Review: The Owl House “Really Small Problems; Understanding Willow”


OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

When school is closed suddenly, Luz, Eda, and King must learn to create a school at home through magic Zoom calls!…wait, read that wrong. They go to a carnival. But King is jealous that Luz spends time with Gus and Willow instead of him, so he gets a shrinking potion from Tibbles (remember him?) to get them out of the way. He gets found out, the group is almost killed by tiny animals, they make up, end of story.

Later, Luz and Willow attend a class about photographing memories, but the memories they take photos of can be destroyed if handled poorly (more on this later). Amity sees a memory of her in Willow’s collection and tries to burn it to destroy the evidence, but this ends up burning a ton of Willow’s memories. To make amends, she and Luz go inside Willow’s mind to fix things. Once inside, they learn more about both Willow’s and Amity’s past, including why she stopped being friends with her, which was mostly pressure from her parents. They eventually confront the flame that’s burning the memories and Amity starts rebuilding the bridge between her and Willow, though they’re not quite friends yet.

OUR TAKE

So, for whatever reason, we have two episodes of The Owl House to look at this week. Initially this seems like a smart move, since the first of the two episodes, “Really Small Problems”, is a pretty weak outing on its own (which seems to be consistent with King focused episodes so far). It’s pretty similar to “Sense and Insensitivity” in that the main thrust of the plot is that King screws up something and eventually has to own up to it. Were that the only episode to review this week, it would have been a pretty mundane review overall. So, with plenty of people eager to learn more about Amity’s connection to Willow that’s been hinted at in previous episodes, the powers that be decided to speed things up a bit and show that episode too. And there is WAAAAAY more to unpack with that one, though not all of it good.

In fact, the first thing about it is actually pretty alarming. Whose bright idea, in or out of universe, was it to have the memory that students pull out of each other FOR SCHOOL PROJECTS to be able to destroy the ACTUAL MEMORIES if they’re destroyed? I know that comparing stuff to Harry Potter is not in fashion right now, but I’m pretty sure the Penseive doesn’t PULL OUT THE DATA OF THE MEMORIES THAT CAN BE SUSPECTIBLE TO BEING DESTROYED. Why would ANY SCHOOL do work on that kind of magic if it came at the potential risk of having a student TURN INTO A BRAINDEAD INVALID?! So that detail alone feels just contrived to make drama happen, which I guess this show just likes to do regardless of the implications it brings about the world later.

But onto the character relationship stuff. While it is interesting to get to the heart of the complicated broken friendship between Amity and Willow, which seems to be slowly reforming and not instantly healed (which I think is a good move), that also seems to have some things that were really forced. Apparently the main thing that got Amity to cut ties with Willow was that Amity’s parents threatened to keep Willow out of Hexside if Amity didn’t comply. I have to really question how much effort that would be worth OR how they didn’t think Amity wouldn’t tell Willow about this, but she didn’t so I guess that plan worked. This show just seems to be way more fumbles than catches overall, though we still have four more episodes this season to see if it breaks that trend.