The Owl House is finally returning

It’s been over six months since the last episode of The Owl House. On Saturday, the latest installment quietly premiered on Disney Channel, although it’s not yet known when it will be available to stream to a larger audience. While the premiere may have escaped many people’s radar, eager fans were ready and waiting for it – and now perhaps more than ever, with the show’s fate hanging in the air.

Even if some plot details are dusty in my own brain, the world is so alive, the characters so dynamic that I fell in love with the story right away. Throughout the course of the show, creator Dana Terrace manages to pull a deeper, darker plot through the light-hearted episodic adventures. And if that first episode back is any clue, there is a lot of waiting on the horizon. The show is set to end with an abridged third season, though Terrace said supporting the show could help some executives change their minds. So if there’s time to catch up on this insanely wonderful series, it’s before season 2b.

[Ed. note: This post contains light spoilers for the newest episode of The Owl House]

Image: Disney

The Owl House premiered on Disney Channel in early 2020. It follows Luz, who accidentally stumbles into a realm of witches and demons, where she decides to learn magic and eventually make friends — and also begins dating formerly aloof high-achiever Amity Blight.

Follies at the Coven Day Parade picks up right where the midseason finale left off. After finally being reunited with her mother – albeit through strange mirror-dimensional hijinks – misfit Luz is torn between staying on the Boiling Isles and learning the magic she always dreamed of, or returning to her mother, once she is able to create a portal and never return to the islands. Meanwhile, the renegade witch Eda is determined to reunite with her former lover Raine, who was captured in a rebellion against the tyrannical Emperor Belos, which went wrong…but from what Eda has heard, it seems Raine is fine and she is about to perform at an upcoming parade.

So much from The Owl House focuses on Luz finding the place – and more specifically the community of people – where it belongs. An outsider in the human world, she has finally found a group of people to support her and defiantly learned how to practice magic despite not being from the Boiling Isles. But after reuniting with her mother in the mid-season finale, she’s torn between those two worlds and wants to know if there’s a way to have a foot in both. More than ever, Luz is struggling between her love for her mother and her newfound place on the Boiling Isles. It’s a poignant metaphor of growing up as Luz discovers what she wants out of life. But it’s also a high-stakes fantasy adventure, with the stakes getting even more pressing when Emperor Belos reveals he has some big plans for the Boiling Isles – which involve using wild magic (aka the unbound, unspecified magic) which Eda wields and which Luz has learned to command).

Follies at the Coven Day Parade still has its share of funny moments and sweet interactions between characters – Amity seeks advice from her old, estranged friend Willow about Luz; Among other things, Hooty and King confiscate a giant puppet of the Emperor – but it ends bleakly. If the Season 2 semifinals were the turning point, then the back-half premiere gathers all the shattered pieces and prepares us for what’s to come.

Image: Disney

It’s sophisticated storytelling like this that has made such ardent fans of it The Owl House. Not only did it have that, it had real LGBTQ characters in a time when animated shows on Disney Channel shied away from such storylines. With the endings of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Steven universe, The Owl House became the perfect show for fans of fantasy adventures who hungered for actual performance rather than snippets. In season one, it was revealed that Amity had a crush on Luz in the episode “Enchanting Grom Fright,” which marked the first mainly LGBTQ Character in a Disney Channel Animated Series. When the two officially got together in Season 2, Terrace and gravity falls Creator Alex Hirsch, who also voices a few characters on the show, spoke about how tough the uphill battle for representation has been few years ago. This was before the revelation that Disney had backed Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law.

But while the show is hugely popular, this second season will be its last full one. The upcoming third and final season will instead feature three 44-minute episodes. Terrace explained in a Reddit post this The Owl House was canceled because it didn’t fit Disney’s brand.

“At the end of the day, there are a couple of business people who oversee what fits the Disney brand, and one day one of those guys decided that TOH didn’t fit that brand,” Terrace wrote. “The story is serialized (hardly compared to your average anime lmao), our audience is older, and it just didn’t suit this one guy’s tastes. That’s it! Isn’t that wild? Really grinds my guts, boils my brains, kicks my shins, all that stuff. It sucks, but it is what it is.”

The first season – and the first half of season 2 – by The Owl Housee are available on Disney Plus. The new episode is available to watch on Disney Now through your cable provider. New episodes air Saturdays at 9 a.m. EDT.