Korra 1.10 Turning the Tides Television 

Five Thoughts on The Legend of Korra’s “Turning the Tides”

By | October 10th, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome back for this week’s Korra review! Everything is coming together as we head towards the season finale. Let’s dive in!

1. Action action action!!
I criticized last episode for skimping on the action, speculating that it might have underwhelmed due to budget reasons. Well, I think this episode more than made up for it! There’s wall to wall action in every conceivable form. There’s tense hostage situations, mech fights, hand-to-hand combat, and major bending battles. Sometimes it’s widescreen and epic, and other times it’s up close and personal. It all adds up to an edge-of-your-seat episode that I was NOT expecting before the finale.

2. Airbending family strikes!
Something that’s been bugging me a bit with this season has been the number of characters introduced, compared to the relatively small amount of time spent developing them. In this episode, though, we finally get to experience the true might of Tenzin’s airbending family!

We still don’t have deep understandings of the kids, but we don’t need to for these moments to work: Jinora is the calm and steadfast one, Ikki is the hyperactive one, and Meelo is that strange, awkward younger brother who you can’t help but find adorable. Even knowing only that, it was a joy to watch them defend their home against the Equalists.

The creative team even went back to a joke I didn’t like in a previous episode — Meelo’s fartbending — and used it so well, at just the right action moment and with just the right execution, that it redeemed the whole concept and made me laugh out loud.

And then there was the whole drama with Pema having her baby as the island was under siege! This show is so, so good at endearing us to side characters with these sorts of climactic moments, which is important since they are so few and far between.

3. Get this love triangle OUTTA HERE.
There were a few more groan-worthy moments concerning the Korra-Mako-Asami love triangle here. Asami confronts Mako about kissing Korra, then acts passive-aggressively towards them later as they head into battle. And then nothing else really comes of it.

I’m so done with this subplot. It’s been nothing but a source of eye-rolls for me. It doesn’t reveal anything about the characters and feels like drama for the sake of drama. Relationship issues can be fun, just not like this.

4. Lin: the MVP, again.
This episode reminds us of a few things: one, that Lin used to date Tenzin, and two, that she’s the show’s hidden weapon. In this episode, both facts are intertwined.

By re-establishing her past relationship with Tenzin, we are also reminded that she might not have fully healed from it. So when she watches over Tenzin’s family as a matter of duty to the last surviving airbenders, we know there’s more going on with her emotionally. She’s guarding the family that she could have had with him.

And with that emotional set-up, the action pay-off hits that much harder. At the end of the episode, as the last airbenders flee their island home, she sacrifices herself to try and tear apart the Equalist ships using her metalbending. It’s a truly awesome scene, directed with large-scale power, yet with intensely emotional music.

However… she fails. The Equalists capture her, and, in a dialogue-free scene, as the rain falls on her face, Amon takes away her bending.

Remember what I said before about the show’s way of endearing us to side characters through small climactic moments? Here’s yet another example.

5. General Iroh??
In the last few seconds, as everyone flies off to their final destinations, a new voice shows up, commanding a fleet of ships: Dante Basco, the voice of Zuko! Decked out in red, the character is then referred to as “General Iroh,” who we can only assume is Zuko’s direct descendant, named after everybody’s favorite tea-loving uncle.

This is one of those few moments where I’ll gladly accept this level of fanservice. That reveal still gets me excited to this day.

What did you think of the episode? Did any particular action scenes stand out to you? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see you next week for the season’s final two episodes!


//TAGS | 2020 Summer TV Binge | Avatar: The Last Airbender | The Legend of Korra

Nicholas Palmieri

Nick is a South Floridian writer of films, comics, and analyses of films and comics. Flight attendants tend to be misled by his youthful visage. You can try to decipher his out-of-context thoughts over on Twitter at @NPalmieriWrites.

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