Avatar The Last Airbender 107 The North Television 

Five Thoughts on Avatar: The Last Airbender’s “The North”

By | April 5th, 2024
Posted in Television | % Comments

Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of Avatar: The Last Airbender. This week Team Avatar finally reached “The North,” and they receive a warm welcome in the cold, as they are aware of the risk that is coming to them. And for us, what is coming is the season finale! Let’s dive right in!

1. The Death of Prince Zuko

If there’s something that we can be sure of, it’s that the Fire Nation military is full of strategists, who are always using misdirection to achieve their goal. In this case, they used one of Zuko’s soldiers to make the prince flee before a supposed arrest for treason, luring him onto a boat filled with explosives.

With this murder attempt, Zhao begins his theatrics with Iroh and reveals his plans, that he’s going to attack the Northern Water Tribe directly through their front wall, and why would he do something so absurd? Because his secret weapon is “his destiny.”

There’s a moment where he and Iroh are talking, and Zhao admits that he doesn’t have battle experience, but somehow, he equates that with the fact that he has not had a failing, unlike Iroh, so he managed to show he is dumb and insulted a veteran at the same time. Man, Zhao is a fool, and he’s going to fall really hard soon.

Of course, Zhao is not the only one with tricks up his sleeve, as Zuko is alive and Iroh knows, but they will keep that secret until it comes in handy.

2. Kuruk Didn’t Help at All

After arriving in the North with the Water Tribe, Aang goes to their temple to talk with Avatar Kuruk. He has a bad reputation, as Princess Yue (more on her later) explains that Kuruk seemed more interested in the spirit world than the natural world, so he is not so loved.

When Aang meets Kuruk we get the truth, he was obsessed with the spirit world because he stopped many attacks by bad spirits, but the only one he couldn’t stop was Koh, who took his loved one.

Aang proposes that Kuruk take his body and channel the Avatar State just like Kyoshi did before, but Kuruk is weakened by all his battles, and this one belongs to Aang whether he wants it or not. In the end, he warns the same thing the other Avatars did: this is a path one must walk alone.

3. Women Don’t Fight, That is Our Way

Katara is very happy because she will get to learn water bending, but she realizes that the only thing that she can learn are healing abilities, and she already has experience with that. She wants to fight, but here, women don’t fight.

She ends up in a battle with Master Pakku to prove that she can fight, and even uses techniques that she learned from earth benders, proving that she is worthy of fighting. She still loses, but ends up being admired by the entire tribe.

4. Yue

We meet Princess Yue (played by Amber Midthunder, whom you may know for her role in Prey, the magnificent Predator prequel), and Sokka is instantly infatuated with her, although he feels that they have met before, and that is right, because she appeared to him in the spirit world as a fox.

Sokka learns that Yue was betrothed to someone else, but that guy wasn’t “the man of her dreams,” and they kiss: love is in the air! We also learn that the reason she can enter the spirit world as a fox is because she was very sick and, in the attempts to heal her, she became part-human and part-spirit, which will come in handy in the future.

5. Feel the Thunder

We have been seeing the slow process of Ozai destroying Azula’s soul with rejection, so she is finally tired and lashes out, that angers the Fire Lord, but instead of another Agni Kai, Azula reveals all of her power, including the ability to generate lighting, which pleases her father.

This attempt to gain his favor and attention is successful, and she asks for the same thing that Zuko got, to go into the world and bring back the Avatar, proving once and for all that she is the one who deserves the throne.

Continued below

Bonus: I find it very funny that Momo appears for 30 seconds each episode, like, “Hey! Remember that cute animal you all love? There you go! Here’s a brief scene, but not too much, it’s expensive to animate it.”

And that’s it for this one, we are approaching to the big fight in the North and with that, the big finale of the show. I have been thinking about it and I realized something a little weird, which is if there is one bad thing that you can say about this live-action take, is that it feels a little bit rushed in its storytelling, when it’s roughly the same length as the original’s first season: we have seen around eight hours of story, the same amount of time as twenty 23-minute episodes in the animated, so how can one feel more rushed than the other?

Well, what did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on the season finale, “Legends.”


//TAGS | Avatar: The Last Airbender

Ramon Piña

Lives in Monterrey, México. He eats tacos for a living, literally. You can say hi on Twitter and Instagram. Besides comics, he loves regular books and Baseball - "Viva Multiversity Cabr*nes!".

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