It’s the final episode of the season! Let’s get this over with!
At the end of the previous episode, Aang finally learned how to ~feel everything~, and managed to find where Appa was being kept. Now he’s off to rescue him, I guess!
But before we get to that, we see a flashback of Aang picking Appa back when he was a younger kid, and he wasn’t the sole Airbender around. We then go back to the present, where Aang has eluded the Dai Li that have come to arrest him.
We then go to what I am now realizing is Lake Laogai, and I’m a little disappointed that it’s merely just a prison now and not the mind-altering location that it was in the animated series. I’m hoping that we still get to see that, but I’m not expecting to.
Elsewhere in Ba Sing Se, Toph and Lady Beifong are having a mother-daughter heart-to-heart, and I guess I’m appreciative of this added layer to their relationship. I just wish the show was better at balancing adding new layers to the characters while also retaining stuff from the animated series that is integral. And I know that’s a difficult job and that there are different opinions on what is integral, but that’s why people should think long and hard before re-adapting media that was already good the first time around.
Back in Lake Laogai, Katara finally finds out that the Blue Spirit is Zuko, and the Zutara shippers won’t like her reaction to him. Does she react this way so that Zuko’s turn later on in the story is easier to explain, since they didn’t have the multiple episodes that the animated series had to show Zuko’s motivations? Maybe.
Aboveground, Azula kills all of the Earth Kingdom generals with what I can only call chain lightning. Long Feng did not expect that, and now he doesn’t even have a city he can be a shadow ruler of, because he can’t fight raw power with cloak-and-dagger shit. Like Cersei said, power is power.
Iroh eventually finds out that Zuko has also been captured by the Dai Li and taken to Lake Laogai, so he’s gone there himself and runs into the Avatar. Inside, Katara and Zuko have a discussion about the war, and I like how Katara is very frank about what the war has cost her and the rest of the world. Outside, Aang is also having a heart-to-heart with Iroh, for parallelism. Elsewhere in Lake Laogai, Sai and Sokka are also having a talk. And for a season finale, it’s dragging. Other than the Zuko-Katara conversation, the rest of these conversations feel like they should be in the penultimate episode rather than in the finale.
As Aang and Iroh explore Lake Laogai, we get the Joo Dee scene, and credit where it’s due: it’s just as unsettling as it was in the animated series, even if it’s not a 1-to-1 recreation. Aang and Iroh eventually find Sokka, Katara, and Zuko, and they apologize and mend their friendships. They would have made a clean getaway and taken Appa with them too, if Aang didn’t try to save Joo Dee.
While all of that is happening, we get the Toph inventing metalbending scene and…it feels tinier, for some reason? Am I being too harsh? It just didn’t feel as joyous as it was in the animated series. To be honest, it kinda felt like when I tried to adapt Noli Me Tangere in high school for a class project. All the important scenes were there in the script, but I just essentially lifted them off the book. I didn’t have the knowledge of how to make it look good on stage. It just felt like you’re just reading the dialogue off the book and skipping the rest of the text. I hope this explanation makes sense because this is all I can give you guys right now. This metalbending scene just feels like they looked at a clip of the scene without context and just recreated it soullessly.
But then we get the scene between Zuko and Azula, where they work out their mommy issues, and I really think that whoever made the show was a Fire Nation fan. Like I said before, this show doesn’t need to be a one-to-one adaptation for it to be good. You can make massive changes like Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat did and still make it work!
We then get the climactic battle scene in the caves, and I don’t want to rag on it too much because unless this adaptation had a bajillion dollars, it wouldn’t ever measure up to the one in the animated series. All things considered, I thought they did it well. My biggest complaint would be that the bending felt heavy. It didn’t have the speed and lightness that it had in the animated series, but again, I have to consider the financial constraints.
Just like the animated series, Azula strikes Aang with lightning while he’s in the Avatar state, and as I rewatched a clip of the whole cave scene, they actually got it as close as they could to what they did in the animated series.
So why didn’t it have the same impact as the animated series did? As everybody else who’s much smarter than me has probably already pointed out, it’s everything that led up to the fight. The uneven quality of all the episodes that came before this climactic fight just really chipped away at all the emotion that we’re all supposed to feel with this final fight. It also didn’t help that the internet was against this show, and probably affected the way I interacted with it.
All in all, I have the same opinion as I did with the first season. It’s not a steaming pile of shit, and there are great moments scattered throughout, but it hasn’t really gotten out of the animated series’ shadow. Would I still watch the third season? Sure, just to complete the whole thing, but I’ll be keeping my expectations even lower than when I finished season one.
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