Recap / The Owl House S1E13 "The First Day"

Original air date: 7/25/2020

Production code: 113

During Luz's first day of Magic School, curiosity gets the best of her, and she finds herself thrown into the Detention Track, where she's not allowed to learn magic. Fortunately, some new friends are there to show her the ropes on how to learn and thrive.

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Tropes:

• Abstract Eater: The basilisk eats magic. Not magic beings, not magic users, but straight-up magic.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: It's revealed at the end that the student that created the Room of Shortcuts and was the last student to want to study all magic was none other than Eda.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice: The Monster of the Week is referred to as a "Greater Basilisk", a serpentine creature that feeds on witch magic, is capable of speech, and can shapeshift into a humanoid disguise. One student mentions that they were thought to be extinct.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • A more comedic variant. When Luz first goes to the school, she tells King to act like he doesn't know her. Later, when she gets into trouble, she calls on King to bail her out, he takes the advice a little too seriously and still keeps up the charade.
  • And Played for Drama when Luz initially wants to get out of the detention track and asks her friends to bail her out before learning what the Troublemakers were really like.
• Big "NO!": Luz delivers one of these upon being transferred to the detention track.
• Call-Back:
  • When asked by Bump if she can perform any additional feats in addition to her light and ice pillar spells, Luz inverts her eyelids as she did in the first episode.
  • Hexside is in need of repairs from Luz's last two visits; the abomination classroom is covered in the remains of the abomination fight that broke out, and Detention Hall is still broken.
  • Luz is once again carrying around confetti, just like the last time she was at Hexside.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Luz picks up a crystal ball and conjures an oracle spirit. Moments later, Principal Bump catches her.
• Chekhov's News: Bump watches a news report on his crystal ball about the students and teachers at Glandus High School being unconscious after having their magic drained and shows the track of the creature who's responsible for it. When the inspector from the Emperor's Coven arrives for a routine inspection on Hexside, the inspector reveals her true self, which is the creature that attacked the other schools.
• Combination Attack: In an attempt to fight the Basilisk, Willow and Gus combine their magic to conjure a flower monster with large, muscular arms. It gets eaten almost immediately.
• Comedic Sociopathy: When Principal Bump hears that the magic of Glandus High's students has been eaten, he chuckles and says that means less competition later.
• Continuity Nod: When Willow and Gus are taking Luz to talk to Principal Bump, a flyer for the Human Appreciation Society can be seen with a picture of Mattholomule and a comment about how it's under new management.
• Corrupted Character Copy: The Choosy Hat is essentially the Sorting Hat if it started trying to eat students.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Students who are caught mixing magical disciplines - or even practicing a cross-cluster discipline by accident in Luz's case - are permanently sent to the Detention Track where they are banned from learning any magic for the rest of the school year. This seems to be more so a decision Principle Bump instated as a method of keeping "troublemakers" out of the way (since actual detention was destroyed in a previous episode) and not a particular law enforced onto the school, as he reluctantly waived this rule after the Detention Track's students mixed magics to save the school from the Basilisk.
• Dissimile: When dropping her off at Hexside, Eda offers Luz the chance to back out and earn a "Quitter Badge" for the Bad Girl Coven. "Quitting! It's like trying, but easier."
• Dumpster Dive: King goes to school with Luz just to root through the garbage cans, saying they're full of "half-eaten gold."
• Feed It a Bomb: Luz activates a light glyph on a stack of paper and chucks it into the basilisk's mouth, causing it to recoil in pain as her Wild Magic burns it from the inside. However, this isn't enough to stop the basilisk.
• First Day of School Episode: This episode shows Luz's first day (as a student) at Hexside and her struggle to adapt to the curriculum.
• First Rule of the Yard: After seeing how worried Luz is about starting school, Eda advises her to walk up to the first student she sees and punch them in the face "to establish dominance".
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: The oracle orb that Luz picks up warns her that she is about to be in trouble. Cut to Principal Bump standing just across the hall, having seen the whole scene, and dragging her to her new homeroom.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The Eda puppet Luz made for her "heartfelt sonnet" has mismatched eyes.
  • Early on in the episode, Bump mentions reports of a basilisk attacking two other schools. The same basilisk later becomes the main threat of the episode.
  • When checking out the room of shortcuts, Luz ends up opening a door to a locker nearby where Amity is pacing back and forth, stating that just because Luz is now going to her school it doesn't change anything between them.
  • Viney expresses surprise at the basilisk's presence, noting that they're supposed to be extinct. An explanation for this won't be forthcoming for another season.
• Freudian Slip: After jokingly telling Luz that she'll never leave the Room of Shortcuts alive, Viney then nonchalantly introduces herself. A rattled Luz replies, "I-I'm terrified! Um, I mean, uh, I'm Luz."
• Gray Is Useless:
  • Judging by Luz's outfit, the default uniform for a Hexside student who hasn't chosen a track yet is a very light gray.
  • The Detention Track's color is a dark gray.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Although the basilisk mainly eats magic, it attempts to devour Luz the second time it encounters her.
• Heavy Sleeper: The teacher in charge of detention, leaving the kids in it relatively unsupervised. Gus is intrigued and tests it out by putting a mop on his face; the teacher doesn't even stir.
• J'accuse!: Jerbo slings this at Luz when he overhears her talking to Willow and Gus about getting her out of the detention track.
• Living Clothes: The Choosy Hat, a parody of Harry Potter's Sorting Hat that originally sorted students into coven tracks until it gained a taste for flesh and decided to start eating students instead.
• Magic Eater: The basilisk poses as an inspector to get into the different magic schools and feed on the students' magic. Luz's Wild Magic, however, proves toxic to it.
• Motif Merger: When multiple tracks are allowed at the end, the formerly delinquent track's students get both of their track's colors on their uniforms. Luz, being undecided between all of them, gets all of the colors on her uniform.
• Mundane Made Awesome: An oracle-track teacher is seeing giving a brief speech on working out the truth of a person's future by working backwards from their end... as she folds together a cootie-catcher.
• Noodle Incident: Apparently, Luz’s entrance exam isn’t the worst the Principal Bump has seen.
• No Ontological Inertia: Justified. The Greater Basilisk is defeated by being crushed by heavy sandbags, causing it to vomit up all the magic it had swallowed and send it back to its owners.
• Performance Anxiety: Luz is definitely feeling it when she has to demonstrate her skills to Principal Bump. She passes the entrance exam anyway.
• Poor Communication Kills: Luz almost joins the Detention Kids in their club, but that's before they overhear Willow poorly word how Luz said she was "too good for detention". Feeling deeply hurt, they rescend their offer to join their club, even when Luz insists she didn't mean it.
• Portal Door: The secret room is full of magic doors that lead to other rooms in Hexside, which the detention kids use to peek on other classes and learn other types of magic. The doors don't need to open to other doors, instead creating doors out of whatever happens to be at the location (walls, lockers, etc.).
• Rack Focus: When Luz sets her sights on a crystal ball from the Oracle track, the focus shifts from the ball to herself watching in the background.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Seeing the detention kids save the school from the basilisk, combined with Luz's plea and some goading from Gus, convinces Bump to wave his single-track restriction and allow them to study multiple tracks.
• Red Herring: The basilisk recoils in pain when Luz chucks a paper stack with her light glyph into its mouth, demonstrating that it can't eat her magic. Rather than use this to defeat it, she and the Troublemakers instead lead it into the secret room so they can drop it onto the presentation stage and drop a sandbag on it.
• The Red Mage: Each of the detention track students prefers mixing two types of magic.
  • Barkus uses potions to enhance his oracle magic.
  • Jerbo mixes abomination and plant magic to create organic monsters.
  • Viney using healing magic, but has a griffin companion, which counts as beastkeeping magic.
  • In the end, Luz is allowed to study every track.
• Retirony: Parodied. When Principal Bump has his magic eaten, he laments he was "only 300 years until retirement".
• Sadly Mythtaken: Aside from being a serpent monster, the "Greater Basilisk" bears very little similarity to descriptions of basilisks. It lacks the poisonous breath, venomous bite, killing gaze or fire breath mentioned in legends, and gains the completely new abilities of shapeshifting, speech and magic-eating.
• Secret Room: The detention students found a secret room containing secret passages that go all over the school. Eda apparently built it so she could sneak around the school whenever she wanted.
• Security Cling: After seeing the Greater Basilisk drain a teacher of their magic, Luz and Willow hug each other in fear.
• Ship Tease: A small bit for Luz and Amity. When Luz first arrives at Hexside after being accepted, Amity greets her pretty nonchalantly, but later we see Amity having a small Freak Out that she and Luz are now classmates.
  Amity: (to herself) So you two go to the same school now. That doesn't change anything!
• Shout-Out:
  • Hexside used to have a hat called the Choosy Hat that decided which coven track kids would be placed in, like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, but it was evil and tried to eat them instead.
    • The story plot involving a basilisk attacking the Wizarding School, with the involvement of a hidden compartment of the school is also ripped straight from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
    • The Room of Shortcuts is a combination of the Room of Requirements (being a hidden room on the school grounds that follows the same "Room of X" naming theme) and the Marauder's Map (having been created by the protagonist's parental figure).
  • When Luz transforms into her multi-colored school uniform at the end, it's reminiscent of the transformation sequence from Sailor Moon.
• Spikes of Villainy: Averted. Viney has a spike filled hairband, a spike for a clasp on her cloak, and a barbed fishhook for an earring, but she is a Nice Girl with a love for healing and animals (and a slight mischievous streak).
• Sure, Let's Go with That: King initially denies being a substitute teacher, but upon realizing that as a teacher, he would be an authority figure, he plays along to assert his authority.
• Swallowed Whole: The basilisk does this to Amity's abomination.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Luz's Wild Magic proves to be this to the basilisk, though this isn't how it's defeated.
• Wham Episode: Principal Bump allows Luz and the Troublemakers to study as many subjects as they wish, causing an upset in the status quo at Hexside. They weren’t the first to attempt this.
• Wizard Duel: In Potions class, wondering what the other classes are learning, Luz looks out the window and sees Willow having a sparring match with an oracle track student. It looks pretty much like a fight with mons, with Willow creating a plant monster and the oracle student summoning a spirit from a crystal ball.

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