To summarize my first piece, the first season is good but suffers from an overall lack of tension. Zuko is too sympathetic, Zhao is more antagonistic to Zuko than the main cast, which makes for with good episodic tension but leaves something lacking when it comes to the bigger picture.
Season two changes this immediately. With the introduction of Zuko's younger sister Azula, the threat level in this show skyrockets. She's everything you want in this show- she's dynamic, powerful, manipulative, and just barely holding back a psychotic break. In her introductory episode, she nearly captures Zuko and Iroh just by playing on Zuko's insecurities. She puts everyone on their back heels by attacking them from every possible angle. Whenever she loses, it's just barely, so it's no surprise that, come the end of the season, she wins everything, conquering the Earth Kingdom via a coup and nearly killing Aang with a well-timed lightning strike.
The other thing that really pushes this season to another level is the introduction of earth bending. We saw a bit of it in season 1, but we get so much more of it here and adds a much more visceral quality to the fight choreography. There's just something about two people pummeling each other with the ground they're standing on that makes the fights feel so much more dangerous and exhilarating.
What I also appreciate is how the show explores the political aspects of the 100-year war. The Gaang spends the first half of the season making its way to Ba Sing Se, the last major Earth Kingdom stronghold and home of the Earth King. Their plan is to see the Earth King, tell him about an upcoming eclipse which will disable all firebending, which is the perfect time to launch an invasion of the Fire Nation to end the war.
Except, once they get to the city, they're cut off from seeing the king and everyone they talk to seems to have no idea that there's a war going on outside the city walls.
This state of affairs is brought about by the Dai Li, the secret police of Ba Sing Se who work to keep order by gaslighting the city into ignoring the war altogether and actively keep its existence from the king so he doesn't do anything stupid.
Funnily enough, there is a legit point behind them behaving this way. Cities under siege tend to fall because they crack from the inside. When resources spread too thin it gets fantastically hard to hold everyone together and soldier on through food, medicine, and water shortages. Even cities as self-sufficient as Ba Sing Se have a psychological limit that a century of war would erode. Eventually, the walls protecting you from the threat outside morph into the walls of your coffin.
So it makes a certain kind of sense that the Dai Li would value order above all else. In a city where the poor are literally walled off from the rich and powerful, any breakdown in order would lead to massive riots and fires which would be a nightmare to deal with. And it would be increasingly harder to prevent such a thing when to have the Fire Nation slowly but surely raiding, burning, and conquering its way all over the continent until Ba Sing Se is the only place left to go. In that scenario, its only a matter of when the city breaks, not if.
Of course, pretending that the war doesn't exist at all to the point were the pressure keeps on mounting because nothing's being done to relieve it is stupid and bound to fail as well, so remember kids, you can only propaganda your problems away for so long before they come bursting through your door.
Personally, I think this is the strongest of the original Avatar's three seasons. Part of what made the show so fantastic was that it isn't three separate seasons as much as one story broken into three distinct acts. In the second act, you raise the stakes, complicate the established arcs, and bring the heroes down to their lowest point. This season does all of these with aplomb, making for some of the funnest, most exciting, and heartfelt moments you'll find in any media.
This season is the show firing on all cylinders without an ounce of fat on it. It doesn't have to do any off the narrative set-ups that slow down the first and third seasons to varying degrees and can get along with the business of telling its story. It leaves the heroes in such a desperate place that it makes their victory feel all the more powerful when it finally comes. It makes that inevitable victory feel earned because, even though you know it's coming, you have reason to doubt.
More than anything, it leaves you in a position where you have to keep watching to find out all it works out in the end. Which is what we'll get into when we look at how the ending of the series kinda spoils all the good work spent getting there.
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