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After last week’s The Owl House season 2 premiere which saw Luz, Eda and the gang picking up the pieces from the events of the petrification ceremony, they are ready to move forward with their lives and get back to some semblance of normalcy. We also got our first look at Luz’s friends since everything went down. Life has gone back to normal for them already for the most part until someone with a grudge tries to push them out of the picture for their own selfish gain.
We got a good look at Blight Industries with a lavish event presentation in front of a large crowd, all dressed in capes. Amity’s parents present their latest abomination and Amity agrees to be in on the act at her moms urging. She pretends to not be able to defeat the abomination to show it’s strength to potential investors until her Grom photo with Luz, Willow and Gus falls out of her pocket and is about to be destroyed by the creation. She destroys the creature and the crowd leaves, disappointed with what they see. Amity’s mom becomes upset and realizes Amity has been distracted by her friends, led by Luz the human.
Luz is settling into her role of teaching Eda and Lilith glyph magic. It’s day 3 of her boot camp and Lilith is delighted. Luz already taught the two witches the light, plant, fire and ice glyphs which are all of the ones Luz has learned so far. Luz doesn’t know where to get more spells or if they came from nature or another witch made them. Eda carves an attempt to create a spell into the desk but it doesn’t work. Luz tells them they have to master the basics before trying to get to the point where Eda was with her old magic.
Hooty interrupts and tells Luz she has to get to school, leaving King in charge. Lilith follows the rules, doing what Luz told them to do, while Eda wants to try something bigger. This moment highlights the differences between the two sisters. One is more rigid and follows the rules, the other tries to go big and think outside of the box. While they often clash in their styles, they are both striving for the same outcome, as they have in the past. Their journeys may be different, but they both are looking towards the future. The best line from this whole scene is when King has to try and reign Eda in and says “No one ever said power came with responsibility.” It was a funny play on the classic hero line.
Luz is nervous about her first day back at school following the petrification ceremony. She is immediately greeted ecstatically by Willow and Gus (whose voice has changed! “Witch puberty”). Amity greets Luz with a homemade fairy pie. Horrified by the twitching, partially alive fairies in the pie, Luz accepts and Amity blushes and turns away. Amity’s parents hijack the PA system and order the 4 of them to Principal Bump’s office. Amity’s mom takes charge and says that Luz, Willow and Gus been bad influences and must be expelled. Amity becomes angry, but her mom tells her she has to uphold her end of the deal. Luz, Willow and Gus get dragged out of the office. Luz calls out for Amity who sadly ignores her desperate pleas.
Outside of the school, the three all react to their banishment. Willow cries to a tree, “I’ll water you one last time. With my tears!” Luz confronts Amity’s parents as they exit the school. They tell Luz to come to them to work out some sort of agreement. Luz doesn’t seem to fully realize they shouldn’t be trusted. That ever optimism!!
Amity tells Luz she’s a coward by not saying anything when Luz needed her. Luz understands that she’s scared of her mom. Luz asks her to help again, but she says she can’t. Luz finds a business card that Amity dropped and contemplates going to the Blights to make a deal.
Back at home Eda is goofing off and notices Lilith showing off her skills to Hooty. The Hooty ice sculpture she creates is hilarious. Eda keeps trying to use the glyphs to make something bigger. Eda’s next glyph attempt goes wrong.
Luz arrives at the Blight’s house. An abomination greets her at the door, and she reforms his face into a cat. Luz goes downstairs and finds Amity’s parents working on their next demonstration. Luz says she’ll fill in for Amity at the next demonstration if they promise to let all 3 of them back into school. Amity arrives home to a note that her parents found a replacement for the demonstration. She notices the cat face on the abomination and knows it was Luz.
Willows dads tell her they are quitting their jobs to home school her so she can have a good schooling experience now that she’s expelled. Gus casts a spell telling her to go to the window. One of her dads comes back into the room, catches her and leaves the room pretending not to see it, giving Willow the OK to sneak out. Outside, Amity and Gus tell her Luz is in trouble (again). They arrive at the venue and the 3 argue about how to get into the event. Amity’s siblings give them cape disguises to get them in. On stage, Luz battles one final abomination. In the crowd, abominations catch Willow and Gus as Amity avoids capture and climbs up a ladder. The abomination on stage goes hard against Luz. She asks Amity’s mom to stop it but she replies that it won’t stop until its enemy is eliminated. Absolutely diabolical! Luz tries to flee up in the rafters, but the creature follows. Destruction ensues, the audience flees, and the abomination is about to take a final blow against Luz when suddenly, magic stops it. Amity tells it “Stay away from my Luz!” and enters the battle.
Amity’s mom talks to Amity through her necklace, telling her she’s in trouble for her actions. With her back turned, Amity takes it off her neck and breaks it in her hand, not even turning back to look at all. Her mom gasps. Amity asks Luz if she’s okay. Luz blushes and tells her to look out. The abomination breaks free of the spell and stands up. Amity casts another spell and struggles against the monster. Her mom orders Amity to get away from Luz. Amity tells her that Luz, Willow and Gus are her friends. She tells her how they’re nice and listen to each other and make her think about the kind of person she really wants to be. This moment was extremely powerful in that Amity is finally taking a stance against her controlling family and thinking about herself and those around her that she cares for. It was so sweet seeing her admit that Luz and the others make her more confident in herself and wants to become a better person.
Amity overpowers the abomination again. Luz gets up and stands back to back with Amity, glyphs at the ready in her hands. They both blush at the same time (SQUEE). Amity tells her mom to let her friends back into school or she’ll rip the abomination apart in front of all their investors. Her mom agrees and tells Amity to stop with the theatrics. The monster takes a final blow against Amity and Luz. The two pretend to be knocked out on the ground. They wink at each other and smile, before immediately pretending to be out cold again. The crowd cheers, Gus and Willow rush over, and Amity’s mom takes back her word. Immediately, Amity’s father calls her out saying she made a deal and she must uphold her end of the deal.
Inside The Owl House, the glyph disaster keeps growing. King gets caught inside of the growing ice creation. Realizing she doesn’t have the situation under control, Eda calls Lilith for help. Eda tells her she’s ready to follow the rules but Lilith surprises her and says she’s ready for an experiment, holding up a bunch of glyphs.
Next we see them, Eda and Lilith on the floor drawing glyphs. King is safe on the couch, wrapped in a scarf sipping a warm beverage, and sneezes from the effects of the cold ice. Lilith realized that glyphs command magic instead of the way they used to have magic within them. She equates the glyphs to words. Eda in her failed attempts has been drawing them on top of each other, which is essentially like shouting multiple words at the exact same time. If you order them in a carefully crafted combination, you can specify what you want them to do. They realize maybe there aren’t more glyphs and that you just have to learn combos of the four glyphs to do other things, like making complete sentences with individual words. Fascinating! Luz arrives home exhausted and gives them both stars for their works.
Amity’s parents bask in selling so many of their abominations when Golden Guard saunters in, flanked by other guards. They kneel and he tells them that the Emperor is buying every single abomiton and will fund research into making them stronger. He warns them that Emperor Belos doesn’t take kindly to citizens making a private army… That’s not promising. This is extremely worrying.
I love how we slowly are getting pieces into what Belos is doing behind the scenes. He’s working on the door to the human realm, and is ensuring that citizens don’t have protection or an army to possibly fight back against him so he can rule without interference. I wonder if Amity’s parents pick up on this potential threat. It’ll be interesting to see if they fully comply, or pull a fast one on Belos and work one something or keep a small army for their own protection.
We saw Amity’s big breakaway moment from her family and their set expectations and perceived idea of falling in line with the family. She’s announcing her independence from their control while also appealing to their senses that her actions are in their best interest. It was nice seeing Amity’s siblings helping her out in that situation too. They’ve had more independence from the family that Amity has in the past, so it’ll be interesting to see how their relationship continues to evolve. The moments between Luz and Amity were wonderful. Give me more Lumity growth! I’ll take it all! Their feelings for one another are plain as day on their faces with each blush they give each other.
Lilith and Eda’s realizations about the glyphs was extremely interesting. I didn’t even think about the fundamentals surrounding them. We just assumed they were keys to magic, but they’re the building blocks to magic outside of witches themselves. I hope we learn more about their origins or why they aren’t used more in this world. I’m certain they will be key in taking on Belos once that inevitable situation befalls our heroes.
While on the surface the episode felt more contained in the moment with Luz vs. Amity’s parents, when in fact it was full of moments where we saw growth in our characters, learned more about magic and continued seeing what Belos has going on behind the scenes. The balancing act of world building and day to day situations involving each character is spot on. Escaping Expulsion was a fun, informative and action filled episode. This season is on a roll so far and I can’t wait for next week!
The Owl House Season 2 airs Saturday mornings on Disney Channel. New episodes can be streamed on Disney Now.
