2x13 Darkness Falls

[7.6/10] Here’s the weird thing about this season for me. Despite the world-changing events going on, the mystical origin stories and threats of uber-spirits reigning for 10,000 years, the plotline in the season I’ve enjoyed the most has been about Tenzin and his family.

In fairness, that’s not crazy for me. I tend to like smaller, more personal stories as much as I like the one with major fireworks and battles to the death, but it seems odd when the universe is supposed to hang in the balance here, and I’m more invested in the Offspraang Gang trying to find Jinora than whether Korra will save the world.

Part of that is because the Tenzin/Kya/Bumi portion of the episode is just so good. It has a few things going for it out of the gate like return engagements from Iroh and Zhao(!) (the latter of whom is still ranting and raving after his adventures with Northern Water Tribe) which helps give the story a sense of place. It also allows us to explore more of the spirit world. The fog of lost souls is a neat concept, as is submitting to a spider creature to get there, and I prefer the spirit world to be this sort unpredictable unknowable place (with humorous talking mushrooms) than just an interdimensional battlefield.

It also gives us a great insight into Tenzin. Sure, Bumi fearing cannibals and Kya fearing being tied down are bit too on the nose, but I love the culmination of Tenzin’s arc here. So much of the sibling’s plot this season has been about reckoning with their father’s legacy and the different ways it marked them. Having Tenzin’s great fear be that he won’t live up to that legacy, that he’s failed to preserve what his father stood for and wanted for him is a deft choice in that regard, and I like the show’s answer too. Tenzin has to stop trying to be his father and start simply being himself. It’s trite, but relatable and understandable, and it works as a key to solving problems plotty and personal.

The other part of my preference for Tenzin & Co.’s story is that the rest of the episode feels so rote and easy. Don’t get me wrong, the show still knows how to do action and design like nobody’s business. Dark Avatar Unalaq has a crazy-looking design that gets by on coolness alone, Korra fighting a giant kite is actually much more exciting than I imagined, and she even gets her own badass Aang like moment, where it looks like she’s down for the count but then comes back with Avatar powers to kick ass, replete with the musical swell. Heck, she even does something really bright -- air-blasting Unalaq out of the spirit realm so that he can’t bond with Vaatu.

But I just can’t get over the easy escalation of this whole plot. The entire concept of the Dark Avatar feels like too much to me. The Avatarverse has always had stories about big bads, but having an almost purely villainous dude endeavor to replicate the mechanism that created the first Avatar to make an Anti-Avatar feels like a lazy way to make a universe-threatening antagonist with the standard “evil reflection of the protagonist” veneer. In a Star Wars prequel sort of way, it reduces the inscrutable magic behind the power of The Avatar to an admittedly difficult but all too understood process that can be replicated, and just gives us a snarling uber-bad guy for the trouble.

There’s some interesting things happening nonetheless. Eska and Desna freeing Mako and Bolin because of love is a bit too contrived for me (and it feels like they probably should have turned on their own by now), but each has something to do here and it largely works. And I’m admittedly curious about where the show is going to go after having Vaatu seemingly kill Rava and thus wipe out the previous line of Avatars. It would be a bold choice if they stick with it, though something about the previous “neither light nor dark can ever be permanently” defeated shtick suggests that they’ll find some means of wiping it all away.

I don’t know. There’s a lot of cool stuff in both parts of the story of this episode, but one of them is founded on something sound -- a man who is both son and father trying to reconcile himself as a child and as a parent, dramatized with neat expansions of the spirit world, and the other is founded on something disappointing -- the reduction of the Avatar to a magical recipe and the usual “I’m the dark version of you” bad guy that often happens when a franchise has run out of places to go. We’ll see whether TLoK can stick the landing and shut me up.