Creator Dana Terrace’s animated Disney Channel show, “The Owl House” — whose third season tragically had its wings clipped with its cancellation back in 2021 for arbitrary (if a bit misguided) branding concerns — will mark the beginning of its end with its first of three 44-minute specials on Oct. 15.
The abrupt cancellation of “The Owl House” came at the heels of its second season, which was a genuine triumph both in its storytelling and its real world implications. One of the most triumphant achievements from season two introduced Disney’s first canonically lesbian couple: Luz Noceda and Amity Blight — Lumity for short. Their adorable and match-made chemistry brings a delightful amount of levity, drama and romance into the mix while also setting the textbook example for how to write a captivating yet crucially complex LGBTQ couple in media. The cartoon follows Luz, a Dominican-American teenager from Connecticut who is led astray into the city of the Boiling Isles through a portal door. Luz is then led towards Eda Clawthorne — a powerful witch who also happens to be a criminal that evades the law — and her adorable friend King, the self-proclaimed king of demons. Eda and King serve as guides and mentors to Luz during the course of season one, and her fun and dorky personality starts to rub off on them.
Luz’s main drive to learn magic as a non-witch human provides an interesting conflict for the rest of the season, since she often bites off more than she can chew, taking on other more skillful and powerful magical beings. Luz befriends fellow young magical witches Willow, Gus and Luz’s future love interest, Amity — arguably the best secondary character ever written for a Disney TV show — who accompany her through her journey in the Demon Realm. While the first season of “The Owl House” manages to be a great episodic narrative that follows Luz and the secondary characters that accompany her in her quest to learn magic, the end of season one marks a significant turning point both in the story and in the literal storytelling of the show itself. Once Luz destroys the portal door home to protect Eda, who has grown to love and appreciate Luz in an almost motherly way, her fantastical reality of learning magic in an alternate dimension begins to crash down.
Season two of “The Owl House” really cranks up the drama, pathos, character development, tension and more. This season achieves the impressive feat of setting its plot, hidden lore, foreshadowing and character developments into motion in each episode; all of which was done with the knowledge that its third season would be shortened and canceled. In short, every episode matters, and nearly every important character gets development. There is always a connective thread in each episode to the main conflict with Emperor Belos: a despicable villain and a worthy foe for the show’s protagonist Luz. Emperor Belos’ wicked scheme of draining magic for his trans-worldly portal takes the protagonist’s full focus, adding an at-times unbearable element of tension and tragedy when his scheme is realized. Everyone is fortunately saved by happenstance, but the latter of season two and its gradual buildup to Emperor Belos’ “Day of Unity ” offers some of the best storytelling from Disney in years since “Gravity Falls.” The season ends on a major cliffhanger, with the teen protagonist five stack of Lumity, Gus, Willow and Hunter trapped in the human realm and with uncertainty on where the show will take its audience next.
The story of “The Owl House” is nothing but captivating both on and off its animated landscape. While the series was originally set to have a full third season greenlit by Disney, what ultimately changed and led to the demise of the show’s run wasn’t necessarily because of the unique precedent Lumity created as its first on-screen lesbian couple presented to the world, the COVID-19 budget related concerns — which did plague many animated shows during the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic — or the horror elements in the show itself. Simply put, Disney executives did not believe the show would fit the Disney brand, as vague and maladaptive as it may seem. While Terrace provided her side of how and why “The Owl House” was canceled in her Reddit post online, the executives’ official reasoning for canceling the show remains a mystery to this day. Many online fans and critics were justifiably upset that the show — with its progressive and rich, lore-filled magic society — was canceled despite being at the top of its game and having immense popularity in its own right. So, despite the clear demand from a large, supportive audience, the show’s majestic run was cut short as a result of corporate politics not being in the show’s favor.
Animation isn’t just some “genre,” but an artform with a capacity for horror, romance, comedy, drama, tragedy, subversion or indeed any mix of those genres. “The Owl House” made full use of its artform, and had much more potential in its storytelling, but what the fans can hope to get in these final three specials — which will total to about two hours and 20 minutes — is a bittersweet yet satisfying payoff after such an emotionally distressing cliffhanger. One can only dream what the show’s status could have been had it been allowed to continue a little longer.
Phillip Lemus is a Sports Section Intern. They can be reached at plemus@uci.edu.
