Once Upon a Swap - (The Owl House Season 1 Episode 8) - 'Toon Reviews 42

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Once Upon a Swap

Some may notice that if a show has some major element of magic or science, it’s likely that will utilize certain extraordinary phenomena for at least one of its plots.  As this series falls into the magic category, you can imagine that it’s going to have its fair share of these kinds of stories.  In this case, the phenomena at the forefront makes for a largely antic-driven escapade that both has interesting elements to its composition, and falls a little flat.

It begins with a standard setup of our main trio not seeming to get each other’s problems.  Luz wants to attract attention to Eda’s stand and use magic to solve her problems, Eda wants to keep a low profile, and King wants to be taken seriously and not be coddled.  With a little magic, they all proceed to get over the disagreement of who has it the worst by swapping each other’s bodies.  There’s a decent touch of comedy to coming from this conclusion of Eda coming up with it practically on the fly, self-aware of the cliché setup of a lack of understanding.  Plus, it’s cool to see how the characters’ designs are altered from the swap with Luz in Eda’s body, Eda in King's body, and King in Luz’s body.  It’s kind of remarkable how much a difference a change in the eyes makes.  It doesn’t make much sense that the eyes change, or that the bodies’ voices are those of the minds controlling them since they should be staying the same.  The voice thing is a head-scratcher in most body swaps though, and I still can’t fault the eye thing being a creative touch.  Anyway, with the swap in place, another creative touch to the setup is put into full force as every character’s experience is highlighted as its own segment, complete with title cards.

Eda, as King, at first finds solid benefit from her new body as the guards after her don’t recognize her at all.  The coddling she gets, which King is against, is a plus for her as well, with pampering and affection that she’d easily be all for.  The ultimate extent of pampering comes when she enters a pet shelter run by two old women who give her the ultimate special treatment.  It’s all warm and inviting, but in an effort to keep things interesting, a weird dark turn is thrown in for good measure.  Apparently, these old women are actually sadistic animal abusers who coddle pets they find so much, that they lose their free will and act as infantile as they’re treated.  Heck, one of them even only speaks in monstrous gestures.  Eda, who already has enough when the women want to put her in a costume, is all set to make a break for it, but ends up trapped in a window display.  This is certainly a creative twist, but if this is meant to show Eda how hard King has it not being taken seriously, I’m not sure if it does that well.  Even without this dark turn, he’s still able to face the overbearing tendencies of people calling him cute.  All this feels like an extreme measure that suggests coddling will always get you imprisoned by sadists.  That said, it is interesting ends up as a hub for all these body swaps.  However, there’s also a formulaic nature to their basic setups.

Such a formula is realized in the next segment with King as Luz.  Out of his small dog demon body and in a teen girl’s body, King feels he’s gotten his ticket to power over others, and everything around him.  However, he sets his sights on dominating over a gang of teen witches and demons hanging out in an old clubhouse run by Boscha.  Now, Boscha herself is portrayed as a standard uptight bully with no sign of depth in the slightest and is generally unpleasant, begging many questions why others follow her.  Since this show has proven, and will continue to prove, to be good at making characters more than they seem, this is very unfortunate.  It’s practically satisfying that King’s usually pretentious ways win over the rest of the teens.  The teen-related pranks they pull on many of the denizens of the Boiling Isles are pretty funny too.  Like Eda, King seems to be getting what he wants with this body swap, but then he sees his enjoyment backfire.  Boscha challenges him to a race, and it’s a genuinely exciting climax to this segment with high energy, and fast pacing.  However, whether it’s from King’s overzealousness or Boscha’s smug calculating, King’s racing ends up destroying the clubhouse, and all the teens are turned against him.  He’s chased to that same animal shelter Eda’s at, and is held captive there with the owners seeing him as a teen girl to enslave as a volunteer.

Then there’s Luz’s segment which is already off to an appealing start.  Even in a much older figure’s body, she still retains her good spirit and likability.  That’s just what’s needed with her free to run Eda’s stand her way.  Combined with working magic the way Eda does, she seems to have a good handle on things.  It attracts the good business the stand is looking for, suggesting that Luz knew what she was doing all along.  With faults in her ideas of using magic and a point in the series to teach her not to see reality like her fantasy world, it’s natural that her plan ultimately backfires.  On the other hand, given how all the other body swaps have gone, you can kind of see it a mile away.  

Like Eda feared, Luz’s publicity stunts and magic confront the guards and she gets arrested.  In this course of events, however, comes the biggest development to the overall story of the episode.  While arrested, Luz is visited by Lilith, who unaware of the body swap sees the victim as her sister and no one else.  Though she expectedly strictly berates who she sees as Eda for her list of crimes, Lilith proves to be more than that, a true expansion on the show’s core theme.  She sees these actions as a cry for help and that they’re Eda’s way of saying she wants to join the Emperor’s Coven, all in a genuinely sympathetic manner.  Luz even gets a bit of shock upon hearing that Eda wanted to join this particular coven when she and Lilith were young.  As Eda has been against the nature of the coven system, this development makes things fascinatingly complicated and something big for Luz to think about.  However, she doesn’t take much time to think about this development as her misuse of Eda’s spells gets her to escape and cause major damage.

As for how all this body swap madness resolves, it’s debatable if it really does.  Luz, Eda, and King meet up at that same animal shelter and get back in their proper bodies for sure, but everything else becomes a mess.  It’s marked by a decently big climax of everyone they wronged while in different bodies coming together to gang up on them.  Before anyone has a chance to give them all a piece of mind, Eda works her body swapping magic on the mobs.  There’s a whole explosion of confusion, despair, and shock over everyone seeing what everyone is doing with each other’s bodies.  However, the trio’s response is to just leave everything to chaos without any care to their state of well-being.  I know most of them were ill-intended and were going to beat them, but others are, at their core, innocent bystanders.  Is it really ok for them to be left like this?  Plus, it doesn’t feel like anything was genuinely learned from all this despite everyone seeing firsthand why certain people have certain issues.  I can get a laugh out of a nonchalant claim of something being learned, but for its own story, it’s debatable if it works.

In the end, this episode is mostly just the main trio messing around for the runtime and the comedic possibilities that come from the fictional phenomena of body swapping.  However, it’s still a pretty fun watch overall with some creative touches to the setup, a couple of standout character moments, and even one major plot development.  For that, it’s clear that even when the show is not at its best, there’s still solid entertainment.

B

The Ranking

1.      Lost in Language

2.      The Intruder

3.      Covention

4.      I Was a Teenage Abomination

5.      Witches Before Wizards

6.      A Lying Witch and a Warden

7.      Hooty’s Moving Hassle

8.      Once Upon a Swap

The next Owl House review has Gus take Luz on a tour of Hexside while Eda decides that her human should enroll in the school to properly earn a magic education.

Next time on MC Toon Reviews from Amphibia is an episode pulled from the air consisting of "Contagi-Anne" and "Family Shrub".

If you would like to check out other Owl House reviews on this blog, click here for the guide made especially for them.