Welcome back for another weekly review of Avatar! This week, we take a detour through the Cave of Two Lovers.
1. The Shipping . . . Oh, the Shipping.
Look, this episode is one of my least favorites in the show. It’s a detour in between two much more important and much more interesting chapters. The A-plot has the characters stuck in a cave, which is visually uninteresting until the end and eventually becomes grating. Beyond all that, though, is the shipping.
The previous episode that went heavy on the Aang/Katara pairing, “The Fortuneteller” back in season one, took a fun, youthful look at the young love. This episode, however, seems to throw them together simply because that’s what happens in myths. That’s their exact reason for attempting to kiss: ‘The main characters in the myth did it, so we should, too!’
I might have enjoyed that aspect of the episode a little more if there was some metatextual commentary attached, something to say, “People expect things to be a certain way because of myths like the one these characters are discovering.” Without that commentary, the two stories exist side by side without truly connecting the way they should, and the romance ends up feeling forced and hollow.
2. Hippies?
If season one was focused on going around the world and giving overviews of the societies in the Avatar world, you could say that season two expands that and explores different personalities of the cultures within the world.
Toward the beginning of the episode, Aang and crew meet a group of people modeled after ’60s American hippies (who, incidentally, took some inspiration from Eastern philosophies which Avatar frequently makes use of). Since this is a different world, though, they don’t have any of the political beliefs or cultural significance. So, removed from that, they become a fun group of easygoing spaced-out friends of the world. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a group of people (Aren’t we all, brother?).
As with the shipping, there was a major missed opportunity here: these people could have easily been the equivalent of what hippies were in the ’60s. Sure, they can retain their personalities and perspectives, but they could have also explicitly become this way as a reaction to the war. What we get is enjoyable, I just get frustrated that there was such an obvious missed opportunity.
3. A Legendary Past.
Despite my misgivings about this episode, “The Cave of Two Lovers” does a great job incorporating a number of new elements into the Avatar world to make the show feel legendary.
We get introduced to the badgermoles and learn about their status as the original earthbenders. We also get the history of Omashu and human earthbending, courtesy of a stunning series of paintings by Lauren MacMullan designed to look like old Chinese painted scrolls. This backstory is all told in the form of an ancient tale with simplistic language, accompanied by the soft coloring and limited motion of the paintings. All together, the scene makes the world feel full and storied, with its own legends that have been passed down through generations.
4. The Kindness of Strangers.
Just as the A-plot dealt with the hippies helping out our heroes, there were also some significant acts of kindness over in the B-plot as Zuko and a sick Iroh are taken in by a random pair of women. By far the strongest parts of the episode, we can already see how traveling through the Earth kingdom incognito is starting to humble Zuko. This episode humanizes the people he’d never before given a second thought, and he begins to realize just how much damage the family he was born into has done — to the people around the world, as well as to his own psyche.
Zuko hasn’t come fully around in just a few episodes, though, as he steals the family’s ostrich horse as they leave. The creators want this to be a gradual transition, which makes sense for the character. He hasn’t fully come to terms with his upbringing, and he’s beginning to see himself as having been the bad guy, questioning how justified he used to feel in all of his actions. These scenes also begin the switch in Zuko’s reasons for not wanting to be helped: whereas he used to feel a need to prove himself, he now starts to feel he doesn’t deserve other people’s help.
Continued belowThere’s so much going on in these short scenes from a character standpoint, and it doesn’t hurt that we also get some beautifully designed sets, especially with the color work from the lanterns and fireflies in the exterior night shots.
5. Dry Humor! Clever Wordplay!
If there’s one thing that I think Joshua Hamilton completely nailed in his first time stepping out of the Writer’s Assistant role to write an episode, it’s the humor. There was at least one laugh-out-loud moment for me every minute or two, and it was all completely in line with the dry sense of humor Avatar had perfected up to that point. His written jokes are performed spot-on by the hippies’ voice actors, and kudos to the animators for giving extra attention to Sokka’s physical reactions. The editing also deserves a special mention here, as a lot of comedy is in the timing. There’s one moment at the end (“Are you guys going to come to Omashu with us?” “Nope.” “Okay!”) that sounds completely un-funny on paper, isn’t performed in a particularly funny way, and that I’m fairly certain wasn’t initially intended to be a joke. However, the speed at which the shots fly by created a great joke where there wouldn’t have otherwise been one.
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What did you think of the episode? Does it also rank in your least favorites? Did the Zuko/Iroh stuff carry the episode for you? Or did you enjoy the episode for reasons I didn’t see? Let me know in the comments!
