3x08 The Puppetmaster

[9.2/10] Avatar: The Last Airbender has been scary before. There’s moments where our heroes are under threat or some strange new monster or power is after them, or some freaky thing called “the face dealer” is in play. But never before has the show been as downright creepy as it is here. “The Puppetmaster” plays like an episode of Tales from the Crypt, with a mystery, a friend turned tormentor, and a dark secret.

The very idea of bloodbenders, of someone who can control other life forms, be they animals or human beings, is intriguing and haunting in turn. The episode builds up to that nicely, with Hama initially taking water from plants, and seeming slightly unnerving in her presence before the big reveal. One of the things I like about Avatar is that it takes the natural nerd-y questions about these elemental powers and takes them to their logical, sometimes disturbing extremes, whether that’s Toph being able to bend metal or Hama being able to manipulate human beings filled with fluid.

But what I like about Hama is that the show doesn’t make her just an evil witch. For one thing, she is a link to Katara and Sokka’s history and tradition. She is, for all we know, the last water-bender from the southern water tribe. There is a sense of communion with her and Katara, a connection between them that Katara cannot forge with anyone else given the circumstances and what the Fire Nation did to their people. That immediately makes her reveals, her attacks, and her methods more damning and haunting – because she is, at least nominally, on the side of the good guys.

And yet what I love about Hama is that she’s basically Magneto from X-men (right down to breaking out of prison built to evade her powers using substance contained in a human being). She does terrible things and she has a binary, retributivist view of right and wrong that perpetuates the cycle of violence. Still, you absolutely understand who she is and what she does and why she is that way given what she’s been through and what’s been done to her. She’s seen the worst of the fire nation’s trespasses against her people; she’s seen the way they wiped out her brothers and sisters, and she has no forgiveness in her heart for them or anyone who bears their brand. She is a victim rounding up the descendants of her tormentors. That is horrifying, but complex.

It’s also unnerving because she tries, and arguably succeeds, in passing that legacy down to Katara. Hama is worried about the practices of her people dying out, and so works to teach bloodbending to Katara, to force her to use the techniques. The very sight of her controlling Aang and Sokka and using their bodies to attack Katara is creepy enough, and the same goes for the way she contorts Katara’s arm. But the real tragedy is that she forces Katara to use the bloodbending to stop her, passing this terrible mantle down to her in the process.

AtLA can be scary, but it can also be much deeper than that. “Puppetmaster” succeeds at telling a horror story as good as any that could be whispered around the sort of campfire at the beginning of the episode, but it grounds it in complicated notions of vengeance, legacy, and agency that take a horrifying thing and given it an unavoidable human dimension.

Props to the show for getting this dark, as many children's media even nowadays rarely touch on topics like this. "The Puppetmaster" is creepy, foreboding, and even horrific in it's implications, and the fact the show shows no restraint in that regard must be applauded. In terms of atmosphere, the show doesn't get much better then this as it uses it's dark colours, moonlight, and shadows to create a mood unlike anything else on the show. Plus the actual action is scary too, less focused on flashy bending and more unnerving uses of powers never once thought possible.

And yes, this leads to bloodbending, which is easily the darkest Avatar has ever gotten. This was the kind of question that other shows would ignore, but instead this show tackles it head on with the idea of "no, what actually WOULD bending the water in somebody look like?" and the results are nothing short of spine-chilling. Katara's own arc here is one where she is forced to get darker and use more destructive forms of her own bending, and by the end of the episode she is a different person, a much more distraught version of herself that knows how powerful she can be and what she is willing to do to do what she thinks is right. A brilliant, ballsy episode.