Review: The Owl House “Wing It Like Witches”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

It’s Grudgby season at Hexside, which turns out to be a different sport entirely from Rugby! Who knew! Though the main event going on is the big upheaval in the social ladder. Amity is hanging around Luz a lot more, which has apparently been a sign of weakness by her popular friends, with the tri-clops Boscha taking her position as most popular, helped by being the captain of the school’s Grudgby team. She starts targeting Willow for acting more confident since making up with Amity, though Luz comes to defend her and challenges Boscha to a Grudgy match, inspired by another Azura story. If Willow wins, then no more bullying, but if Boscha wins, then things are only going to get worse.

They train hard in montage form, though Willow thinks it’s hopeless and quits, forcing Luz to face everyone alone. That obviously doesn’t go great, but Amity, the former captain of the team, convinces Willow to come back and play, with Amity joining them. They then manage to fight off the other team and score some points…only to find out there was a Golden Snitch-like thing that instantly gets the other team a ton of points. Still, they had a fun game and Luz learned fire magic, though Boscha isn’t about to let them carry on with a good attitude.

Also, Eda and Lilith play a Grudgy skirmish to determine if Eda will go with her to see the Emperor and Lilith loses and leaves. I’m starting to think Lilith might be an idiot.

OUR TAKE

Well, it didn’t take too long for the show to back to its more expected level of quality, but MAN was it a sharp dive back. The popular girls schtick is already played out to hell and back so having that carry an entire episode on it wasn’t super thrilling to me already, though the sports angle was a neat addition. I’m always eager for more worldbuilding and learning more about a popular sport in that world certainly helps, but I shouldn’t be surprised that the sport itself is pretty boring to watch, even with all the magical traps happening all over the place. And then at the very end, there’s a very random commentary on how the Snitch from Harry Potter’s Quidditch that may have been topical if this was done ten years ago, but now feels really dated. Not to mention that while catching the Snitch DOES end a Quidditch game, it doesn’t necessarily mean the team that catches wins, since the other team could get more than the 150 points catching it earns.

We also have two characters holding the idiot ball this week, though for similar but different reasons. Amity is in full on crush mode with Luz, which makes sense at this point with her character, but the being barely able to talk to her without breaking out into huge red blushes starts out kind of cute and gets to be pretty annoying after awhile. I remember thinking it was a lot more cute back when I watched something like Hinata pining over Naruto in “Naruto”, but now I’ve come to want the romances I watch to pick up the pace. Now when I see something like, say, Noelle constantly pulling a blushy act with Asta from “Black Clover” and it doesn’t go anywhere for over a hundred episodes, I’m pretty rightly annoyed. I’m sure there’s plans for further development between the two of them sooner rather than later, but this wasn’t the best used of their time since they could be talking to each other more than less. Thankfully Amity is a big part of this episode, but hopefully the blushing goes down.

And then there’s Lilith, who looks to be pretty much bending all the rules to maybe get a little close to her sister, the most wanted criminal in the isles, but this makes increasingly less sense the longer it goes on. I understand it being complicated dealing with your family, but given the positions both of them are in, this seems a lot less like making an exception for a family member and more just being bad at your job. But whatever, we’ve got two episodes left in this season and I’m sure things are going to start getting a lot more serious from here on out.