Recap / The Owl House S2E4 "Keeping Up A-fear-ances"

Original air date: 7/3/2021

Production code: 204

Eda gets an unwelcome visit from a family member who puts a strain on everyone in the Owl House.

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Tropes:

• Affectionate Nickname: Gwendolyn calls Eda "Witchlet", and Lilith "Sweet Flea".
• The Alcoholic: Played for Laughs, Appleblood is implied to be some form of alcohol or alcohol-like substance. After witnessing just how far Eda will go for one bottle, Gwendolyn starts to worry that the curse isn't Eda's only problem. Eda even refers to it as her "night juice."
• All for Nothing: Gwendolyn has been trying to cure Eda's curse for thirty years. But since she keeps falling for scams that promise 100% cures rather than treatments like the potion, she's wasted tons of time and resources, alienated Eda, and neglected Lilith.
• All-Natural Snake Oil: The gremlins' cures are at best useless tinctures, and at worst actual garbage or harmful things like fire bees, that they've ascribed mystical properties to and sell at outrageous prices.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Owl Beast Eda was dangerous enough, but Raven Beast Lilith is shown to be a much bigger threat, figuratively and literally.
• An Aesop: Do NOT trust alternative medicine and miracle cures over the word of medical professionals. While it might be tempting to turn to someone promising a quick and easy solution to either your illness or that of a loved one - especially when that illness has no cure - at best it won't cure anything, and you run the risk of making the illness even worse.
• And I Must Scream: While in Raven Beast form, Lilith is aware of what she's doing but can't control herself.
• At Arm's Length: Eda keeps her mother away from hugging her this way when she drops by for an unwanted visit.
• Bait-and-Switch: At the end of the episode, we see Camila apparently crying over Luz being missing... but then it's shown that she's actually watching a sad nature documentary and gets offered some tissues by an imposter taking the form and role of Luz...
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Every time the curse kicks in, Eda is put in a dark place, running away from a giant barn owl-like monster. But at the episode's climax, thanks to her mother's encouragement and apology, she manages to face her inner demon, reducing it into a baby form of itself, and block it when it tries to escape from her, allowing her to take control of her cursed form.
• The Beastmaster: As part of the Beast-Keeping Coven, Gwendolyn is able to command the fire bees and threatens to turn all the animals of Bonesborough on the gremlins if she sees them again.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: There is the small implication that Camila wanted her daughter to be more normal, and that is only fulfilled because a fake replica took the place of the real Luz.
• Big Entrance: Gwendolyn arrives in a giant tornado. We can see where Eda gets her showmanship from.
• Big "WHAT?!": This is Hooty's reaction when Lilith decides to move back home with Gwendolyn.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the end, Eda, Lilith, and Gwendolyn reconcile with each other, but Lilith decides to leave the Owl House to spend some more time with her mother while researching the curse. Meanwhile in the Human World, it's revealed that someone or something is impersonating Luz and living with her mother.
• Broken Tears: Gwendolyn's Cooldown Hug causes Raven Beast Lilith to break down in tears, giving Luz an opening to administer the elixir, and even after being restored to normal, Lilith continues to cry while saying she's sorry for being unable to stop herself.
• But Now I Must Go: Lilith decides to go with her mother to spend some quality time with her and to study the curse together, much to Hooty's sadness.
• Call-Back:
  • Eda teased Luz's curiosity with the possibility of learning about her parents in the future at the end of "Covention", and here we meet her mother Gwendolyn Clawthorne. In the former episode, King tries to discourage Luz from wanting to learn more, hinting at their strained relationship shown in this episode.
  • King brings up his missing father, whom he learned about last episode.
  • He also states that he tried subduing the Raven Beast with a light glyph like Luz did with the Owl Beast in "The Intruder".
• Calling Parents by Their Name: Eda at first calls her mother with her name, Gwendolyn, just to further emphasize how strained their relationship is. At the end of the episode, she starts to call her as mom.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Luz and King both do this to Gwendolyn.
  • Luz tells her that she's obviously being scammed by Wartlop, and even tackles her upon learning that she had her palisman steal all of Eda’s elixir from the Owl House.
  • King also calls her out for ignoring Lilith to the point that she missed all the signs that Lilith also had the curse.
    King: Were you not paying any attention to her?!
• The Cameo: Morton, Eda's elixir supplier, makes a brief appearance.
• Comically Missing the Point: After her attempt to pay Morton for more elixir with a "hyper-realistic drawing" of him gets refused, Luz blames it on the drawing not being very good.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Over the years, Eda has transformed into the Owl Beast so many times that she isn't even remotely scared or fazed during the chase sequence.
  Oh, let's just get this over with.
• Contrived Coincidence: Eda literally tripped over the portal, mostly buried in the ground, while running from her mother after eavesdropping and learning that she was willing to try more extreme measures to cure the curse.
• Cooldown Hug: Gwendolyn apologizes to and tenderly holds Beast Eda, then Beast Lilith, in order to buy Luz time to give them their elixirs. This causes to Eda to fight back against her inner Owl Beast and regain control of herself, and while not as effective with Lilith, it does cause her Beast form to start crying.
• Crazy-Prepared: Eda reveals that she's hidden bottles of elixir all over the Owl House, so that if either she or Lilith feel the curse flaring up, they can treat it quickly no matter where in the house it happens. Unfortunately, Gwendolyn gets rid of all the elixir because she's sure that her new "cure" will work, leading to an Owl Beast/Raven Beast rampage at the episode's climax.
• Daddy Didn't Show: Lilith laments to King that her mother never even came to her Coven Initiation.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Lilith's relationship with her mother is certainly reminiscent to anyone who might have a sibling with health conditions that require, or at least cause, their parents to give a lot of extra attention to the sibling but seemingly ignore the other one who is going to of course seem much more self-sufficient comparatively.
  • Gwen's use of non-traditional methods to try and remove Eda's curse reads as a condemnation of alternative medicine and medical practices.
    • Gwendolyn's refusal to accept the elixir as medicine because it's not a perfect cure but then trying any and all folk remedy she comes across simply because they claim to be complete cures puts her in the alternative medicine camp.
    • Alternatively, her speech about how the curse is a part of Eda and not something to be ashamed of can be interpreted as a parent whose child has special needs or development disorder. One who can't accept that it can only be managed and not "cured", becoming obsessed partly out of guilt to the point of falling victims to scammers and con artists.
    • "Master Wartlop" and his "cures" are a very blatant indictment of homeopathy, with everything he sells being profoundly bogus, ineffectual, and overpriced. His book — which ends at a crucial part with an ad for his next volume (at 15 easy payments of 180 snails) — even has a two-page spread simply saying, "Don't Spend Money on This — Spend it on Me!" with a customer turning up his nose at a potion.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": When Luz runs after Gwendolyn, calling her "Mrs. Clawthorne", Gwendolyn asks her to call her "Gwen".
• Drunk on Milk: After binging on lots of tubs of ice cream, Lilith and King act and speak as if they were drunk. It's even enough to worry Hooty, who notes that Eda buys said ice cream at the Night Market, and thus it may well be alcoholic.
• Easily Forgiven: Even after Gwendolyn finds out that it was Lilith who gave Eda the curse, she isn't mad at her for it.
• Enemy Within: The personification of Eda's curse manifests as a massive Owl Beast with a barn owl-like face, which takes over her body every time her curse fully transforms her. By confronting it instead of running away, Eda shrinks her inner demon down to a baby version of itself and regains control of her body.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Luz tries to investigate the cure out of guilt about Eda's curse getting worse, as well as knowing her own mom must be missing her. She gets skeeved out on learning the "cures" are endangering Eda's life and stressing her out, and outright tackles Gwendolyn on learning she stole all the elixir in the Owl House.
  • King, of all people, calls Gwendolyn out on neglecting Lilith to the point that she overlooked the very obvious signs that her other daughter was cursed.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Notably, the episode begins and ends with Eda's entire day. The story opens with Eda getting ready for the day, and by the time it nears the end, Eda turns in for the night, intent on sleeping "for 24 hours".
• Face Framed in Shadow: The Luz Doppelgänger at the episode's end has its face framed in shadow, though being an exact replica of Luz, it must clearly still resemble her face so as not to arouse her mother's suspicions. Instead, it is more to underline its sinister presence and intentions for replacing Luz.
• Failed a Spot Check: Gwendolyn is so fixated on curing Eda's curse that she fails to notice the obvious signs that Lilith is also suffering from the curse right up until Lilith transforms into her Raven Beast form.
• Failure Is the Only Option: As usual, another attempt to cure Eda's curse turns out to be a scam. Lilith instead suggests they keep studying the curse to come up with a cure themselves.
• Familiar: Like her daughters, Gwendolyn also has a palisman, in the form of a hawk she named "Hawksley".
• Foreshadowing:
  • Eda advises Lilith, in the throes of her first partial transformation, that the curse gets worse as you get more stressed. Seeing her mother appear and subject Eda to Parental Favoritism, even brushing off Lilith's own signs of the curse, proves to be a stressful enough situation that Lilith's curse eventually consumes her when her bottled up emotions become too unstable. It also foreshadows Eda herself succumbing to the curse after hitting her breaking point with Gwendolyn and Luz's attempts to "cure" her.
  • When Lilith is looking for the elixirs in all the spots Eda showed, the last two have brown feathers falling out, hinting that Hawksley was the one who stole them.
  • In a bit of cross-episode foreshadowing hinting at some details revealed four episodes later:
    • When Lilith mentions her and Eda's father, Eda looks away ashamed.
    • Seemingly innocuous at first glance, the fact that the light glyph trick works on Eda's Owl Beast, but not on Lilith's Raven Beast hints at an important detail about the former.
• Foul Medicine: Eda's gross-out noise when drinking the elixir which checks her Owl Beast curse in the morning reveals that the stuff tastes awful.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • If one looks closely when Gwendolyn raises her arm, they can see the Beast-Keeping Coven mark on her right wrist.
  • As Eda berates her mother and Luz for putting her through a dangerous situation in an attempt to "cure" her, her already darkened gem can be seen turning pitch black as she grows increasingly angry, kicking off her transforming into her Owl Beast form.
  • Several of the signs Luz wrote have upside-down exclamation points at the beginning of sentences, reflecting how Luz is Spanish-bilingual.
• From Bad to Worse: Eda transforms into her cursed Owl Beast form, which is immediately followed up with Lilith arriving in her cursed Raven Beast form and the two begin to fight.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Gwendolyn's eyes briefly glow light purple as she confronts the goblins who have been scamming her by taking command of their fire-bee campfire. It really emphasizes her Tranquil Fury.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Gwendolyn is warned to this effect about the tome she's given, though it's actually because anyone not as desperate as she is would instantly recognize it as bogus and tell her as much.
• Heartbreak and Ice Cream: Lilith and King binge on ice cream as they lament being estranged from their parents. Lots of ice cream. So much so that Hooty is concerned for their well-being, especially given that the ice cream is from the Night Market and thus may be alcoholic.
• Here We Go Again!: After Luz expresses surprise at Eda pushing her mother away after Gwendolyn claims to have found a cure for her condition, Eda tells Luz that her mother visits every year with a "miracle cure" that doesn't live up to the hype, so she's learned not to get her hopes up.
• Hypocrite: Gwendolyn claims that the Potions Coven is only out to make money. Luz points out that Wartlop is no different, making her buy useless charms by passing them off as surefire cures.
• Idiot Ball: Luz is normally naive, but by this point in the show she has grown and is usually more discerning. All that character development leaves for this episode (thankfully only this one), where she blindly trusts Eda’s mom over her trusted mentor and is taken in by an obvious scam. Justified in that Gwendolyn promised her information on a way to get back home if she helped cure Eda's curse and is having a bit of Psychological Projection over her own separation from Camila, leaving her just as desperate (and thus gullible) as Gwendolyn herself.
• Ignored Expert: Gwendolyn means well but she tends to ignore the sanctioned experts and go for folk and holistic healing in order to cure Eda's curse. It's implied this is because the experts can't cure her and can only offer ways of managing. Gwendolyn in her desperation started falling for scams that promised to cure Eda 100%.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Hooty weeps unashamedly when he learns Lilith is going to move back in with her mother.
• Internal Reveal: Lilith ends up telling her mother that she gave Eda the curse, and that she gave herself the curse too.
• Jaw Drop: Both Luz and Lilith have this reaction when Eda kicks her mother out from the house.
• Jerkass Ball: After a depressed Lilith learns her mother visited Eda regularly but never did so with her in thirty years, she tells a very excited King that his dad was no father for not waiting around to see King hatch from his egg. Cue King drowning his sorrows with ice cream, Justified as she’s understandably bitter about her mother only paying attention to Eda.
• Kick the Dog: With a literal dog. King tries to comfort Lilith by talking about his issues with her mother. She shoots back that his father is never coming back, since he didn't even watch his son hatch. Ouch.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Lilith in the previous season forced Eda into her Owlbeast form to capture her. Now she knows how it feels to be stuck in the same form and what Eda must have been suffering.
• A Lizard Named "Liz": Gwendolyn's hawk palisman is named Hawksley.
• Magic Staff: Like her daughters, Gwendolyn carries a staff topped with a bird-themed palisman. In this case, it's a hawk named Hawksly.
• Mama Bear: After she realizes she's been scammed and her attempts to cure Eda have only made things worse, Gwendolyn threatens the three gremlins that scammed her, by using her skills in beast-keeping, to leave Bonesborough and never return.
  Gwendolyn: Leave. [the fire bees flare into an inferno behind her] And if I ever see you in Bonesborough again, every beast in the forest will be after your head!
• My God, What Have I Done?: Gwendolyn has this reaction when she sees that she was being scammed and endangered her daughters. After dealing with the gremlins, she turns out to help Luz restore Eda and Lilith to normal witch form.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Gwendolyn swipes Eda's supply of potion because she thinks her cure will work. Not only does this deprive Eda of the potion when she needs it, but it also means Lilith is left vulnerable.
  • Subverted with Luz helping out Gwendolyn with the cures. While this does trigger Eda's transformation, she finds out that Gwendolyn had stolen the elixir bottles long before Eda had booted her mother into the sky. If Luz hadn't "helped", then she wouldn't have had the elixir needed to help Lilith or Eda.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Luz's attempts to get home are stymied by the fact that the Portal Door is an apparently unique magical artifact. Eda merely stumbled upon it and kept it as a convenient tool. She has no idea who made it or how, nor did she care to find out. If even Belos needs the original as part of his plans, it must be powerful magic indeed.
• No-Sell: King mentions that he tried using the light glyph trick previously used to subdue Owl Beast Eda on Raven Beast Lilith to no effect.
• Not Afraid of You Anymore: After many years trying to escape the owl monster in her mind, Eda finally faces it and turns the tides in her favor, shrinking and subduing it when it tries to run away from her.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Eda's reaction to Gwendolyn saying that she's found a cure is a subdued "oh no" and "here it comes", since she's claimed that pretty much yearly.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Hooty is trying to be the Only Sane Man when Lilith and King get Drunk on Milk, you know things are bad.
• Organic Technology: The clock Eda smashes has both gears and internal organs.
• Payment Plan Pitch: Volume 7 of Wartlop's books is listed as costing 15 installments of 180 snails.
• Parental Neglect: Gwendolyn inadvertently makes Lilith feel like The Unfavorite due to always ignoring her in favor of trying to cure Eda. Any child who felt left out because of their siblings' illness or disability can attest this is painfully true.
• Parents as People: Gwendolyn means well, but her methods of curing Eda's curse are highly questionable at best and outright harmful at worst. Her fixation on healing her daughter has also left Gwen vulnerable to scam artists. Plus, she not only unintentionally made Eda feel ashamed of her curse, but also made Lilith think she's The Unfavorite, because she was too focused on finding the cure.
• Perfect Solution Fallacy: Gwen is guilty of this in-universe. Rather than trying to find a way to help Eda manage the curse, Gwen wants something to get rid of it. In doing so, Gwen has wasted a lot of time and resources, and caused both of her daughters to resent her.
• Psychological Projection: While wallowing in self-pity, Lilith bums King out by projecting her issues with her mother onto his currently missing father, declaring he was no father for not waiting to see his son hatch—even though Lilith has absolutely no way of knowing that and the last episode very heavily implied that something had happened to King's father to prevent him from being there.
• Put on a Bus: At the end of the episode, Lilith decides to go live with her mother, both to better study the curse and to finally get some bonding time.
• Rage Breaking Point: Eda hits hers after enduring Gwendolyn and Luz's attempts to "cure" her, causing her to trigger the curse.
  Luz: Eda, please, try to remain calm.
  Eda: Why? Why should I be calm? I have a right TO. BE. UPSET!
• Reading Tea Leaves: Luz tried this method to learn more about the portal. When she turns the cup to show Eda, it forms an outline of herself shrugging to show her lack of progress.
• Reality Bleed: Gwendolyn explains that Titan's blood, an extremely rare substance, occasionally causes things to cross over from the human world.
• The Reveal:
  • Eda literally stumbled upon the portal door as she was running away from home, and is no more aware of its origins than Luz herself.
  • Eda's ability to detach her limbs is a side effect of the curse, an effect Lilith now shares. She was also given the gem she wears on her chest as an indicator of flare-ups by a healer.
  • Gwendolyn mentions that she only joined the Beast-Keeper coven after Eda was cursed, implying either that while you can only be in one coven at a time it is possible to change which one you're in, or that Belos' coven law originally wasn't as strict and he made the law more restrictive as time went on.
  • Gwendolyn reveals that another human once lived in Bonesborough a long time ago and left something in the library that may help Luz return home.
  • Summer camp has ended. But Luz's mom isn't worried about her missing daughter, because a doppelganger of Luz has replaced her.
  • Luz has been living in the Boiling Isles for the span of a summer.
  • A minor one compared to everything else, but Eda's gold fang turns out to be fake.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder:
  • Eda sarcastically asks Luz if she's curious about her past after explaining how she found the portal. Luz, with complete seriousness, says she's always curious.
  • Gwendolyn asks "who knows what they put in those nasty concoctions?" when Eda says that she's fine sticking with her elixirs instead of trying her "cure". Eda, having actually studied potions at Hexside, responds that she does know what's in it.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Gwendolyn is dismissive of Eda's elixirs from the very start and would prefer a more permanent solution, convinced that it's snake-oil sold for profit. This is ironic since the last season revealed that the elixirs were becoming less effective as time went on, creating urgency in finding a cure.
• Ring-Ring-CRUNCH!: Eda smashes a screaming alarm clock against the wall; the pile beneath that same spot reveals that she has already destroyed numerous identical clocks.
• The Runaway: Eda ran away from home after hearing her mother demand that a member of the Healing Coven cut the curse out of her, if need be.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Gwendolyn tells Luz that another human came to the Boiling Isles long ago, and that they left some hidden information in the Bonesborough library before mysteriously vanishing.
  • A Luz imposter is currently living at her house, with Camila none the wiser.
• Shout-Out: Teenage Eda has a poster for Rats in her bedroom, including one for Maws.
• Significant Anagram: Wartlop's name, spelled backwards and with the vowels swapped, is "Paltrow." Gwyneth Paltrow is an actress known for promoting "alternative" medicine.
• Skewed Priorities: When Eda and Lilith transform, Luz goes immediately to try and stop them from destroying the town. Gwendolyn, still in denial, goes to Wartlop for help despite seeing firsthand that the "cures" didn't work. While this lets her see that Wartlop was a bunch of gremlins scamming her, she goes My God, What Have I Done? that she left Luz to save her daughters.
• Snake Oil Salesman: "Wartlop the Great", a supposedly phenomenal healer, is actually several gremlins in a costume, selling fake cures so they can con money out of desperate people like Gwendolyn.
• Spotting the Thread: Luz immediately catches onto the scam the second she sees Wartlop's book for herself. It takes seeing that the last page says to buy the next volume for her to start convincing Gwendolyn of the same thing.
• Stepping Stones in the Sky: Gwendolyn uses her beast-keeping magic to enchant some roof tiles in the climax, turning them into flying bat-like platforms for her to walk on.
• Story Arc: This officially begins Luz's story arc of trying to find a way back to her home dimension.
• Take a Third Option: The Healing and Potions Covens declare that Eda's curse cannot be cured, but managed. Gwendolyn goes for unconventional means that promise a cure for the curse, but they turn out to be scams. Lilith suggests studying the curse so that she and her mother can come up with a cure on their own.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: As Eda continues to fall for the signs promising Appleblood, she grouses that it had better be the best Appleblood she's ever had. The next sign promises that it will be.
• Totem Pole Trench: "Wartlop" turns out to be three little gremlins in a costume.
• Tranquil Fury: After finding out Wartlop had been scamming her, Gwendolyn scares him straight by threatening him with certain doom and fire bees. All without raising her voice.
• Unexplained Recovery: When Eda first found the portal to the human world, it had a noticeably large diagonal crack through the eye decoration, which it did not have in the previous season. The significance of this has yet to be explained but might tie into the Emperor's attempt to fix the damaged portal.
• The Unfavorite: Subverted. Lilith is not actually this, since Gwendolyn does love both of her daughters very much. She was simply trying for a long time to find a cure for Eda, and didn't think Lilith needed as much attention due to her being so independent and good at taking care of herself. Still, it caused Lilith to think she was this for many years, and it's only by the end of the episode when Gwendolyn helps Luz return her daughters to normal and makes it clear how much she loves both of them that Lilith realizes it isn't true.
• The Unreveal:
  • Eda's and Lilith's mother, Gwendolyn, debuts in this episode, but we don't see their father even though Lilith indicates he's still around.
  • We learn how Eda found the portal, but not who made it or why it was buried in the ground. All Eda knows is that it was already pretty old when she found it.
  • The Luz doppelganger at the end has its Face Framed in Shadow (though it theoretically has to look like Luz to keep Camila from realizing the truth), and there's no indication of who sent it and why.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Gwendolyn is so sure that the cure in Wartlop's book will work that she removes all the elixir Eda had stored in the Owl House. This not only leads to Eda transforming, but a stressed-out Lilith does so as well and both go on a rampage.
• Voice of the Legion:
  • "Wartlop the Great" speaks with this kind of voice, revealed to be so because he is actually multiple gremlins together in one robe.
  • Eda gains this right before fully becoming a beast as she screams at her mother and Luz for their dangerous "cures". She still has it when she manages to regain control of herself after Gwendolyn's Cooldown Hug.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Gwendolyn's obsession with curing the curse rather than just treating it leads to her not only falling for obvious scams but removing all the potions Eda had been stashing around the Owl House because she thinks that her "cure" will work instead, leading to Lilith transforming because of the stress her mother caused her by ignoring her and favoring Eda.
• Wham Episode: It's revealed how Eda found the Portal Door, which was just buried in the dirt of the Clawthorne's estate, and that she has no idea where it came from. Gwendolyn reveals that Luz isn't the first human to wind up in the Boiling Isles and that a substance called Titan's Blood could be the secret to her returning home. Lilith leaves the Owl House to return home to her parents so they can all work on a cure to the curse. The summer camp that Luz was supposed to go to is over, and Camila doesn't know that Luz is trapped on the Boiling Isles because a doppelganger of Luz has taken her place.
• Wham Line:
  • Gwendolyn tells Luz that she knows of another human who came to the Boiling Isles, and he left something in the library that might provide a clue as to how she can get home.
  • At the end of the episode, Luz muses that the summer camp she was supposed to be at is probably over by now and that her mother must be so worried about her. We then cut to the Human World, where we see Camila crying, but it's at a nature documentary. Then we see a hand passing her tissues and hear someone say "Here, Mama"... in Luz’s voice.
• Wham Shot: The episode ends with Camila crying at a nature documentary, and she’s handed a box of tissues by a doppelganger of Luz, whose face is obscured in shadow.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Luz and Lilith are shocked when Eda chases Gwendolyn away.
• Wrong Context Magic: Eda’s curse involves magic far beyond any expert witch’s comprehension. Whoever created the curse is likely not from one of the legally recognized covens.
• You're Not My Mother: Lilith declares she has no mother as part of her drunken rant.

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