Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of Avatar: The Last Airbender. This week’s episode is named “Into the Dark” and it was full of challenges to every character, so let’s dive right in!
1. Bumi is a Wiseass
Aang and Uncle Iroh are trapped in Omashu’s prison, where the boy complains to the old man about his nephew’s attitude, saying they are in this situation because he does not stop pursuing him. At this point Iroh is cryptic, but he tries to let Aang know that his nephew is not evil, and the issue is more complex than just trapping him to win the war.
Afterwards, the old man is sent to the labor camps, while Aang has an audience with the king, an old man of more than 100 years who is apparently crazy. It’s then Aang discovers that the king is Bumi, one of his friends from the Earth Kingdom, and he seems to be hell-bent on pulling out challenges and tests on the kid.
I feel that in this episode I do have to make three key comparisons with the animated series. (As I told you before, I don’t like doing this, but this time it’s going to be useful.) The first is that the flashback scenes about the friendship between Bumi and Aang are very brief, they do not make very clear the level of friendship that the original conveyed, where I understood that they were best friends, and in this series it does not fully 100% translate; I also think Bumi looks more aggressive than the original.
2. Cave of Two Lovers
Meanwhile, Sokka confronts the Mechanist, who reveals that he was indeed giving information to the firebenders, but he only did so to protect himself and his son because he was threatened to death. Teo is disappointed in his father, while Sokka and Katara ask him for help to get Aang back.
Freeing the Avatar is a good path to redemption, the Mechanist is reluctant, but his son says something very powerful: now that they know that the Avatar lives, it is no longer time to hide in the shadows, and now that it is possible to openly confront the Fire Nation, it is time to stop being afraid.
Then, with the path signaled, the two siblings enter the cave to try to save their friend, where they meet some hippies who tell them the legend of Oma and Shu, the first earthbenders, who were in love, but belonged to two enemy towns; there, the siblings learn to get along better by expressing their fraternal love.
Here it’s necessary to point out the second comparison: here, the Cave of Two Lovers was used to help the relationship between Sokka and Katara, but the meaning of the cave in the original episode has a lot of depth, it teaches our heroes to let be guided by love, and involves a literal story of romantic love. I feel like this adventure was reduced to a plot point or check point that the live-action series has to go through, instead of it being a learning point that supports the development of our characters.
3. The Dragon of the West
While Uncle Iroh is being taken to the Pits, one of the Earth Kingdom soldiers informs him that he knows who he is, and knows that he led the 600 days of Ba Sing Se, where his brother died. Iroh responds that war is complex, meaning that everyone has to do bad things to get ahead in that cruel world.
Here, we learn a little about Uncle Iroh’s backstory and his relationship with Zuko: we see him at his son’s funeral, that changed him forever, and his nephew’s act of kindness is what convinced him to accompany Zuko and guide him in his exile.
Uncle Iroh is one of my favorite characters and a fan favorite. He has a very complicated history: we must acknowledge that he was a monster who fought for the Fire Nation in a brutal way, but we found out about this much later in the animated series, giving us time to get to know and empathize with him before learning about his sins. This acceleration makes me worry if people are going to be able to empathize with him as much as they did with his animated counterpart.
Continued belowOf course, I’m eager to see this story, it’s one of the ones that I was most excited to see, and the actor of Uncle Iroh, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, gives an adequate gravitas, and a tremendous performance that conveys a character tortured by his past.
4. Grow Up!
In his final challenge, old man Bumi himself fights Aang in a duel to the death. The king’s greatest complaint is that he had to grow up, he could not remain a child and was confronted by terrible decisions: what life are you going to save, this one or another? Which person are you going to feed?
Bumi wants to force upon Aang, somewhat vengefully, the 100-year growth he suffered, and puts him against the rope; is the Avatar willing to save himself, and sacrifice the king to continue his mission of saving the world?
5. …or Don’t
Sokka and Katara arrive at the last minute to save the king and help the kid not have to make this forced decision. Fortunately, Aang does not have to do this mission alone, he does not have to make a binary decision, since his friends are metaphorically and literally a third way, it is with their support that he will be able to achieve a peace where major sacrifices do not have to be made for a common good. He doesn’t have to grow up: it’s his child-like soul and his pacifist mind that will save the world.
This is also reflected by Zuko, when he has the choice between trying to hunt the Avatar or rescue his uncle, and chooses Iroh. Fire Lord Ozai forced his son to mature, he stole his childhood, but by choosing his uncle and not his ultimate mission, Zuko shows us that there is still goodness in him and that he can redeem himself, and it is his uncle Iroh who can help and inspire him so that he can be himself again.
And that’s it for this episode, I did have problems with these three changes that I feel accelerate the plot, it can be somewhat understood that these are creative decisions due to having to reduce 24 (short) chapters to 8 long ones, but by focusing on check points that people want to see to seem to be faithful to the original, instead of concentrating on the development that is obtained in those stories, a little of the magic is lost.
Let me be clear, the chapter was not bad, in fact, I enjoyed it, it’s just that there were shortcuts that did not allow me to fully enjoy it. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 105, “Spirited Away.”
