During one of her charity streams, Dana Terrace released the audio for a supposedly cut episode featuring three characters (Hunter, Luz and Lilith) writing their experiences.
Hunter’s palisman observations
Supposedly, it was cut as it was mostly a “filler” episode, but it does unveil some new information about the characters. In particular:
- Lilith’s letter contains a mention of her being Aro/Ace, which is never mentioned in the show!
- Meanwhile, Hunter spends some time with Flapjack, and his observations contain a foreshadowing of Belos belonging to the human world, as he’s the only one who knows what a flapjack is (“Damn you, pancakes!” may be the funniest line in the entire series - I’m sad it was cut!).
- Luz’s diary contains the least amount of notable information: the only new piece of info is her mom being lactose intolerant, and a foreshadowing of Amity and Willow “working out some things”, which eventually happened off-screen in an unfortunately cut scene in S02 EP18 “Labirinth Runners” (I’ll talk about more dropped/cut plot points in another post).
Luz’s diary also contains enough evidence to put these entries in a narrow time frame: she mentions “seeing my mom in the rain”, but also that “Philip” is a smart dude, indicating that she hasn’t uncovered his identity yet. This means that these entries are being written between S02 EP10 “Yesterday’s Lie” (the episode where Luz talks to her mom) and S02 EP16 “Hollow Mind” (where Luz discovers Philip’s identity). Depending on how much you want to read into Luz calling Philip “smart”, the time frame may be shortened to S02 EP12 “Elsewhere and Elsewhen”, where Luz meets a very unpleasant Philip.
I also thought that they were extras for the stream (by the way, thank you for mentioning the stream, I realized I forgot to put a link to the original source), but I’ve talked with two different people who told me that it was somewhere mentioned that these were originally meant as one episode repurposed as a donation incentive for the charity stream.
I haven’t been able to confirm their claim - hence why I said that it was “supposedly” cut - but two different and unrelated people arguing the same thing kind of convinced me. Although, now that I think about it, it could just as well be a Mandela effect.
That being said, their claim does have some backing: the three shorts share a common narrative (the characters writing a letter or diary of sorts), the time frame matches the shortening of the series (which the team was notified of after EP10), and there’s good production value behind them (the voice pitch is the same as the show’s characters, which of course is slightly different than the voice actor’s).
I never actually got a chance to watch the full stream yet, I just saw them from the same clips you linked. Did they say anything about the origins of the shorts on stream?
Again without any context of the rest of the stream, just being read in the characters voices doesn’t say much to me. In-character table reads aren’t that uncommon at events like this, and those could even be totally original content that’s just for fun and never even meant to be considered canon (I’m not suggesting that’s the case for these, just not unexpected in general)
I watched the stream but didn’t hear a confirmation one way or the other, but I also didn’t know that it’s common practice in streams like these (I don’t watch streams generally, and was made aware of the existence of this one only after the show ended).
Finally skimmed over the stream, and yeah it’s not exactly as I thought it was, can’t really say one way or the other
I don’t really get that into streams/events like this either, so idk exactly how common they are, but the table reads I was thinking of are more typically the cast doing a live reading together. I haven’t heard of something more professionally pre-recorded like this. Certainly possible, but not nearly as common
Maybe the VAs just weren’t available to be there live, or maybe these were collected from the cutting room floor
At one point (1:20:30 circa) Dana says (talking about Lilith’s audio specifically) that it had been entirely written by Zach Marcus and John Bailey Owen, the writer and the head-writer of TOH, which implies a collective effort by a lot of team members (Dana herself, the writers, and the voice actors). Even if it really was just a one-of thing for the charity stream, they certainly put a lot of effort into it!
Yeah I’m not gonna say it’s impossible, but that definitely seems like an above-average amount of effort for just a couple stream incentives. It’s certainly appreciated, but I’m leaning a bit more towards the cut episode idea now