Essential Episode for the two lead men of Avatar. 10/10
That some good drama.
8/10
A landmark episode. "The Storm" is an episode that finally gives context to everything we've seen on both sides of the conflict, and what's fascinating about it is how much they deepen both our protagonist and our antagonist. Aang's struggle with being essentially the chosen one is treated with sensitivity, and I love how it's tied into his own personal struggles in the present. His remorse about the past can be seen as him trying to constantly overcorrect in the current time, by him being the nicest possible person he can and helping everybody as part of a penance for his own mistake a hundred years ago.
By contrast, Zuko is a good person who was turned to evil over circumstance and abuse, molded by the fascist regime at the center of his country and led by his father, cloaked in a meanacing shadow. Even to Zuko, the Fire Lord is nothing but a faceless monster, willing to take down whoever to get his way. He was punished for doing the right thing, and Aang is being slowly rewarded for doing the wrong thing - it's a deliberately fascinating dichotomy that rewards the viewer for paying attention. Brilliant.
A slow but very important episode. A first glimpse of why Zuko is who he is.
This episode is pure backstory brilliantly done.
Everything Aang in this episode was perfection. Aang's flashbacks really contextualizes why he was so invested in seeking out fun right out of the iceberg. He spent the last weeks or months of his life "before" hemmed in my the isolation of being the Avatar so his desire to go penguin sledding, skate the mail carts in omashu and ride elephant koi is such an apt response to what he was denied. And the episode goes on to unpack his survivor's guilt beautifully. This show wrestles with Aang's desire to just be a kid and his duty to the world so well.
And in contrast we have Zuko, someone who's desperate to prove himself at all costs. We see how that manifested when he was younger, aching to be a part of the war council and prove himself and how cruel punishment has shaped and handed him. The way this show demonstrates that innocence lost with just a few frames of contrast is stunning. We get such fascinating insight into Zuko, his "disrespect" being in the name of defending soldiers set to be sacrificed says so much about his character.
But the most gut wrenching moment in Zuko's backstory is that fateful Agni kai. I'll never get over just how visceral Ozai's cruelty is. We never see his face but his pure malice toward an innocent child, his innocent child is haunting. And seeing how that harded Zuko in just a few flashes is god tear storytelling.
And to top off an already excellent episode that final look between Aang and Zuko was the end to a perfect episode.
"I'm too young to die!" "I'm not, but I still don't wanna!" mwah
This is such an incredibly powerful, important episode in the series, and in the development of Aang and Zuko. Yet they still manage to strike a perfect balance of levity and narrative drama. So, so good.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-11-21T03:15:28Z
9.4/10. As this show has started to improve, I may need to start normalizing how I rate it a bit more. There's still a lot of filler episodes, but the show's impressed me with what it can do, to where giving it a high rating every time it puts out an above average episode is likely putting its ceiling too low. That said, this was a superb episode that gave us some great insight into both Aang and Prince Zuko, creating parallels and contrasts between them, even though it was mostly done in backstory.
I'm frankly kind of surprised that we got the dirt on both Aang and Zuko in the same episode. It seems like the sort of thing that the show would hold off for a season finale, maybe even the end of the series, but I liked getting to know more about the two of them here and now after enough of seeing their adventures to get to know each of them a bit, while not stretching things out too much.
What I like about Aang's story is that there's a certain Last Emperor flair to it, in that both feature a child striving to be childish thrust into a time of tumult where they're expected to be much more because of the times they were born into. I've also compared this show to Harry Potter before -- with its magical powers and world-building and trio of heroes facing a world-threatening big bad -- but this episode also makes that comparison more vivid by exploring something that franchise did with regularity -- the burden of being the chosen one.
After all, the fact that Aang has the weight of the world placed on his shoulders at the tender age of twelve is a little heartbreaking. We know him as this carefree kid, one who takes such joy in life through things like riding exotic creatures or playing "air scooter." To not only have that ripped away from him, to have the responsibility of being the avatar, but to have him rushed into that training because of a sense of impending danger among the monks makes his desire to run away sad but understandable.
But what I really loved about this episode is how it does the unexpected when juxtaposing Aang and Prince Zuko. The former has been portrayed as an innocent devoted to the good, while the latter has (with a few notable exceptions) been depicted as a pretty expectedly evil bad guy. In their backstories, however, we see that Aang couldn't handle the responsibility of caring for the many, that it was his responsibility to become the avatar to protect the world, and it was too much for him. By contrast, we see that Zuko was not an innately evil kid, but rather that he was punished and sent on this task for speaking up for innocent people who were going to be used as cannon fodder for the Fire Nation. Aang was too reluctant and anxious to defend his people, and Prince Zuko was too eager to protect his. That's what leads them to where each of them are today.
I like how it, again, complicates Prince Zuko. He is no longer a monolithic evil, but rather a naturally good kid with an abusive father, compelled by the horrible code of honor of the Fire Nation to go on what was thought to be an impossible task to get back in the good graces of the parent who disowned him. That's a complex motivation that make him unique as a character and gives him a rationale better than an "I'm fighting you because I'm the bad guy" fiat. What's more the glimpses we get of the Fire Lord (frickin' Mark Hamill!) emphasizes the cruelty Zuko faced, the place he grew up in and the experiences he had that both explain why he is the way he is, and give us hope for redemption for him.
It also makes Aang a little less pure, and a little more understandable. Learning that you are the reincarnation of the pseudo-prophet destined to protect the world is a lot to put on a kid who isn’t even a teenager yet. The episode does a nice job at showing how it changes his world, how the things that he enjoyed in life – playing games and being with his young friends, were taken away from him. His responsibility isolated him, and the threat that he would be taken away from the one person who had allowed him to remain a child, the monk who was his guardian, was enough to make him want to flee from having anything more taken away from him.
But what’s meaningful is that we see both Aang and Prince Zuko overcome their anxieties about their past. Aang feels guilt for what happened in the century since he was too afraid to face his destiny and froze himself beneath the water. And yet in the present, while the setup is a little contrived, he faces the same situation, but this time he sees Sokka and Katara holding onto Appa beneath the water, and he realizes he has something to fight for, using his Avatar powers to save them.
In the same storm, we see Prince Zuko, who in the beginning of the episode was parroting his father’s forceful lesson about how individual lives are inconsequential in the face of the Fire Nation’s goals, especially in relation to a task set by the Fire Lord himself, risk his own life to save that of one of his crewmen. It’s a sign that Fire Lord’s teachings haven’t poisoned him yet, that there is still the good kid who worried about the Fire Nation War Council sacrificing loyal but inexperienced recruits to win a battle. And he’s also willing to let the Avatar escape in order to preserve the safety of his crew, something that shows that goodness survives, and supersedes even his all-consuming quest to win back his father’s approval.
Both Aang and Prince Zuko reckon with their pasts, but emerge having made their peace and become able to move forward. Aang resolves not to be weighted by his past, believing, with Katara’s encouragement, that perhaps there’s a reason why he’s needed here now. And Prince Zuko shows that despite the trauma he experienced at the hands of his own Father, despite his devotion to finding the Avatar, there is an integrity to him, and sense in which the better parts of him may still be reclaimed. The protagonist and antagonist of this show are each deepened, not only by knowing where they came from and how they got here, but by seeing what they do in the here and now in the shadow of all that’s happened to them before.