2x10 A New Spiritual Age

[6.4/10] We may have to come to a sobering realization as fans here, folks. Korra might be dumb. No, dumb is the wrong word. She might just have poor judgment. And maybe that fits with the character, consistently shown to have her heart in the right place but act a little too headstrong.

Still, one can only wonder what her thought process was when Unalaq was holding Jinora hostage and threatening to kill Jinora if Korra didn’t open the other spirit portal. Admittedly, Korra was understandably not expecting to have to make this choice, and so maybe her gameplan isn’t as refined as it could be, especially with a surrogate niece/grandchild/babysittee in the balance, but holy cow does she make a bad decision.

Maybe this is the cold utilitarian in me showing his util-weighing face, but man, trading one life (again, admittedly a life to which you have a personal attachment, which complicates things) for 10,000 years of evil reigning is a really, really, really poor trade. Nevermind the fact that it seems obvious that Unalaq, who despite the faintest veil of decency, seemed like the evil lord of evil from the beginning of this season, probably wouldn’t hold up his end of the bargain anyway. It’s just a dumb thing to do, and coupled with Korra’s initial trust of Unalaq this season, and her odd attempt to just declare Oman a fraud and expect everyone to believe her, it suggests that Korra doesn’t really think these things through.

I have to admit, I was a bit underwhelmed by the other adventures in the spirit world too. There was something neat about Jinora visiting the library that we saw in “The Library” and matching wits with the owl guardian that protects it, but on the whole it mostly serves to set up the hostage angle that didn’t really work for me. (Though I have to admit, I loved the brief but chilling look at what happened to the professor who chose to stay in the library in the corresponding AtLA episode.)

I also didn’t love Korra’s half of the spiritual journey either. I’ll admit, I enjoyed the Alice in Wonderland homages, the design of the spirit creatures was again very cool, and I literally gasped with Iroh showed up. But maybe it’s just watching this show in a post-Inside Out headspace, but there’s something that seems overly simplistic at best and harmful at worst to have the message of the episode essentially be that if you just think positively and don’t process any negative emotions, you’ll be in good shape.

Nevermind the fact that the battle between good and evil seems so much more rote in this season than it ever was on Avatar. One of the things I really appreciated about AtLA is how it eschewed simplistic notions of bad vs. good. Sure, Ozai was terrible, but the show took care to show how not every person from the Fire Nation was bad, not every person from the Earth Kingdom was good, the villains had damage and their own understandable motivations, and the heroes had flaws that meant they weren’t always crusaders for justice.

We still have four episodes left, so I’m not ready to declare anything yet, but there are far fewer shades to the current conflict in Season 2 of TLoK so far. We have a titan-level battle between the literal embodiments of good and evil; we have a big bad who has been nothing but mustache-twirlingly villainous, and we have the good spirit/malevolent spirit dichotomy. It’s all far too binary and uncomplicated for my tastes, and feels out of step with the ethos of the franchise. Again, I expect to have egg on my face when the show reveals some new level of depth in the final four episodes of the season, but it’s not promising or particularly interesting as a central struggle so far.

The episode does wring some juice from Korra returning to the material world and Tenzin’s reaction to the realization that his daughter didn’t come back with her (and Kya and Bumi’s earlier reassurances are a nice touch). But on the whole, it’s centered on two unsatisfying individual stories, with the backdrop of two-tone conflict, and a foolish decision from the main character to wrap it altogether. Not the show’s best outing, to be sure.