Welcome back for a new Korra review! This week, things get mighty political. Let’s get into it!
1. The new Team Avatar.
Finally, two-thirds of the way through the season, we see all four members of the new Team Avatar go out on patrol together! The prior episodes set up the character relations and stakes, so now that they’re all in the same car riding through the city, we’re able to fully appreciate their team dynamic: the way Korra and Bolin earthbend together after their pro-bending days, the way Asami jealously watches Korra and Mako from her rear-view mirror. Those quick nuances make the scene feel much grander than the simple car chase that it is.
2. “They’re not Equalists, they’re just innocent people who want their rights back.”
The most striking moments of this episode are the political ones, concerning Councilman Tarrlok’s increasing reliance on police to sow division among his constituents. At one point, he puts a curfew on non-benders, then cuts the power to an entire district, causing them to come out in the streets and demand their power be turned back on. Which, of course, leads him to utilize the police to round them up and falsely claim that they’re all Equalists.
This is a classic political move, done not to protect anyone, but to manufacture fear in a group of people (benders) by oppressing and making an enemy out of another group (non-benders). It’s also the use of a police force to achieve a higher-up’s power-grabbing ends, regardless of the citizenry that are affected.
The Equalists are a problem. They have never been depicted as a positive force. And they are a small minority. Yet as soon as the person in power was able to turn things into a binary — that is, to claim that all non-benders are dangerous Equalists — he was able to get the other side of the binary, the benders, to put their faith in him.
3. “You’re using your power to oppress and intimidate people!”
Korra’s standoff with Tarrlok is probably the most memorable scene in the episode, in part because of the wonderful action scene in front of a dark waterfall, and in part because of the ideological tête-à-tête. When Korra says the above to Tarrlok about using his power to oppress and intimidate, his response is a simple, “And you don’t? Isn’t that what you came here to do?”
This leaves Korra a little speechless. Her response is to back off for a second, then double down that they are nothing alike. But he is correct about the intimidation. They are using the same tactic, just for different means, and they both see themselves as righteous. So how does one decide how appropriate a tactic is? Can a line be drawn showing when it becomes okay to use a certain tactic? Is intimidation okay if one is righteous enough?
4. Fartbending.
Look, I don’t want to be that guy who complains about fart jokes in his cartoons, but… there are a few jokes in this episode that are so tonally inconsistent with the rest of this episode. The episode as a whole skews very serious and political, so a few jokes are necessary. And a lot of the jokes work! Naga falling over after attempting to carry all four teens on her back? Hilarious. But Meelo jumping on the new Team Avatar’s group hand-stack to fart on them? Not so much. Same deal with Korra’s internal anime-esque explosion when Jinora reveals that she likes Mako.
These moments aren’t necessarily bad on their own, it’s just that they feel like levity thrown in at the last minute JUST to lighten the scenes up, whether they worked or not. I think this episode was a rare case where I’d prefer less jokes over jokes that don’t work, so we can have a smoother overall episode.
5. Guess who’s back? Back again? Bloodbending’s back… hnnnggg– can’t… s-spea..k…
At the end of the episode, Tarrlok breaks out a tactic we haven’t seen since the original Avatar show: bloodbending! I remember this being a HUGE deal when the episode first aired. Only Hama and Katara learned bloodbending back in the original. So how did this dude learn how to do it? And how can he do it if it’s not a full moon? This is a wonderful cliffhanger as Korra is carted away to an unknown prison, in the hands of someone far more powerful than we realized.
To be continued…
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What did you think of the episode? Did the political moments work for you? What about the attempts at comedy? Let me know in the comments!
