Review: The Owl House “Once Upon a Swap”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

When Luz and Eda can’t agree on whether to make the shop stand flashy and King feels underappreciated, Eda decides the best way to share perspectives is with a body swap episode. So Luz is now Eda, Eda is now King, and King is now Luz. King-Luz ends up running with some rowdy teenagers and briefly taking control of their social clique, Eda-King gets trapped in a cat-themed café, and Luz-Eda is out of the story for a disconcertingly long amount of time before making the shop stand out like she wanted to only to get arrested and almost put in the Emperor’s Coven by Lilith. The all reconvene, Eda turns them all back, and they get away from the authorities in the chaos.

OUR TAKE

As formulaic as shows like these can get with their premises, it’s typically not the well worn premise that ends up being the issue, but the execution. I like me a good body swapping episode every now and then, usually for the reasons shown here: it gives the characters involved a chance to see things from the other’s eyes, walk a mile in their shoes, and so on and so forth. Though I guess I’m used to it coming about due to some sort of accident or random curse or something that they can’t undo without going through some sort of obligatory understanding of the other’s hardships and such. I don’t know if having the swap happen due to deliberate action by Eda is meant to just be a lampshade on that, but something about it feels…not right.

It’s just something she decides to do over what is a pretty tepid disagreement and can apparently undo at any time in order to settle with Luz that it’s important not to draw too much attention to the stand…knowing full well that Luz will draw attention to the stand to prove her own point and likely get arrested, which will make selling things even harder to do down the road AND leave the inexperienced Luz in the driver seat of Eda’s full magical potential, which is the equivalent of giving a monkey a loaded machine gun (not that the show explores that). In theory, that could be a cool way for Luz to get a good look at what it’s like to be the kind of witch she wants to grow up to be (which they don’t explore either), but it really doesn’t accomplish much aside from showing that Lilith really doesn’t know her sister at all if she knew she could body swap but didn’t recognize that her sister wasn’t in her own body and acting like a scared teenager.

Also kind of weird is that the episode gives titles to each of the subplots as each character goes through their day…even though they’re not nearly separate enough to warrant separate titles AND the titles themselves don’t even go well with the subplots. I’ve never before been more certain of feeling like an episode was hobbled together from the mumblings of writer with a serious hangover than I am with this one, because it feels very hobbled together, rushed, and shat out onto the airwaves likely with the hope that it will be forgotten with time.