Welcome back for another weekly review of Avatar! This week, Sokka finally gets his own master! Let’s see how it goes.
1. Useless Sokka?
I’ve mentioned before that the show has a tendency to talk down Sokka’s skills in the name of humor. The first act of this episode takes that to an extreme, but with a certain nuance that ends up achieving a level of insight about Sokka that we haven’t seen much of yet.
As opposed to the rest of the team seeing Sokka as ineffectual during a crisis, this time Sokka is the one seeing himself as ineffectual. As he says, he’s not a bender, and he doesn’t have any other fight training. But even as he talks himself down, the others point out his unique skills: he’s creative, he’s the strategy guy, and nobody can read a map like him (as Toph says, “I can’t read at all!”). This is what makes these scenes different from past episodes. Sokka isn’t portrayed as a joke, and everybody realizes his positive qualities, so the shortcomings he sees in himself are used as motivation to push him towards learning a new set of physical skills.
2. Training!
Once Piandao takes Sokka under his wing, the second act of the episode becomes a sequence of short training scenes. It’s almost montage-like in how quickly each scene happens, and each scene highlights a different positive aspect of Sokka. In the ways he performs calligraphy, rock gardening, and painting a landscape he only had a few seconds to take in, he shows off his goofy creative side by coming up with solutions that defy any expectation. Calligraphy is about putting your identity on the page? Sokka paints his face with ink and rubs it on the paper. Rock gardening is about using your surroundings to your advantage? Sokka creates a comfortable lounge chair for himself out of rocks and moss. Sokka is a think-outside-the-box kind of guy, so he meets every challenge with that sort of thinking.
And let’s never forget that he chose to make his sword not out of a material easily found, but of a meteorite that fell to the earth the night before. Something wholly unique, and wholly him.
3. Swole Iroh, Comedically Uncomedic Gaang
As mentioned above, act 2 is interesting in that it bounces around to different small moments of Sokka’s training. Splitting those up, though, are equally small moments of not one but two (!) subplots. This is pretty rare for the show. We usually see only one subplot, if any (last episode had zero).
But it’s easy to see why we needed those two extra sets of scenes. The main plot about Sokka would become one-note if we were to see each training scene one after the other, so we have the Iroh subplot to split things up. The Iroh scenes, while they carry immensely important implications, would also have been one-note if there were too many, as they each boil down to “Iroh acts like a senile old man in front of the guards, then reveals himself to be getting buff when alone.”
So, a third subplot was incorporated, equally small and entertaining but fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things: Aang, Katara, and Toph miss Sokka. I love how humorous and flippant this subplot is, while also reinforcing character. Essentially, all that happens is that the kids get bored and fail at trying to make each other laugh the way Sokka would. That’s all we really need to see, both on a structural level and on a character level for Sokka’s emotional journey, so it works.
4. “Use Your Surroundings!”
I’m always fascinated by the ways directors and writers try to make sword fights interesting. It’s such a simple setup: two people swing swords at each other. There’s a limit to the amount of drama you can pull from such a simple setup, and for that reason, many movies that use this sort of scene rely on the buildup to sell the fight, as opposed to the fight itself.
As is a big theme of the episode, though, the sword fight employs all manner of creative solutions to this problem, leading to a truly visually interesting scene. After a bit of the standard (yet well-directed) “swing and dodge” moves, Sokka starts using his surroundings. He jumps over the stairs, traps Piandao’s sword flat under his as he stands on it, runs into the bamboo forest and slices down the bamboo so it falls on Piandao behind him, kicks up dirt with his sword to temporarily blind Piandao. To say nothing of the excellent directing and music in the scene, these writing choices ensured the scene would be interesting no matter what the rest of the team did.
Continued below5. The White Lotus Connection
At the end of the episode, it is revealed that not only did Piandao know Sokka was water tribe all along, he also is part of the mysterious “White Lotus Society” that we saw Iroh was a part of way back in episode 2.11, ‘The Desert.’ We still don’t get many details about the society, but if a fire nation nobleman is willing to train a water tribe kid in the name of the society, we can probably assume that it’s benevolent.
What stuck out to me on this rewatch, which I had never previously noticed, is that the white lotus symbol is all over Piandao’s castle. It’s on the front gate, the courtyard, the upper walls of the interiors, even the end of his sword’s handle. Piandao is entrenched in this society, whatever it is.
We also see lion turtle statues around the courtyard, and Piandao says Sokka has “a heart as strong as a lion turtle, and twice as big.” This is only the second time we see or hear anything about lion turtles (the first being back in Wan Shi Tong’s library), and each time they are spoken about with a strong spiritual reverence.
—
That’s it for me this week. Any thoughts on Sokka finally getting his due? How about Iroh’s body transformation? The White Lotus Society? Sound off in the comments!
