Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 1: For Want of a Villain

I've been thinking about the show Avatar: The Last Airbender a lot lately and decided to re-watch the series and do a write up for each season because I'm bored and feel like taking a break from politics. Also I'm starting grad school soon so I figured it'd be a good idea to start stretching those analysis muscles before the semester starts. The main thing I'm focusing on is how the show ups the quality and stakes of its conflicts by scaling up the quality of their villains in each season. Write up, and spoilers, below the cut.

( I don't want to do a whole plot summary for the show, so if you haven't seen it, watch the opening. It's only a minute.)

Let me just say that overall, I really love this show. It's the best supernatural martial arts show anyone has ever done, with a incredibly rich and developed world of disparate cultures and  peoples. That being said, this first season is, by a wide margin, the weakest in the series.

The primary reason for this is that the season doesn't have a very strong antagonist. Zuko is a red-herring since he's more of what's called the deuteragonist (literally the second most important person in the story) more than an antagonist. Sure, he is the primary pursuer of our main trio, but that is more because he needs them as objects to fulfill his own personal quest of restoring his honor and his destined place in the world. 

Zuko doesn't act out of any real sense of enmity; he, like Aang, is simply pursuing the person he thinks will help him restore balance to a world gone upside down. Enmity develops between Zuko and the main trio, because how can you not sorta hate the person trying to capture and imprison you, but this is used by the creative team as a smokescreen to obscure the similarities between Aang and Zuko this early in the story. It's good long-form story-telling, but it has the unfortunate side effect of sidelining Zhao, the actual antagonist, negating any threat he could pose.

Zhao, voiced wonderfully by Jason Issacs, is more of an impediment than he is a threat. He fights both Aang and Zuko one-on-one on two separate occasions over the season and is beaten by both of them. In Aang's case, Aang doesn't even throw a punch, he just tricks Zhao into destroying his own boats. Even when Zhao has Aang imprisoned, a disguised Zuko waltzes in and out of the prison Aang's being kept in with only minor difficulty. And since Zhao's pursuit of Aang is more of an attempt to humiliate Zuko, he's barely proactive in hunting down the main trio of Aang and siblings Sokka and Katara. 

Zhao, at best, is making his decisions as reactions to the actions of two other people, he never really seizes the initiative or forces anyone to reconsider their game plan. Sure, they have to work around him, but they do, easily and repeatedly. It really says something that the only time Zhao poses a legitimate threat is in the finale where the main trio, having successfully evaded him, are training in the North Pole. Basically, the team corners themselves and even Zhao can't fuck up posing a threat in that position.

But Zhao's incompetence does serve a broader, more important story function. His bumbling interference serves as a way to keep the Gaang (the shorthand term for Aang, Katara, and Sokka) out of any serious or perilous physical or emotional situations that they aren't prepared to handle. They're a relatively weak and incompetent lot of heroes, so they need a villain who's at the same level as they are and, on the other hand, prevent someone who is more driven and passionate in chasing the Gaang from fulfilling his own quest. Zhao is basically padding in living form- he keeps the story going without adding anything meaningful to it. It makes stretches of the season boring, unfortunately, but at this point he's something of a necessary evil.

The other aspect of this show that doesn't quite get used to the full extent is the cost of the war and its effect on the world these characters live in. "The Southern Air Temple", "Jet", and "The Northern Air Temple" are the episodes that handle the conflict and its costs best, but for a large part of the season, you could be forgiven that stopping this war is the whole point of making sure Aang learns how to use four elements. 

In context, I don't consider this criticism as important as the one about Zhao's listless villainy because, one, the characters themselves are still immature and don't have the full real-world experience to handle being fully exposed to the war, and two, when the writers do dip their toes into this area, they do exceptionally well.

The two Air Temple episodes are fantastic looks at Aang and his survivor's guilt. The death of his people, his culture, his entire heritage, crushes him in both episodes to a fantastic degree. Also, "The Northern Air Temple" introduces us to the Mechanist, a man who has converted the temple into a mechanized factory of sorts to build hot-air balloons and gliders for the surviving members of his tribe, including his crippled son Teo, after a Fire Nation attack. It's later revealed that the Mechanist has been building weapons for the Fire Nation for years. He explains that shortly after they came to the temple when Teo was still a baby, Fire Nation troops found them and threatened to kill them. In order to spare their lives, the Mechanist offered his services, and the troops accepted. 

What's most impressive about the whole episode is that while the show portrays the Mechanist's actions as terrible, it doesn't apply the same treatment to the man himself. Instead, they play them as a man who had to make a terrible choice, a man who knows that the same methods and devices he's using to create a safe, loving life for his son and the people he loves are, at the same time, destroying families and lives exactly like his every day. It's an awful burden, and to see it introduced and handled so well in any form of media is impressive as all hell, no matter if it's just a "kids" show.

Similarly, the episode "Jet" gives Katara and Sokka an opportunity of their own to see what they could become if they let go of their own code. The eponymous character leads a rag-tag group of child soldiers in a resistance against the Fire Nation soldiers garrisoned nearby. Like Sokka and Katara, Jet's mother was killed by Fire Nation soldiers-everyone in his group lost someone to the Fire Nation- like the Gaang, Jet is part of a loosely assembled band of children way out of their depth doing what they can to bring down an army that has ruined so much of their lives.  

 

Unlike the Gaang however, Jet becomes the very thing he hates the most. His plan in the episode is to manipulate Aang and Katara into filling up the local reservoir, then blow it up, flooding the town killing solider and civilian alike. He justifies himself by saying he wants to kick the Fire Nation out of the valley, and by killing everything, well that fulfills his mission. 

This "make a desert, call it peace" is the same style of conquest the Fire Nation engages in and Jet justifies himself by saying if you want to beat them, you have to use their own tactics against them. Unlike the example with the Mechanist, the show doesn't cut Jet any slack (at least not yet) because when confronted with the monstrosity of his choices and their consequences, he refuses to alter them. Again, the show doesn't downplay or diminish the validity or scale of his loss, but it does hammer home that no matter the pain or circumstance, our choices are always our own, and we will have to reconcile them sooner or later.

All that said, I still recommend the watching the show and starting it from this first season. The individual episodes are strong- "The Fortune Teller" and "The Great Divide" are the only real duds in the season- even if they don't do a very good job of building momentum towards the climax of the season. The three-part finale is (and I do hate using this) epic in all the best ways. 

 

Main reason I don't feel this season is bad, exactly, is because all the primary complaints I have with it disappear in the next two seasons once the trio moves directly into the main theaters of the war instead of being on its fringes. 

This season is very much concerned with laying the foundation for all the conflicts and character growth still to come and it does that quite well; everything is comparatively low stakes because the characters don't have the physical or emotional abilities to handle the higher ones yet. So while that may make for a dry and sometimes difficult experience watching the story, it's still necessary and I'm glad the showrunners got it all done at once.

That's all I've got for the first season.  Next up: Season two and the wrecking ball that is Princess Azula.