I LOVE this episode!

The Intruder

This one really hit it out of the park for me. Where to begin?

World-building!

The episode begins with King taking it upon himself to teach Luz about demons, as he had suggested Eda do in a previous episode. Yay, continuity! The hard part is getting Luz to pay attention. The best part is, this isn’t some throwaway gag, but an important part of King’s character. He later reveals that he yearns to be admired, or at least taken seriously, and hoped teaching Luz about his kind would inspire her with the awe he so craved. More on that later…

In particular he focuses on the “Snaggle-back”, purportedly one of the most ferocious demons in the boiling isles. By the law of Chekov’s gun, this is the setup for a payoff. Yay, red-herrings! His lesson is then interuppted when we finally learn how the Boiling Isles got it’s name: a rainstorm of scalding hot water.

Eda: “Yeah, we don’t have weather. We have plagues. Gorenadoes. Shail-hail. Painbows!” King: “It’s like a rainbow but looking at it turns you inside out!”

I love it. The Boiling Isles are so deliciously dystopic. The SCP Foundation probably gets half it’s stock from this world alone. It seems every passing day puts another crimp in the glittering facade Luz expected from her fantasy adventure. This is defying audience expectations done right!

Eda conjures a magical force-field to protect her house from the boiling downpour. Trapped inside until the rain abates, Luz pressures her into teaching her magic despite her clear exhaustion from casting the ward. From her slapdash lesson we learn the following:

A Witch’s magical staff is imbued with power, but must earn the right to use it by demonstrating her own magical prowess.

Spells are cast by drawing a glowing circle in the air. The bigger the circle, the more powerful the spell.

Most witches in the Boiling Isle get their inherent power from an organ grafted to their hearts.

Witches formerly used a method that didn’t rely on this organ, but Eda never bothered to figure out how.

It’s a lot of exposition, but told in a fairly concise manner and serves to connect a few dots the show already established without it. More importantly it leaves Luz on the rocks, considering she won’t be able to conjure magic, much less learn it. Her lesson concluded, Eda finally conks out with the effort of demonstrating her magic. King assures a panicking Luz that her teacher will be fine, citing an incident in a previous episode where Eda survived decapitation. Yay continuity again! Logical consistency!

Character Development!

Now Luz is left in the dark. Still frustrated at not being able to conjure magic, she can’t focus as King tries to continue their demonology lesson. She confides in King that learning to be a real witch is her chance to be taken seriously. Relating to this, he shares what later proves to be the erroneous hypothesis that the alternate method of conjuring magic lies in a potion he witnesses Eda drinking to put some pep in her step.

Earlier, Luz finally gave voice to the question we’ve all been asking: Is she single? Why is she called “the Owl Lady”? Besides of course for the fact she lives in a house with a prominent Owl motif. We get our chance to find out when King filches this potion for Eda but accidentally shatters the vial. With the contents wasted and Eda too comatose to benefit from it anyway, she transforms into an owl-like were-beast and terrorizes the house.

At first they blame a roving Snaggle-back, which turns out only to be a tiny runt like King hiding from the storm. When they discover the beast is Eda, they manage to transform her back with the power of a huge light spell which Luz finally learns the secret to conjuring. Coming to, she confides in the pair that she was cursed as a child to transform into this beast, but manages to stave off the transformation with the potion.

Eda: “Nobody likes being cursed, but if you take the right steps…it’s managable…”

Her situation is a fairly clear, but not too forcibly conveyed allegory for people dealing with illnesses that require medication (depression, behavioral disorders, STD’s, etc. and any that apply). What’s more, it seems to explain why Eda is such a cynical recluse. She’s also set up for an interesting arc when we see her experience a vision of a shadowy figure that she concludes was the one to inflict this curse upon her. The plot thickens…!

Overall, it’s nice to see that King isn’t just a cutesy plush-toy for fan-girls to gush over (like Luz) and Eda isn’t just some crazy old bag just for the lulz. This episode fleshes them both out in a way I wasn’t counting on them doing for at least another season (looking at you, Gravity Falls). Additionally it seems Eda has just as much to learn from Luz about magic as vice-versa, adding a whole new dimension to their relationship.

Logical Consistency!

I’ve already heard some complaints regarding plot-holes or continuity errors in this episode. Things like:

How does anyone live or anything grow in a place with boiling rain?

If Eda was planning to sleep all day why didn’t she take some of her potion beforehand? If she did, then why does she still transform?

How did Luz not see the glowing rune in the center of Eda’s magic circle without her phone breaking?

Now, the low hanging fruit to responding to these criticisms would be…

…But, I think I give the show enough credit by now to not just handwave these complaints away.

It’s reasonable to assume that most plant-life in the Boiling Isles had adapted to be resistant to the rain. I know there are plants in the desert that develop a thick, waxy coating on their leaves to conserve water, so maybe the plants in this world operate on a similar principle to protect themselves from scalding raindrops. Naturally, these plants might be more vulnerable as young blooms (like the flower Luz talks to, or the ones Willow grows on her balcony) which wither and die if they don’t sprout at just the right time of year. The same is true for mundane plants that bloom too early in spring and are wiped out by a late winter frost. As for the denizens of the Isles, scalding hot water doesn’t necessarily dissolve buildings, but would cause wear and tear over time (Hooty simply seems unusually fussy about his precious stucco walls). We see Eda’s potion flask is half-full on her night-stand, so she probably staggers her doses throughout the day. She was planning on waking up and taking her evening dose when it went missing (“Hmm. I was looking for that”), and that’s when she transformed. Have you ever seen video footage of old computer screens and noticed they have a wonky cascading effect? That’s because the frame-rate at which cameras record footage is different than that computer monitors use to display images. The same principle could be at play with the magic spell circles Eda casts. The outer circle glows in a constant thrum, but the complex sigil in the center flashes in a succession of faint pulses too quick for human eyes to detect. When the footage on Luz’s phone was corrupted from it being broken, it lowered the frame rate of the footage down to where Luz could percieve the pattern.

Those are really the only qualms I thought dignified an explanation. Otherwise, refer to the image above.

Overall: 9/10

Now, that’s where the review ends…but if you’re interested, I’ve got something more in store. I don’t usually do theory-crafting because I find it encourages rampant speculation and mismanagement of expectations. But, I think I’m invested enough in this show to break from tradition.

Theory: Eda’s “Curse” afflicts all Demons

Alright, hear me out. We know King is a demon. He fancies himself a former Demon King whose crown and power were stolen to render him a cute little tyke. But, the events of the first episode seemed to imply these were mere delusions of grandeur and Eda was only humouring him. However, this may have been a simple red-herring. We see in this episode another demon with an equally terrifying reputation who turns out to be no more than another cutesy half-pint. In fact, Eda is the only entity we’ve seen be called a demon that’s actually lived up to the terrifying moniker.

Perhaps there’s a pattern here. From King’s encyclopedic knowledge of demons, perhaps he isn’t just power tripping when he tries to pull rank on Eda. Maybe he really is a Demon King who has been cursed to be a harmless plush toy alongside the “Snaggle-back” that was introduced in this episode. Maybe all Demons in the Boiling Isles were afflicted by a curse that transformed them from hideous, evil abominations into weak, non-threatening new forms (perhaps by the shadowy figure in Eda’s dreams?).

But where does that leave, Eda? Is she really a crazy witch-lady that was cursed to turn into a demon, or was it the other way around. Maybe the real twist of this episode is that her natural state is the void-eyed owl creature, but when she was afflicted with the curse her version of a non-threatening cutie pie was an eccentric old lady. But, for whatever reason, the curse didn’t affect her all the way and she uses a potion to maintain the facade.

So…make any sense? Or am I as crazy as this little lunatic?