Recap / The Owl House S1E4 "The Intruder"

Original air date: 1/31/2020 (produced in 2019)

Production code: 104

Trapped inside by a boiling rainstorm, Luz and King must defend The Owl House from a mysterious intruder.

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Tropes:

• An Aesop:
  • Stealing someone's medication can harm the person it was meant for, because then they won't have it when they most need it.
  • Hiding that you have an illness can not only harm you, it may also harm people around you. Even better, you don't even have to hide your illness, because your friends will still love you.
  • If someone, particularly someone with health problems, is worn out after working hard at something and they tell you they need some time to recuperate so they don't overexert themselves, listen to them. Let them rest. On the flipside, if you're the one who needs to rest, don't push yourself past the point of exhaustion, even if other people are disappointed you can't do things. You know your limits, and you can't help anyone if you hurt yourself doing more than you can handle.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Eda gets these in her monster form. Luz even comments on them.
  Luz: Oh, man. Did you see her eyes? They were like, "BLAAAAH!"
• Black-Hole Belly: Even when Eda shrinks down to human size, having a dog-sized demon in her stomach doesn't make her visibly larger.
• Blinded by the Light: Demons with black eyes (Eda for example) are scared of the light; this is how Luz changes Eda back to normal.
• Bottle Episode: The episode mostly takes place within the house or the area surrounding it because of the boiling rain.
• Brick Joke: When Eda gets distracted by the light on the pen, she says she needs it for her nest, and Luz questions this. Later on, it turns out she really does have a nest instead of a bed.
• Broken Pedestal: Played for Laughs. King called the Snaggleback one of the mightiest beasts at the Boiling Isles, but after seeing one for himself and how small and weak they actually are, he says at the end of the episode that he will rewrite everything he previously wrote about them.
• Call-Back:
  • Willow appears grabbing her plants off her windowsill when the rain starts hitting them.
  • A subtle one, but in the previous episode King makes a bet with Eda because he wants to be Luz's teacher. Throughout this episode, he's still trying to teach Luz demonology, with her eventually calling him a great teacher.
  • King mentions when Eda got her head chopped off when Luz is worried that she inadvertently killed her by forcing her to recast the light spell again while unconscious.
  • During King's demon lesson, one of the beasts on his display is a giraffe.
• Cast from Stamina: Doing big magic (like the force-field that protects the Owl House from the boiling rain) seems to take a lot of energy out of Eda. When she tries to show Luz how to do a simple light spell, Eda proves to be so drained she eventually passes out completely.
• Chekhov's Gun: King uses the light-up pen from earlier to distract Eda in her monstrous form.
• Chekhov's Lecture: Eda explains during her first lesson that a spell's power is proportional to the size of the spell circle. Luz ends up having to put this to practice in the climax by drawing a massive version of her light spell on the wall to stun Eda's cursed form long enough to give her some elixer.
• Closed Circle: The fierce boiling rainstorm outside keeps our heroes trapped in the Owl House.
• Curse: The invader turns out to be Eda, turned into a bird-monster by a curse laid on her years ago. She passed out before she could drink the elixir to put off its effect.
• Cuteness Overload: When King, after applying bandages to himself and Luz, declares them to now be "boo-boo buddies", she lets out a squeak, her eyes dilate, and she loses the ability to sit up straight and tips over onto the ground.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: When Eda finally talks about her curse, it's handled like a mental condition, and her elixir is comparable to treatment for it. Appropriately enough, she concludes with a fitting message:
  Eda: No one likes having a curse, but, if you take the right steps, it's manageable.
• Everyone Has Standards: King was not amused by Hooty saying it'd be funny for Luz to go out into the boiling rain.
• Evolving Credits: The intro updates Willow in her new green uniform.
• Expecting Someone Taller: King meets the Snaggleback, who turns out to be a lot smaller and less threatening in person.
• Fantastic Light Source: Eda starts Luz's training with the most basic spell, which creates a ball of light.
• Fluffy the Terrible: One of the demons King claims is especially scary is named "Smoochy-Pie the Sweetybaby". He adds that this demon is a lot more threatening than his name implies.
• Foreshadowing: Eda's nest has the bones of animals in it, foreshadowing her transformation into a monster that is more than happy to eat anything smaller than her. Half of the tag on the elixir bottle is missing. King finds the missing half stuck to Luz's foot when she lost a shoe running away from Monster Eda.
• Fun with Homophones: King keeps telling Luz to look at things by saying "See." Then Luz asks him a question, and he answers in the affirmative with "Sí."
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Eda's monstrous form is initially shown only in silhouette, and superficially resembles the Snaggleback. However, if you look closely, you can see the "spikes" sway around because they're locks of hair, not attached to a rigid shell.
  • An In-Universe example happens when Luz phone, glitching from being dropped, freezes a bit revealing the Sigil for the light spell.
• Geometric Magic: It turns out Luz can cast spells by drawing certain shapes on surfaces. Witches apparently did the same a long time ago, but learned how to make a flash of Instant Runes just by tracing their fingers in a circle, and now most of them don't even know that's how it works.
• Getting Eaten Is Harmless: Eda eats the Snaggleback whole, but she's able to cough him up later, traumatized but mostly unharmed (he claims his tail may have been digested).
• Hostile Weather: Storms of boiling-hot rain are a common occurrence on the Boiling Isles. Eda says they get plagues rather than weather, and mentions phenomena like "gore-nados", "shale hail", and "painbows" (they're like rainbows, but they turn you inside out if you look at them).
• Human Outside, Alien Inside: Witches are only outwardly distinguishable from humans by their Pointy Ears, but Eda's illustration shows they have a large sac next to their heart that excretes bile that fuels spells.
• I Resemble That Remark!: Eda objects to King's remark that she's distracted by shiny objects, only to be immediately entranced by a light-up pen.
• Literal Metaphor: On the Boiling Isles, magic comes from the heart... or rather, from a "bile sac" attached to the heart that serves as a power source of magical energy. Since Luz doesn't have one, this makes it a bit harder for her to learn magic.
• Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: Luz leaves behind her left shoe to run away from Monster Eda (and the other half of the tag King found stuck under her bare foot). King retrieves her shoe for her shortly after.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Eda explains the basics of witch magic during her first lesson with Luz. Spells require some sort of power source (like a witch's bile sac) and are cast with a spell circle, with the power of the spell being proportional to the size of the circle. This is shown to hold true for Luz's magic as well, when she draws a massive light spell on the wall to incapacitate Eda's cursed form.
• Missing Steps Plan: Eda agreed to teach Luz magic without knowing how or even if it was physically possible for a human to cast spells.
• My Instincts Are Showing: Eda was cursed to turn into an owl monster, and even when she keeps the transformation at bay, she still shows owl-like behavior like obsessing over shiny objects and eating live prey whole.
• Never Trust a Title: The main threat of the episode isn't the "Intruder"— a harmless Snaggleback — but Eda in her cursed demon form.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The whole plot gets started because the elixir King stole from Eda, which he thought was some kind of magical pick-me-up tonic, was actually a treatment for a horrible curse.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: During her cryptic dream sequence at the end, Eda groans "Oh no, not this memory again!"
• Our Mages Are Different: When Eda finally tries to teach Luz a spell, they discover humans lacking a witch's magical organ may leave them unable to. Eda tries to recall an older way of casting spells that might still work, and Luz seemingly discovers it was manually writing out the magic runes that also flash when a witch casts their spell.
• Poor Communication Kills: The whole mess in this episode could have been avoided if Eda had just been open with King about her Curse.
• Post-Modern Magik: Luz records Eda casting a spell with her phone, and examines it frame-by-frame to discover and replicate the runes it was actually using.
• Prophetic Name: Luz's name means "light" and the first spell she manages to cast is a light spell.
• Real After All: Eda claims the demons King teaches about are made up, but the Snaggleback is real—however, he is much smaller, weaker, and less aggressive than King believed.
• Recurring Dreams: Eda dreams of a shadowy figure with large glowing eyes standing in a doorway. From her reaction, it's not the first time she's dreamt it.
• Red Herring: The Snaggleback. With how much it's brought up, it would be easy to assume that the intruder was a Snaggleback. Such a demon was Real After All, but much less impressive than King thought, and the real "intruder" was actually Eda's Owl-Beast form.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: King saw that Eda gets a power boost after drinking her elixir, causing him to believe that it grants magical energy. It's revealed in later episodes that Eda's curse actually drains her magic, and drinking the elixir brings it back up to normal.
• Running Gag: One of the creatures on King's board is a giraffe.
• Self-Deprecation: King (voiced by Alex Hirsch) complains about the "hideous voice" of Hooty. Hooty, of course, is also voiced by Alex Hirsch.
• Shout-Out:
  • The demons in King's presentation include Buer from the Ars Goetia and a triangular, one-eyed creature that looks an awful lot like Bill Cipher.
  • Eda's curse transforms her into an owl-like demon, much like how Howl's curse transforms him into a bird-like monster in Howl's Moving Castle.
  • The scene where Eda's demon form chases Luz through the Owl House is a reference to No-Face chasing Chihiro in Spirited Away.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Unless she takes daily doses of potion to suppress it, Eda's curse transforms her into a large and physically powerful — but completely feral and predatory — owl-like demon.
• Tempting Fate: Luz tries to get Eda to show her how to do magic despite Eda being exhausted, and says that one more demonstration won't kill her. Eda quickly passes out from exhaustion, and (thanks to some trolling by King) Luz is briefly afraid it really did kill her.
• This Means Warpaint: Luz uses a pair of band-aids as facial markings before setting out with King to find the demon.
• Weaksauce Weakness: According to King, a demon's greatest weaknesses are purified water... and the occasional passive-aggressive comment.
  Luz: Aww, you guys are sensitive!
  King: Even demons have inner demons.
• Weird Weather: The Boiling Isles has some rather hostile weather phenomena, boiling water falling as rain being one of them.
  Eda: We don't have weather; we have plagues, gornadoes, shale hail, painbows...
  King: It's like a rainbow, but looking at it turns you inside-out.
• Wham Episode: Luz learns to cast a spell for the first time, and Eda is revealed to have a curse that turns her into an owl-like monster if she doesn't keep drinking a special elixir.
• Wham Shot: King finds out what the second half of the tag on Eda's Elixir says, "An elixir a day keeps the curse at bay." Shortly after, we finally get a good look at the creature that's been prowling throughout the owl house. ...and see its face has a strong resemblance to Eda.
• Wildlife Commentary Spoof: The episode opens with Luz using her phone to record King wrestling with a sock, narrating it in the style of David Attenborough.

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