4x01 After All These Years

[7.4/10] Oh man, big time jumps are such a tired move for a T.V. show with a few seasons under its belt. It’s one of those things that feels revolutionary because it gives you time and space to change the status quo. But it also feels like too easy a way to inject some mystery back into a show that’s already explored its characters and setting and premise a bit, because you can keep the audience guessing about what happened in the interim time between seasons for a while. (See also: Parks and Recreation)

So I both love and hate the choice. I love it because it’s basically the show re-piloting, something I admire in series as varied as Homeland and Friday Night Lights and Angel. It does create new roles for all of the familiar characters, letting them drift apart and start new lives and put them in unfamiliar yet natural positions that let the story advance without having to do too much exposition or tediously trace those changes step-by-step.

But at the same time it feels like a cheap way to inject more drama and intrigue back into a show that’s tread a decent amount of ground already and move characters around the board without having to actually do the narrative to work to get them there. Suddenly Kai and Opal are badass airbenders. Kuvira has ascended to become the equivalent of a regional feudalist, with Bolin as her lieutenant. Mako’s the bodyguard for the impending, spoiled Earth King, and Asami’s building railways between Republic City and Ba Sing Se, and Korra is nowhere to be found, and the time jump gives the show the benefit of coming at all of these major developments backward

The devil, as always, is in the details, but I find myself vacillating between being incredibly excited at all the new possibilities put into play by this big change in the status quo, and kind of annoyed that the series basically “yada yada yada’d” its way past how all of this happened.

That said, if there’s one thing I admire in art, it’s boldness, and while it’s a little offputting at first, I appreciate the boldness of “After All These Years” basically sidelining our familiar heroes in introduce or reestablish newer ones.

The peak of that comes in the form of Kai and Opal, who are a two-man airbending defense team trying to protect various Earth Kingdom provinces from roving gangs of lucre-seeking bandits (including one governed by freakin’ Bert Cooper!). The pair have some impressive aerial and acrobatic encounters (giving me a Tim Drake in Batman: The Animated Series vibe). Much of this episode is from their perspective, and while neither character has necessarily been developed enough yet to make that a natural move, it’s interesting to see them given the spotlight a bit.

The same is true for Kuvira who, true to her shoehorned introduction last season, is poised to have a bigger role in the show’s fourth season. She takes up much of the oxygen in the premiere, but I like her as a prospective Big Bad. The notion of her likely colluding with bandits to gain fascistic control over the Earth Kingdom, promoting rigid order as a counterpoint to Zaheer’s anarchy, is an interesting one. Plus, we’ve had evil firebenders, evil waterbenders, and even evil airbenders as Big Bads in the Avatar-verse in the past, but save for Long Feng (who was more of a sub-boss to Azula anyway), we’ve never really had an earthbending Big Bad, so color me intrigued.

Mako is the familiar character with the most to do in this one, but his annoyance at having to babysit the bratty Earth King-to-be doesn’t accomplish much, beyond showing that there’s a reason why the jeering crowds might prefer Kuvira take over. The same goes for Bolin as her second, balancing his desire to try to do the right thing with having to follow orders, typically a fruitful area of character development. Asami doesn’t have as much of an arc plotted out in the early going here, but Republic City has become home to the new Spirit Wilds; Varick is on Team Kuvira, with Kuvira herself engaged to Opal’s brother, and the Air Nomads are traveling the globe setting right what’s gone wrong.

But we don’t get Korra until the last minute of the episode, which is, again, something I really admire. I admire it because it’s interesting storytelling, but also because when we meet Korra, she’s clearly not recovered from the events that happened in the Season 3 finale. A Korra who is broken and trying to heal, trying to become sure of herself once more after all the trauma she’s been through, is a very promising arc for our hero.

When I wrote about the end of Season 3, I talked about the idea of consequences being important to shows like this. That’s the one big mark in favor of the time jump here -- it means that Korra didn’t magically recover from all that she’d been through, that there was time for her to change and yet still not be fully the person she once was. The show has only toyed with the idea of the psychological effect that not being the best in the world Avatar would have on Korra, and I’m excited to see them pull the trigger on that fully. Hopefully it pays off.