline in prose quality and spelling in the latest instalment). Lol.

No Eda in this episode. Like I said, it's very much a breather.

The episode ends with Hunter returning to the palace, but remaining in contact with Willow, Gus, and the other Flying Team members on social media, which he hasn't been exposed to before and is adorably cringe on. Final scene has Luz and Amity returning from their unsuccessful portal-hunt and being utterly shocked when they hear who Willow and Gus just made friends with, which got a nice chuckle out of me.

"Reaching Out" is soooomewhat heavier, in some ways, but also less consequential as far as plot stuff goes. Luz's cell phone (which she's been recharging via bioelectric insect-demons, and using pretty much just for its utility apps since there's no cell service home without a working portal to send signals through) has reminded her that today is a special time of year. One that makes her even more anxious than before about being separated from her mother. She's desperate for something to distract herself with, and ends up combining that urge with her ADHD to try and tackle every problem they're dealing with simultaneously with predictably barren results.

She's even trying to integrate Hooty's matter-animating demonic biology into a new portal attempt. Which is...honestly kind of an inspired idea, doomed though it is to failure.

Luz's reprieve comes in the form of Amity, who wants her help sneaking away from the Imperial Coven special exams her parents signed her up for and entering into an annual underground fighting tournament. Apparently, Amity's dad was a perennial champion of these tournaments for a time, back when he was young and cool and didn't spend all his time tinkering away in the lab to make consumer golems for his wife to pitch to state-controlled enterprises.

Curiously, he doesn't have his hair dyed in the family color either right now. I guess that's just a thing his wife has been pushing on their kids.

Anyway, Amity wants to do the cool things her parents did when they were younger instead of the lame things they do now, and Luz is glad for something fun to go do instead of thinking about missing this event with her mom. And then Eda takes an interest in the tournament as well when she finds out who the current reigning champion is.

Warden Wrath, prominent Imperial Coven officer, prison administrator, and antagonist of the series pilot way back when. This tournament might be a rare opportunity to catch the guy outside of the state's attention and see if she can beat any information out of him about what Belos is planning to use everyone for at the titan's head in a month.

...

Weirdly, it helps the episode that Wrath ends up not knowing anything at the end. The reason being that this episode is an extreme case in point of the "okay, are they or are they not wanted criminals?" issue that's always plagued The Owl House.

The state agents and Eda's group treat each other basically like sitcom rivals in their interactions for most of this episode. I know that "Follies at the Covens' Day Parade" established that Belos has decided to let them go free as part of some mysterious plot of his own, but the lack of consequences for things like "assaulting an off-duty prison warden" really, really stretch that thin.

So, if they'd actually walked away from this episode with any actionable intel about Belos' plans, and therefore made the circumstances of its acquisition vital to the plot going forward, I'd have had issues with it. As it is though, it's fine as a half-serious sideshow incident.

...

So, Luz and Amity fight in the tournament, and Eda has her Loony Toons-ish sideplot trying to capture the warden for interrogation. There's some cool spectacle, as the arena fights demonstrate just how powerful Amity and (especially) Luz have become over the course of the series. Seriously, if Luz has enough notecard-glyphs of the right type on her person, she's fucking deadly. However, Luz's own participation in the tournament turns it into a competition between the two of them, when Amity had wanted to have her friend's support. And then Luz's attempts to make this up to her result in Amity's father finding out where his daughter snuck off to and coming to try and drag her home.

This culminates in a kind of multi-way reconciliation as people stand up and come clean to each other. First of all, Luz does some soul-searching and then confesses to Amity that she, once again, has allowed projection to cloud her judgement. All this drama surrounding fathers, alienation from them, and annual events related to them has actually done a very poor job of distracting Luz from the date over on Earth.

I don't think it was ever said until now if Luz's mother was divorced or widowed or what. Apparently it's the second one. Putting flowers on Luz's late father's grave is an annual ritual of great importance for her and Camilla, and this is the first year since his death that they won't be able to do it. For reasons that, ultimately, stem from bad behavior and impulsive decisions of Luz's.

...

You know, on that topic, we still never found out what was up with that bunkbed in Luz's room.

If she had a dead sibling as well as a dead father, you'd think know would be a good opportunity to mention it (unless it's just too painful for Luz to talk about even now. Man, that family has been through tragedy, if that really is the case).

I guess it's more likely that Camilla and her husband were planning to have another child, but never had a chance to prior to the latter's death. In which case...hmm. It would explain the bunkbed, but it also makes me wonder how old Luz would have been when it happened. From the way she's talking about him now, Luz seems to remember her father very well, implying she wasn't that young when he died. That's an awfully big gap between childbirths, though. Hmm.

Yeah. I'm still really curious about that bunkbed.

...

That's twice in the space of just a few episodes that Luz's post "Yesterday's Lie" guilt has led her to project her issues onto other people and make bad decisions because of it. Hopefully it won't be too many more times now.

Amity forgives Luz's clumsiness pretty readily when she learns what's been going on with her (and to be fair to Luz, the mistake she made that ended up bringing Amity's father down on them was a pretty understandable and minor one in this case. It's not a "Steven we told you not to do the thing!" incident like season one was riddled with). And even offers to hold a sort of memorial service with Luz, even if she can't attend the actual grave with her actual family.

It also helps motivate Amity to stand up to her own father, and manage to get through to the more personable part of him that he's sort of been repressing in recent years as he lets his domineering wife basically rule the roost. Granted, it also helps Amity's case that Eda is there to intimidate him about that time he and his wife kinda sorta used Luz as a training dummy for killer robots a few weeks back.

But, ultimately, it's Amity who does the real convincing. Without quite going far enough to admit that she's kinda-sorta become a resistance fighter who's fought state agents in restricted areas, she's able to get him to accept that she never actually wanted to join the Imperial Coven, or to take part in her mother's social climbing obsession, or to dye her hair green, or any of the other bullshit that they've been trying to convince her that she wants. And, perhaps remembering a younger, freer, less repressed segment of his own life by the scenery around them, he admits that he hasn't actually bothered to know his own children and that he needs to start trying. And also maybe even attempt to stand up to his wife about it.

The episode ends with Luz and Amity, the tournament diversion forgotten, holding a private memorial-anniversary up on a starlit hill. Appropriate flowers conjured with glyph-magic. A levitating balloon shaped from abomination matter. Bound together to float up into the sky, in a novel fusion of human and witch funerary traditions.

That's really a nice worldbuilding touch. I especially liked the detail of Amity finding the idea of placing flowers on a grave exotic and interesting, and being surprised in turn that Luz doesn't know about death balloons.

Far away, on Earth, Camilla privately plucks flowers of her own. Looks into the night sky. Cries for how much she's lost, and desperately hopes that she'll still get some of it back. All while Vee heedlessly eats her dinner in the background.

Like I said, not much in the way of plot or excitement in these episodes. I might even be tempted to file "Any Sport" under the filler category, even though it's good filler. "Reaching Out" does enough for Luz and Amity's characters and the development of their relationship that I think it's fair to call it a critical episode for any curated watchlist.