A LYING WITCH AND A WARDEN

and so we begin! if you've come here directly through the landing page or otherwise, i might recommend checking out this introductory page first, but introductions aside, welcome to the first of many, many episode overviews. i also recommend that you at least consider watching this first episode through whatever means you can get your hands on it, including, perhaps, the full-on official upload on YouTube. i'm playing the format of these overviews by ear - i'll try to broadly talk about the plot beats of each episode, but these aren't meant to be read as in-depth recaps. more of a companion piece, where i encourage you to watch along while i talk about the bits i find particularly interesting in each episode and touch on various character arcs as they start to come into focus.

A Lying Witch and a Warden is a weird one to rewatch, knowing the places this show will go. it presents a lot of the same thematic elements that are going to drive this show over this next fourty or so episodes, but it's all condensed down fairly tightly. the details of this world still feel a little blurry at this point, but what it might lack in big picture lore, it absolutely makes up for in immediately giving you a sense of who these characters are.

Luz Noceda is a weird kid. that's going to surface in a lot of ways throughout the show, but what's important to know right now is that she's big on, in the show's own words, "editing anime clips to music and reading fantasy books with convoluted backstories". as a former weird kid myself, can relate. with her behavior proving increasingly disruptive at school, she's being sent to a summer camp in the hopes that it'll help her mellow out.

first bit of that editorializing - this whole camp thing. this debut episode honestly moves through this plot surprisingly fast, and the stakes all feel a little melodramatically elevated to tell this story in a tight 22 minutes, with the "Reality Check Summer Camp" pamphlet promising to help kids "think inside the box". i don't say this in the sense that Luz is being overly dramatic about it - the world itself is being a little wacky and exaggerated as a narrative device to establish this plot quickly. it's going to take a while for the show to loop back around to some of this, and my understanding from friends who've been watching this show from the get-go is that a lot of people read Luz's mom as a lot more antagonistic than she's perhaps intended to come across as.

as someone who, in my own youth, found myself being a problem for the local school system in some pretty similar ways to Luz, i immediately read a lot more texture into this. Camila isn't excited to send her daughter off to summer camp, but these are absolutely the types of choices that schools push onto parents. that's not the perspective this show is approaching the matter from right now, but i do find it important to put my foot down about what was supposedly a hot button issue amongst fans up until the show's focus drifts back here.

seriously, though, this episode doesn't waste any time, as we're already entering the grim fantasy world of the Boiling Isles by the three-minute mark. it's all maybe a little bit low-brow in conveying to us that this isn't going to be what Luz expects, but it gets the job done and the design work for this landscape and its residents is immediately pretty impressive. i remember being a bit apprehensive on this show's art style based on the first few stills i saw, but it really didn't take long for it to grow on me once it was in motion. it's here that we're introduced to one of our other core cast members, Eda, otherwise known as the Owl Lady, a purveyor of human goods, and the self-proclaimed 'most powerful witch' in this world.

the dynamic put forward here, where Luz's knowledge of the human world is going to be helpful to Eda's business, isn't one that's going to remain at the forefront for very long, but it's a fun way to set this situation up. Eda is a pretty immediately charming character, especially when it becomes clear that she's on the run from the law. in the vocabulary of our times, we stan a problematic girlboss.

once we make it to the titular Owl House, we're introduced to two more characters who we'll be seeing a lot of going forward - the house's living 'security system' Hooty, and the utterly adorable silly little creature that is King. Hooty is... weird for these first few episodes, coming across a lot more indignant about his place in this ragtag bunch of misfits. it's going to take them a while to find his voice tonally, but not sonically - he's voiced by Alex Hirsch, doing 'a bad impression of Mickey Mouse' in what was once intended to be a placeholder vocal. it's an excellent voice and i could listen to it for hours and they absolutely made the right call keeping it in the final cut.

King, on the other hand, makes his whole deal abundantly clear pretty quickly, thanks in part to a bit of exposition from Eda. despite his small adorable stature, he claims to have once been 'king of all demons', and he behaves as such, taking on inanimate objects around the house as his 'subjects' and talking about destroying all who oppose him and such. if he wants to return to full power, he needs his crown, which has been locked away by the villanous Warden Wrath in the Conformatorium, and only a human can retrieve it, meaning Luz will have to stick around in the Demon Realm just a little bit longer if she wants Eda to use her magic key to send her home.

it's really easy to forget a lot of these plot details, because this first episode is an oddly tight and self-contained 22 minutes. Warden Wrath, for all his hype, is not the main villain of this show. he's not even a second-in-command or anything to the real big bad calling the shots, who we don't even get a hint of here. the Conformatorium he runs, meant to lock away self-proclaimed 'weirdos', is also not going to be a regularly recurring setting, although this isn't the last time we're going to see it. there's an argument to be made that for such a serialized show, this makes A Lying Witch and a Warden a rather weak introduction, but as i opened this piece with, i think for all its weirdness, this episode does do the arguably even more important work of laying down the foundations for how we're going to approach this core cast of characters.

case in point, once Luz and King have infiltrated the Conformatorium, we get to see a somewhat sillier and much more petty side to the demon. for all his bluster, he's not above calling himself "a squirmy little fella" or joking around. as we come to understand throughout this mission, he's as much an outcast as Eda is, and this episode really wants to drill into your head that this is going to be a story about people who don't quite fit in finding a sense of belonging. i would say the clumsier side of this, then, is in the prisoners of the Conformatorium, all of whom are incarcerated for mostly harmless 'weird' behavior. it works, but in trying to signal its themes this hard in this short of a timespan, it does leave the whole thing feeling a bit one-note.

anyways, once they make it to the forcefield, which only Luz can cross through - a plot point that feels exceedingly weird in the context of information we receive literally next episode about how Luz is the only human currently living on the Boiling Isles - it's revealed that the crown King has been coveting is nothing but another one of Eda's odd human realm trinkets, a paper crown from Burger Queen. Eda fully understands this, but it's not about any literal power in her mind, it's about how important feeling powerful is to King. it's a nice moment that shows that Eda's laissez-faire relationship with authority isn't just about her own personal gain.

speaking of Eda, relationships, and authority, Warden Wrath is here! though at first he comes across as a full-blown menace, cutting Eda's head off (don't worry, she's fine. in her own words, "this just happens when you get older".) and destroying King's crown, he's actually here to ask Eda out on a date while she's cornered, which really just makes him a different, more pathetic type of menace. i love Wrath a lot. he has a real love-to-hate quality, his underlings all seem to be genuinely rooting for him to work up the courage for this stunt, and he looks cool as all hell. i can easily envision a world where this show is developed as something slightly less serialized, and this guy just shows up every week, maybe with some recurring cartoonish goons to gas him up? i get why we don't live in that world, and i'll gladly sacrifice this guy for the places this show actually does end up going, but he's got so much care poured into him for what amounts to an intro stage miniboss in the Boiling Isles' villain hierarchy.

just to make letting go of Warden Wrath sting a little more, this leads into a sequence that i think really caught my attention and primed me to keep watching this show early on, as Eda puts herself back together and uses her magic to fight the Warden. the animation here is even more polished than usual, with Warden Wrath using his tentacle arms to prowl through the halls of the Conformatorium and Eda doing some run-and-gun fire magic. the rules of magic in this setting aren't really explored too deeply in this initial episode, but this is a really good scene for immediately putting a bit of weight behind Eda's claims of being the most powerful witch on the Isles, and giving us a taste of what witches might be capable of. the weirdos help tackle the Warden down, and Luz gets to live out the power fantasy of her favorite book, albeit with less wizardry and more firecrackers.

with matters settled, Eda sends Luz on her way, despite the loss of King's crown. Luz thinks it over, and comes to the conclusion that as far as anyone is concerned back home, she's still just at summer camp, so why not spend these months in the Demon Realm instead, learning to do magic like Eda? even if humans are seemingly rare around here, Eda knows enough to say fairly authoratively that humans can't just learn to do that, but that's not going to stop Luz from just trying a little harder. figuring that it at least wouldn't hurt to have some extra hands around the house, Eda accepts, bringing us into what will be the actual status quo for the foreseeable future of this show. our premiere ends with Luz texting with her mom, perhaps a little melancholy about having to keep up this lie but ready to enjoy her summer on her own terms.

if not for some especially strong recommendations and an inkling or two of things that are coming later in the show, i'm not sure how immediately this debut would have hooked me. for all my gushing in my introductory post, this show is going to take some time to climb up that lofty pedestal i've put it on. i think the writers very clearly have their head in the right place, though, because at the core of any good story, you need characters you care about. even this early on, i like the core cast this show is building up a lot - Eda's dry wit is already charming, King makes for a good comedic foil, and i can relate a lot to Luz feeling a bit distanced from her peers because her heartfelt love for fiction can manifest in ways that are difficult for other people.

it's very easy to look back on this episode and think it feels a little off, given what i know about the future of The Owl House, but when you break it down, a lot of that comes down to what exists within the fictional world being put in front of us. to zoom out even further to the biggest, broadest picture of what this show strives to be about, a lot of the pieces are already in place. Warden Wrath might not be our recurring main antagonist, but the close-minded thinking and tyranny he represents are going to remain the antagonistic force our main cast grapples with. we might not get a particularly deep look into Luz's life back home, no, but the concepts the show puts forward about the friction between educational systems and 'difficult' students are hardly unintentional. and for as heavy-handed as the stuff with the Conformatorium prisoners gets, this is, without a doubt, a story about weirdos sticking together.

now also seems like as good a time as any to talk about the credits sequence. we're not going to see the opening sequence until next time, but i'm of the strong belief that these things do matter. not to a 'make or break' extent, no, but hey, if they animated something nice to put under the credits, that's a choice that was made, effort was put into it, and i'll give it a fair nod. i like this one a lot! there's something about the music that's very 'bittersweet cozy' in a way that really suits this show, and the animation of Luz wandering through a switching set of Boiling Isle vignettes is a cool visual. if you're a first-time watcher, you might also spot some locales and characters in here that we're not going to be seeing until later this season. enticing!

and there we have it, our first 22 minutes down. i don't really know how i intend to end these overviews, because i don't see much use in scoring the episodes on any scale. they are, across the board, pretty much all good in their own ways, and i don't see any value in saying this premiere is 'worse' than episodes that have the benefit of paying off long-term story arcs down the road. A Lying Witch and a Warden might be weird to a second-time viewer like me, but it's doing what it needs to do, which is conveying who these people are and why you should care. if you are watching along, i hope you enjoyed, and even if you didn't, i hope maybe having this ongoing set of overviews helps guide people towards this show so we can start digging into the really good stuff later.

next time on The Owl House - Luz meets a wizard!