1x08 When Extremes Meet

[8.1/10] When watching AtLA, I tended to think of chosen one stories: Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Star Wars. But when I watch TLoK, I often find myself thinking about Batman: The Animated Series. Some of that’s just stylistic. You have a hero bounding through a cityscape, often at night, with blimps overhead, stylized fights, and a notable score. But some of it’s the way that a good episode of B:TAS could rouse you along through a well-done adventure and then knock you off your block in the third act with some wrinkle or detail that blew you away.

That’s what TLoK does in “When Extremes Meet.” Things are heating up in Republic City after Amon’s attack at the championship match, and Tarrlok’s task force is going to the mattresses against non-benders. It’s obviously a little simplistic, but I like that the show goes a bit political here. Tarrlok isn’t just going hard against the Equalists here, he’s putting all non-benders under a curfew, cutting their power, siccing the cops on them, and it puts Korra in a difficult position.

That’s a position of civil disobedience. As The Avatar (even a “half-baked Avatar in training”) she has a big role in the community, and her directly standing against the police makes a big statement. The notion that she stands up against Tarrlok’s McCartyhism (or Nazism, if you want to go that far with it), and then stops before she gets to the point of publicly challenging him in a fight, is an interesting one that plays in the spaces of Korra’s impulses and her public responsibilities.

It’s also made a bit more explicit than I might like, but I also appreciated that the show leans directly into the “New Team Avatar” business. Seeing Korra, Bolin, Mako, and Asami wrangle the chi-blockers in that bending-assisted car chase was exciting, and it’s a well-done sequence. Creating the sense that these four folks could work very well together, and then having Tarrlok immediately dash that functioned nicely as a way to show that this issue was a bigger one than mere teamwork could solve.

(As an aside, I laughed like hell when Korra got in the face of the new chief of police and told him that he was the worst chief of ever, and had Tenzin calm her down and usher her out, only for him to then turn around and declare the same thing.)

And holy crap, that last sequence. I don’t think we’ve had a full-on bender-on-bender battle on TLoK up to this point. We’ve had benders vs. chi-blockers which is close, and we’ve had pro-bending matches, which is similar, but not quite all out elemental combat. It’s a thrill to see, especially with a character like Korra who has three elements at her disposal. Seeing Tarrlok seal himself in a bubble and fire off ice daggers, or have Korra use the stone water feature behind him as a weapon, or watching her go bullet time and destroy the ice projectiles was pretty damn cool.

Then, all of a sudden, things get serious. There’s the brief moment of horror when Tarrlok bloodbends Korra. The only people we’ve seen do that are Katara at her most dangerous and upset, and the disturbed and damaged woman who taught the technique to her. His use of it marks him as crossing a line, as himself being dangerous and more of a threat than we even knew. The episode belabors the point (see: the title) but his characterization of himself and Korra as cut from the same cloth, in their willingness to go to extremes, becomes disquieting in that context.

The fact that the episode ends on such a down note -- him locking Korra away (but not before she uses Iroh’s “Dragon of the West” technique) and taking her to go know’s where is a nice bit of escalation. It’s a shocking way to close out the episode, and I’m excited to see where the show goes from here.