Welcome back for another weekly review of Avatar! This week, we arrive in Ba Sing Se, where the gleaming city of potential is revealed to be hiding something dark and sinister. Read on to see how the episode holds up!
1. Genre-bending.
This has always been my favorite episode of the show. Hands down. I think the episode seamlessly blends everything Avatar excels at, chief of which is its willingness to play in multiple genres. The episode starts out as a mystery, turns into a sitcom when the characters try to search for answers, and finally descends into a political thriller once everything starts falling into place. Director Lauren MacMullan takes these elements of the script and plays each one up while letting the story naturally dictate when to switch tones. The mystery portion slowly yet meticulously displays the visuals of the city as we receive small bits of information to chew on, the sitcom portion plays up the physical comedy and the occasional absurdity of the Avatar world (“Just… bear.”), and the political thriller portion contains dark hidden rooms and sudden kidnappings as dangerous information gets thrown at the team.
The music of the episode follows suit: During the mystery, we start with some of the show’s familiar themes and a majestic Ba Sing Se theme, which turns less majestic as we realize the city isn’t as glorious as we expected it to be. Then, the sitcom gives us the plucked strings of a 90s Jim Carrey movie, and the political thriller switches the music into a heavy, dissonant, choral-sounding arrangement with a simple, creepy, high-pitched melody lingering on top of it.
Despite its contrasting genres, the show makes them work as if the story wouldn’t make sense any other way. This is one of the best examples of what the show is capable of — and we haven’t even gotten into the subplot or the introduction of the city itself yet!
2. “Ba Sing Se has many walls. There are the ones outside protecting us, and the ones inside that help maintain order.”
Much of this episode is spent establishing Ba Sing Se since we’re going to spend the rest of the season here, and the episode’s title is revealed to be true in far more ways than we expected. Toph has the earliest reaction since she’s been to the city before: she sees it as a cage keeping people locked away from the outside world, as well as keeping them from freedom. In fact, the team is robbed of their freedom to move and think as soon as they step off the train, due to their perpetually smiling guide, Joo Dee.
The episode takes a fairly subtle view of the social structure of Ba Sing Se, yet it’s all there if you look. The poorer residents, whom Joo Dee euphemistically refers to as “people that work with their hands,” are all housed together in cramped slums. Our characters, however, are taken up to the Upper Rings of the city, where they’re given a free-standing house in a quiet, beautifully landscaped area. We don’t understand the extent of it yet, but clearly the rigid social structure has led to radical social inequality in the city.
All the talk of walls and maintaining order extends out metaphorically, too. During the team’s carriage ride through the city, we get briefly introduced to the Dai Li, who, again, Joo Dee dismisses as “the cultural authority.” But we, like Sokka, know there’s something deeper and more sinister going on here. Walls and secrets, walls and secrets…
3. “I don’t want to make a life here.” “Life happens wherever you are, whether you make it or not.”
I’m amazed at how deftly each character’s relationship to the city is shown. As mentioned above, Toph sees the city as suffocating because of the overwhelming amount of rules and structure. Aang remarks how the city is run so differently from how the monks taught him to live. Sokka sees through the bureaucratic BS of the city and becomes frustrated at the government’s attempts to placate him. Katara becomes unnerved as she must reconcile her optimistic hopes for a utopia with the much different reality. Zuko remains his cranky old self as he tries adjusting to life as a member of the populace. And, my personal favorite: Iroh just wants to work in a tea shop. Each of these are introduced one after another, yet they’re all so true to the characters that we can easily keep track.
Take note of the quote I used for this thought. It’s one of my favorites in the show. No character is in their ideal situation, yet Iroh is the most well-adjusted because of his age. He knows that focusing too hard on your end goal will leave you with a wasted life — a lesson the younger characters haven’t learned yet. So, how do you escape an impossible situation? You accept it and move forward in whatever ways you can. We may not know how, but we know life will continue on, so you might as well live the simple tea-serving life you’ve always wanted.
4. Jet!!!!
The moment we’ve all been waiting for: Jet finally confronts Zuko and Iroh about being firebenders. This moment succeeds on a few levels. On one, there’s the fact that Zuko and Iroh really just want to start over, and Jet’s extremism is putting them in harm’s way. On another level, Jet has fallen back into his extremism despite his attempts to reform, which also leads us to consider how far Zuko’s come and how easily he might fall back into his old ways. And on the level that ties everything together, the Dai Li swoop in with a vested interest in the conflict. That fight scene, though? That was on a whole other level.
This subplot is one of the most perfectly constructed in the show. Each character has such high stakes which are introduced seamlessly, and you truly never know who is going to make it out okay in the end — until the A-plot comes crashing into the story to whisk Jet away. It’s an ending nobody could have seen coming, especially considering how the Zuko/Iroh stuff has played out largely separately from the main crew’s stories this season. And it’s an ending that reveals the greater truth of the entire city.
5. “There is no war within the walls.”
So, the big reveal at the end is that Ba Sing Se is run by a shadow government of military police who capture and brainwash everyone who tries to speak about the war. First off, this absolutely blew my mind when I was twelve. Second, it still blows my mind twelve years later because the scenes are so well done, even on my, uh, twelfth (?) watch-through.
This concept is based on several historical authoritarian governments, including the Jinyiwei secret police during China’s Ming dynasty, as well as the organizations run by a man named Dai Li (!) during the early 20th century. While there’s no puppet government, I think the most obvious modern-day equivalent to this form of fascism is North Korea. Just check out big red warning on the “Stay Safe” section of this Wikitravel page for Pyongyang. After listing how one should never say anything bad about the government, its ideologies, or its leaders, the guide reads: “Simply avoid these topics if you can do so. Keep in mind that anyone can be an undercover government agent, so respond accordingly when this subject is at hand, always keep in mind you might be tested and pushed into admitting your real feelings on these subjects, whatever they may be. You and your guide are likely to face serious trouble.” This is exactly what happens to the Avatar gang and Jet in this episode.
The biggest lesson here is that you don’t know who your allies are until you meet up with them. From the outside, Ba Sing Se seemed like a utopia that would help defeat the Fire Nation. As it turns out, while the Earth Kingdom wants to avoid the war, they have no intention of acknowledging it. And the attempts to hide this information from its citizens, to put up unnecessary walls both physically and mentally, and to insist on a complex bureaucratic system of order, has led to a culture of fear and ignorance. It’s the perfect way to start off this arc as we head towards the season’s end. Just when you thought things could only get better, they get immeasurably worse.
Oh, and now that Joo Dee failed to prevent the team from inquiring about the war, she’s been replaced by a completely different woman who wears the same clothes, talks with the same cadence, and also says her name is Joo Dee. Nothing out of the ordinary there.
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What did you think of the episode? Do you think the mixture of genres worked? Happy to see the pay-off to Jet’s story? Any overall thoughts on Ba Sing Se’s society, architecture, or culture? Let me know in the comments!
