Review: The Owl House “Lost in Language”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
While Eda and King babysit the kids of a bat lady for a reward, Luz returns Eda’s library books to the local library, where she runs into Amity reading books to kids, seeing a more compassionate side to her even though they can’t seem to find common ground. Luz also meets her two siblings, Emira and Edric, who love to torment Amity but seem far more welcoming of Luz. They even invite her to sneak back into the library to have fun with the books during the passing of the Wailing Star, which turns out to have the power to bring literature to life.
This is fun for Luz, the real purpose is to find Amity’s secret room and read her diary. In said room, Luz learns that Amity loves the same fantasy books as her, though once Amity arrives and sees Luz with her diary, she writes her off entirely. Luz tries to make this right, though the two of them get captured by a corrupted version of a kids book about friendship, only saved by working together and bonding a bit more in the process, with Luz even letting Amity borrow her copy of the newest book in the series.
OUR TAKE
Glad to see that Amity is slowly gaining more dimension to her over this first season. It’s actually pretty common for the “bully” character to get more developed as a show’s respective protagonist learns to be more empathetic and understand that they’re a person too, but I’ve seen examples of that not even being attempted so it’s good that The Owl House is going that route. I was actually pretty worried they wouldn’t for a bit there when Amity’s first appearance made her look squarely in the wrong when her grievances were more than understandable, though it looks like we’re learning more about what makes her the complicated individual she is through each new detail. She’s got siblings who torment her and probably parents who pressure her to be the best, which leads her to cutting ties with good friends like Willow and be suspicious of people like Luz who are openly and nakedly kind. Seems that each encounter is slowly breaking down that icy exterior, which we’ll no doubt see continue to happen throughout the rest of the season.
As for the fun gimmick this episode, it’s pretty cool to see a sort of “Night at the Museum” plot but with books instead of statues and Owen Wilson. The rules that establish how these living books impact the world or can be edited to change a story or character’s nature is a pretty cool one, though I feel like there’s more that can be done with that. Like how maybe different interpretations of the same work could be at war with each other or maybe how censoring of ideas and concepts impacts how they are portrayed or something like that. I don’t know when we’ll be able to make use of this again since we don’t know when the Wailing Comet comes around or what can be done to make a similar effect, but at the very least, the more corrupted version of a character who is meant to represent friendship was a good way to expand on the tumultuous relationship Luz and Amity are forming. And they even managed to make the subplot with Eda and King link thematically with the main plot by making it about forming loving bonds despite conflict! Cool parallels! Perhaps this show can work out its kinks faster than I thought, which will make tuning into the back half of the season a lot easier to look forward to.
Hi Ashley, thank you so much for reading and we love the feedback. Note that on that day we had 14th posts go up and only ten posts show on the front page, so it's possible the preview had already been archived by the time you got to it. One recommendation would be to add our RSS feed to your favorite news aggregator service like Feedly, this way you get all of the latest posts!