Review: The Owl House “The First Day”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Luz shows off her two spells, Light and Ice creation, to Principal Bump. Using paper to make spells is apparently a lost magic that he’s never heard of (which I find surprising considering it seems pretty basic), but he lets her into Hexide. However, he forces Luz to pick a track to stick with, but when Luz can’t decide, Bump puts her in the Potion Track like Eda had. Yet the siren call of the other tracks is too great for Luz, and the moment she picks up a crystal ball from the Oracle Track, she’s thrown in detention.

There, she meets other students who also wanted to learn multiple tracks by using secret passages to sneak into other classes. Luz bonds with them…but then they turn on her when they overhear her friends quoting that she was better than being in detention (which they somehow interpret as being better than THEM as people?). However, a magic stealing beast infiltrates the school and the detention kids get to prove themselves by saving the day, convincing Bump to allow them to learn different tracks. Also Eda also wanted to learn multiple tracks while in school, which should surprise literally no one considering they mentioned that before awhile ago.

OUR TAKE

The word of the day is CONTRIVED. Adjective. “Created or arranged in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic.” Because that would describe a lot of the developments here. Things are happening in order to lead to a specific result instead of occurring naturally because of the events leading to those results. Why do witches need to only pick one track? So Luz can stand out by wanting to learn more than one. Why does Luz get tempted to pick up a crystal ball? So she can get thrown in detention. Why do Luz’s detention friends overhear Gus quoting Luz saying she’s better than detention? So that she can have a falling out with her new friends. Why does this magic absorbing lady show up at school? So Luz can prove that learning more than one track has its advantages. There’s nothing wrong having an intended result with character choices, but it becomes a problem when you are making characters take nonsensical actions just to get to those points.

I was initially willing to let go the weirdness of not being able to learn more than one type of magic since the Emperor wants to limit the people with multiple skills to his elite guard, but where falls apart is having students not even have the option to learn other types. It would be one thing if witches could learn all the types until they figured out which of the covens they wanted to stick with, but making them pick RIGHT AWAY seems so pointlessly limiting. Not to mention the inherent advantages of knowing more than one skill is pretty self-explanatory. Just start with one track, then branch out and develop it from there before figuring out what you work best with. As an educator, Bump should really not need to have this pretty obvious problem with his curriculum be pointed out to him by this novice human witch.

But that leads me to the bigger problem with all of this, which is that this contrived scenario basically proves that Luz is totally right and has no reason to change. To clarify, I don’t have a problem with Luz having a point, but when the other side of the argument she’s in is deliberately sabotaged in order to make her point stronger, it doesn’t feel like she overcame anything, just that they set up a strawman for her to knock down. I do appreciate the world-building we got this episode, which keeps it from getting an even lower score, but I really hope this is not a sign of things to come with the rest of the show. I guess we’ll see next week when we seem to be getting a double feature.