Review: The Owl House “Enchanting Grom Fright”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

As Luz continues to expand her magical repertoire, Grom Night rapidly approaches. But this isn’t just a regular word made to sound a little more spooky like the rest of this show’s lingo, but the night that one student must face Grom, a magical entity that forces them to face their biggest fears and become Grom Queen. This year, that student is Amity, who is already scared out of her mind about the ordeal, so Luz volunteers to take her place. She gets a lot of training to hold off her surface level fears, but doesn’t tell anyone her actual biggest fear: that her mother will find out that she’s been lying about being at camp. She ends up running away, forcing Amity to own up to her own fear, which is being rejected as Grom date from…someone (who is revealed to be Luz in secret), so she and Luz defeat the Grom together. That night, Luz decides to actually talk to her mother, but not explain where she’s been yet. But it seems that someone has been sending her mother letters to say she’s at camp.

OUR TAKE

You know what, I’m gonna try and be nice to the show this week. Not JUST for what might seem like an obvious reason, but also because I think I need to pull back on the vitriol as we come closer to the finale. This week’s episode is probably the first that actually showed me this show could be more than a mish-mash of YA novel tropes. It’ll be up to the show to live up to that down the line, but for now I’m going to be optimistic. A prom episode is kinda expected for a school setting, regardless of whether or not it makes sense, so I guess it was expected for this show. And while it does kinda pull from the well of clichés there, it does use the Grom Fight in an interesting way.

It feels a bit too Harry Potter with them using the fear based monster, but it does at least use it to touch on an issue I was worried might NEVER be addressed in a significant way: Luz and her lying to her mother. The episode opens with confirmation that Luz can apparently re-enter the human world ANY TIME SHE WANTS (which feels weird right after watching Amphibia for weeks when Anne is so desperate for any reminder of her home) so it kinda dips my sympathy and respect for Luz as a character given that she is lying to her mother just so she can have fun, but…at least she feels bad about it? I dunno, this really needs to get further explored. Right now it’s not looking good, regardless of the stuff going on with Amity.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that we seem to have confirmation that Amity is crushing hard on Luz, showing a main character in a Disney thing actually wanting to be in a same-sex relationship. I say “seem” because I’m still skeptical that Disney will allow this to go all the way, but even this step is pretty big because I didn’t think they’d even make it this far. I’m certainly eager to see where it goes with the rest of this season and the second, though it doesn’t seem like homophobia is a thing in this world, at least as far as we’ve been able to tell. I’ll have my own opinions on the development of this relationship as it develops, but for now it’s neat that they’re bothering at all. Low bar, I know.