A little disappointed by the back pedalling here. Failure is a harsh lesson, but after endlessly demonstrating how important it is for Aang to have his friends there to help him up to this point I'm surprised that his first instinct was to go it alone again.
Possibly I was also taken by surprise by how many things have suddenly changed here.
Aang again must deal with failure!
Whoa. Not gonna lie. Azula looked pretty fiiiiiiine in her nightgown at the end. Wincest incoming?
There are lots of big feelings and heavy emotions in this episode. From Zuko's conflicted angst to Aaangs guilt and shame and Katara's anger. And it's all so emotionally resonant
Katara: "You're not dreaming. You're finally awake."
Some dude: "You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there."
Toph: "They know!"
Aang: "I need my honour back."
Katara: "He left."
Hakoda: "What?"
Katara: "Aang. He just took his glider and disappeared. He has this ridiculous notion that he has to save the world alone, that it's all his responsibility."
Hakoda: "Maybe that's his way of being brave."
Katara: "It's not brave, it's selfish and stupid! We could be helping him and I know the world needs him, but doesn't he know how much we need him, too? How can he just leave us behind?"
Hakoda: "You're talking about me too, aren't you?"
Katara: "How could you leave us, Dad?"
[She attempts to wipe away the tears.]
"I mean, I know we had Gran-Gran, and she loved us, but we were just so lost without you."
[Hakoda moves to comfort her as she turns away.]
Hakoda: "I'm so sorry, Katara."
Katara: [Embraces Hakoda.] "I understand why you left. I really do, and I know that you had to go, so why do I still feel this way? I'm so sad and angry and hurt!"
Hakoda: "I love you more than anything. You and your brother are my entire world. I thought about you every day when I was gone and every night when I went to sleep, I would lie awake missing you so much it would ache."
8/10
Aang’s antics & Zuko’s flip flopping is getting really tiresome. The creators spent 20+ episodes dealing with this but still we see the same nonsense.
After the conclusion of last season, Season 3 opens with a complete, and very needed, status quo shake up. The world thinks Aang is dead, and with the loss of Ba Sing Se the war is basically over outside of a few stragglers. Because of that, the threat is no longer the fear of being chased - it's instead the fear of being caught as the team preps for the invasion. Aang's arc here is an important one, representing almost a rejection of his prior self. He sounds a lot like former Zuko here, wanting to regain his "honor" due to his failure to win against Azula. The moment where he burns his staff is a powerful one and a declaration that the show will never be the same again.
Speaking of Zuko, what's fascinating about his arc is how much he doesn't change. He's still the angsty, brooding, and conflicted character from before, and maybe even more so now that he got what he wanted. And yet he's still not happy - sure, Ozai, in his first real appearance, now respects him again, and he's genuinely happy with Mai, but something doesn't feel right about his actions. Even Katara here, somebody whose normally the optimist, breaks down in this episode and finally admits to resenting and missing her father due to leaving. This is a heavy episode - one that finally begins to break down barriers for a season that has some of the lightest moments of the show but also it's darkest ones.
Why Aang gotta have hair bro?
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2017-03-30T03:18:13Z
[7.5/10] Failure is hard. It’s an obvious statement, but how it impacts us, how we respond to it, is telling. As we start the last season of Avatar, Zuko won his fight; Aang lost his, but they both feel like they failed.
It’s easy to understand why Aang feels that way. Ba Sing Se has fallen, as the twin grannies declare in colorful fashion, and the Fire Nation looks to have all but fully won this hundred-year war. Aang was there. He tried to fight it, and in the end, he couldn’t prevent it.
So when he has to hide his arrows to pretend to be dead, he pushes back on it, because it’s a reminder that everyone knows he failed, that he failed to stop this from happening 100 years ago, and he couldn’t stop it from happening again. It causes him to push his friends away, to try not to bring them down into his failures or make them, as he tells Katara, have to clean up his mistakes.
Zuko won, and he should feel victory, but his homecoming is bittersweet. It’s too much too soon to say that his conscience is bothering him, but as he returns in glory, he realizes that the event which has restored his honor may be a falsehood. He remembers Katara’s magic healing water, and knows that Aang may still be alive.
That creates a tinge of hollowness to everything. He is once again the Fire Prince. He faces his father, the one who scarred and banished him, and is welcomed, treated as someone who has come of age and regained his birthright.
But Zuko didn’t slay the Avatar. As Azula seems to suspect, based on her giving him the credit, maybe no one did. Though Zuko has everything he wanted so badly for these two seasons – his father’s respect, the chance to return home, the adoration and respect of his people, it all feels empty, because it’s a house built on sand.
Meanwhile, we get little bits of exposition to let us know where we are and how things have changed since we last saw Team Avatar. The conceit that they’ve captured a fire nation ship with Hakoda (Sokka and Katara’s dad) is a good one, providing plausible cover for them to move through the fire nation and creating some new dynamics. Sokka is his usual comic self, taunting and then thanking the irony gods. Toph is still a fun addition to the crew. But the best new detail is the relationship between Katara and her father.
Holy hell Mae Whitman! I must admit I mostly know the voice actress who does Katara from Arrested Development, and almost by design, she doesn’t get a chance to do too much there. But there is such hurt and power in her words when she confronts her father for leaving. There is a depth of feeling in the performance, the way she projects the way that Katara understands that her father had to leave them, but also the pain she felt from having to be separated and, in a sense, dealing with the loss of both her parents. It’s complex writing of a complex situation, and Hakoda’s response is age appropriate and heartening, but man is it a dynamite performance from Whitman.
Her sense of loneliness when Aang leaves speaks to the thing that Aang has that Zuko no longer does – friends and support. Zuko cannot trust his sister, who’s doublecrossed him plenty. He cannot trust his father, who banished him in the first place. Maybe he can trust Mai, since they apparently are an item now, but we only see her offer meager support here.
Aang, on the other hand, has Roku and Princess Yue, to remind him that Avatars before him have failed, and that he’s already saved the world once. It’s easy to lose perspective, carry your failures too heavy, and forget your good deeds. And he also has Team Avatar. The group hug at the end, after Aang accepts his new position in the world and is surrounded by the people who care about him and want to help him, is a sweet image, one that suggests the thing that gets us past failure are the people who love us whether we win or lose.