Spoiler warning for The Owl House: Watching and Dreaming
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Owl House is over and I am still drying my eyes. Watching ❀and Dreaming turned out to be an extended dream sequence/kaiju battle/time skip that did everything it could to wrap up loose ends and leave us smiling as the credits rolled. My smile was there, but you’d struggle to glimpse it through all the waterworks. The episode was forced to speedrun through certain character interactions and narrative developments due to the show’s early cancellation, although beneath it all, core themes still managed to resonate and leave us with a message that is both bittersweet and poignant.
I’ve written about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:grief and The Owl House before, touching on Luz Noceda’s father and my own continued experience with inescapable lossꦆ, and it feels like that collective idea of lost love, familial guilt, and failing to be the person others perceive you to be can doom you to unhappiness. Luz’s love of magic and anime comes from a father who sadly wasn’t there to see her grow into a brave young woman, while a fractured relationship with her mom causes our heroine to shoulder burden after burden amidst her own false misunderstanding.
Watching and Dreaming makes tertiary contributions to the development of characters like The Collector and Emperor Belos, although these are all framed through the growth of our protagonist. All three of the extended specials have been a journey of discovery for Luz in how they explore the guilt she feels regarding The Boiling Isles’ destruction, and how never being 𝔉around might have saved others from their own grief. It ties back to never getting over her father’s death, failing to mend exaggerated emotional wounds with her mother, and now realising that being a witch was always a pipe dream she was an irresponsible fool for ever trying to chase. But heroes are inherently flawed, and ꦯit’s through this they find inspiration.
The epis🌞ode begins with a bleak dream sequence, Luz opening her eyes inside the sanctum of Emperor Belos’ castle. This twisted nightmare even dresses her in the tyrant’s uniform, comparing her past mistakes on equal footing to a man who wants to bend an entire world under his thumb. Luz has been wracked by guilt for the entire season, fighting an inner battle of staying behind in the human world when all her friends are safe to avoid ever hurting them again. Amity, Willow, Hunter, and Gus are controlled by a mix of The Collector and Luz’s own internal paranoia. She is the reason her friends have lost so much. She is the reason things can’t go back to normal. She is the reason why the world is in tatters. To Luz, not being here anymore might be the solution to a desperate situation.
Death and sacrifice are alluded to throughout the special, either as a valiant necessity or a♉ last resort when everything feels insurmountable. Luz might feel understood by those around her now, but it doesn’t fix The Boiling Isles’ destruction or imprisonment of her friends and family. She either defeats Belos or everything amounts to nothing, and during certain moments, the idea of emerging victorious seems impossible. The Collector has a warped view of mortality, and goes about life with an infantile innocence because for centuries he has been left behind and toyed with by those he wanted to trust.
He isn’t morphi༒ng The Boiling Isles into a cosmic hellscape out of malice, but misplaced enthusiasm. This starstruck little boy experience🍷s his first taste of freedom in goodness knows how long and wants the outside world to spend the rest of eternity playing games to his whims. The Collector doesn’t understand the concept of death or individuality, and his own selfishness is brought forth by the bad habits of others.
All it takes for him to achieve redemption is for Luz, King, and Eda to reject his seemingly innocent games and 🌊to make clear how things like this hurt people who obviously want no part in it. All the individuals he has turned into puppet playthings have their own agency and desires, much like he does, and often the key to one’s heart and eventual change is earned by listening, uncovering whatever trauma guides them to do the wrong in the first place. Yet this also backfires, with The Collector thinking that Emperor Belos - in his kaiju form no less - can be changed with little more than an innocent hug to his monolithic body. Some in life are beyond saving, which can be a hard and necessary truth to accept too.
Luz sacrifices herself as she’s transformed into myriad plumes of light that rain down upon the isles she was once soᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ desperate to call home. She dies, achieving the self-righteous sacrifice that has eluded her for so long. To watch as she floats between realms of existence, clinging onto some semblance of life is so heartbreaking, yet our hopes are brought back as she stumbles upon King’s father and inherits the generational magical power at the isles’ nexus for herself. Luz earns it, and through this realisation, is able to face the unfair expectations of grief and friendship once determined to ruin her. But while the final act has our heroine emerge triumphant, it is clear she never intends to leave scars behind.
The final battle is massive in scale yet intimate in its emotional vulnerability. Gargantuan set pieces have Luz flying throughout the world with her newfound𝓡 powers in hand, yet every bit of dialogue circles back to a recognition of growth. For years, Luz has wanted to imitate the Go✤od Witch Azura and the legendary adventures she embarked upon, while often failing to realise that what makes our greatest heroes so worth emulating is the flaws they display and the burdens they are forced to carry. We are beautiful and define our lives by the people we meet and the mistakes we make, carrying harsh lessons with us even if in the moment they make us want to give up and leave it all behind. Luz comes to understand that, and so do all the loved ones that surround her.
You could label time skips that take us several years into the future as a lazy conclusion, but for The Owl House it feels like the only necessary final destination. Dana Terrace could have held years of stories to tell, and we were dealt a hand where most of them had to be shrunk down into a shorter, more digestible epilogue that does everyone justice. We see Luz on the eve of her 18th birthday, packing away her belongings for college with a form taller and more refined than the young witch we left behind. Scars remain though, an♏d the end credits pull us into the lives of all our favourite characters to provide a glimpse at how much they’ve grown, yet also stayed the same in ways that matter most.
The Owl House leaves us with a mantra of guilt, forgiveness, and love woven through a passage of time that stops for nobody. Clear in how we must savour each moment as it comes and recognise that making mistakes and surrendering to our emotions is precisely what makes us human. Often the pent-up feelings we hold paint an irrational picture of the outside world and our own worth within it, making love difficult to accept and guilt forever overriding everything else in our minds. Beneath it all though, we are all worth somethඣing.
Luz Noceda got her happy ending, 🍸and so did we. It’s one I’ll carry wit🎀h me for a long time to come.
