Avatar: The Last Airbender: "Chapter Four: Sokka's Master," "Chapter Five: The Beach," and "Chapter Six: The Avatar and the Fire Lord"

(This is the ninteenth installment of my weekly recaps of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Nickelodeon animated series that ran from 2005 to 2008 to much critical acclaim. I’ve never seen it! These recaps are only available to paid subscribers.)

“Chapter Four: Sokka's Master” (originally aired October 12, 2007)

“Chapter Five: The Beach” (originally aired October 19, 2007)

“Chapter Six: The Avatar and the Fire Lord” (originally aired October 26, 2007)

I liked all three of these episodes quite a bit, so let's do some quick capsule reviews, huh?

"Sokka's Master"

As a storytelling gambit, "Let's find out what everybody might have been like if this story never happened" is bold. It's a bit like doing alt universe episodes without actually visiting another universe. And the deeper we get into Avatar, season three, the more I like this particular gambit, even as I'm not sure how necessary it is, particularly for our core trio.

This late in the show's run, we more or less know enough about Aang, Katara, and Sokka to sort of guess at who they might have been if they hadn't ended up in this situation. And yet it's kind of fun to see them just get to be themselves all the same. Watching Aang be just another kid in "The Headband" was a lot of fun, and while "The Painted Lady" was a bit of a bust, seeing Katara's core compassion shine through felt like a worthy window into who her character might have been had things been just a touch different.

But would you believe I liked "Sokka's Master" better than either "The Headband" or "The Painted Lady"?

I gather that this isn't precisely a common opinion. The internet seems largely mixed on "Sokka's Master," but I had a lot of fun with just how trope-y it was. "Sokka's Master" feels deliberately modeled after the Buffy episode "The Zeppo," which was a different episode that came at the question of "who is this guy if he's just 'the regular one'?" via another direction. It also has a fair amount of, like, Kill Bill and lots of kung fu movies distilled into its particular blend of elements. I'm not sure that I want the show playing in this particular arena every week, but as a one-off? Sure.

Plus, it underlines all of the ways in which Sokka is more than just "the regular guy." On Buffy, Xander's normalness was embedded into the show's design in ways that feel creepier the more we know about Joss Whedon's considerable faults as a human being. Xander was there to be less than, but in a way where he was supposed to be good because his less-than status made him worthy of pity. He was a little like a Tumblr post on getting friend-zoned given human form.

Sokka isn't that. He's just a normal kid, surrounded by superpowered kids, and he feels the frustration anybody would feel in that scenario. But he doesn't let it develop into a superiority complex pretending to be an inferiority complex (we call this movie "the Xander"). Instead, he hunkers down and figures out what he can do, which is sword stuff. And sword fights are cool! I really like the big one that closes out this episode.

Also, we learn what Sokka does for the group, and it's mostly emotional labor. Yay, Sokka!

Charming episode. Would watch again.

"The Beach"

But hey, you know who I really want to know more about outside the context of the show? Basically all of the Fire Nation kids but particularly Azula and Ty Lee!

"The Beach" is one of the best episodes of the show, something that brings me no joy to report, because people have been hyping it to me since I started watching, and I hate when hype is right. But what I love about it is how it simultaneously presents an alternate version of the show that I might rather be watching while also underlining how the specialness of this episode of the  show lies in how unusual it is.

If we were with the Fire Nation kids every single week, their presence might start to feel a little claustrophobic. In a one-off episode where they go to an island and hang out with the gender-swapped Statler and Waldorf, then get involved in some shenanigans with the local youths, we get a valuable glimpse of them when they're not explicitly the antagonists. Ty Lee flirts with boys. Mai is snarky and kind of fun. Zuko is tortured. Azula's love of world domination extends to playing sports on the beach and kissing boys. It's a tremendous amount of fun.

What's notable is just how far this episode goes toward making us understand these four characters, particularly Azula. We've spent plenty of time with Zuko over the past two seasons, so we have kind of a bead on who he is. But Azula has been a bit of a one-dimensional character. That's not necessarily a problem (a show like this can be allowed a campy villain), but showing all of the ways in which her villainy is tied to her core personality at once makes her easier to boo and easier to love. There is something deeply broken in Azula and Zuko, and even though Zuko gets the big monologue about this near the episode's end, watching as Azula plots the destruction of the other team she's playing beach volleysoccer against does more to explain her bent toward tyranny than anything else the show has done.

But, like, it's mostly just fun to watch these kids being kids. Because Avatar is so over-the-top and superhero-y, it's easy to forget that all of these characters are under 18. And yet here's an episode to very deliberately ask us to think about who Zuko and Azula might be if they weren't conscripted into an ancient war they barely understand. Azula might be basically the same person in this hypothetical other world, but Zuko... might be very different.

Also, it's just funny to see Mai's reactions to everything. This single episode has done more to endear Mai to me than anything else the show has done.

Finally: This episode features hardcore bird combat. What more do you want?

Ten out of ten episode. Would watch again.

"The Avatar and the Fire Lord"

I love the world-building of Avatar. I like the idea of a world split among four different groups, corresponding to certain elements. I like the notion of "bending" as a kind of superpower. I love the idea of a singular Avatar, but also lots of other extremely powerful benders who specialize in one area or another. That's all super cool.

But I don't really like the lore of Avatar. Every time the show dives into Aang's past incarnations or the spirit world or something, I kinda zone out. My zoning out isn't really on the show. It's handling this sort of thing about as well as you could expect. It's just that this sort of thing ends up feeling like homework to me. I don't care about Avatar Roku, not really. He did the things he did, and now the show is what it is.

But "The Avatar and the Fire Lord" does the most the show has ever done to get me invested in the past of the world it presents. Yeah, a lot of this episode has the feeling of, like, the older Kevin Arnold filling in his kids on the story of the time he fell in love with Winnie Cooper, but the story the series comes up with is just tragic enough to sell what might have been a bland exposition dump otherwise.

One thing that helps: Roku and Fire Lord Sozin totally wanna do it.

Okay, okay, okay. The episode goes out of its way to give both boys a girl love interest, yet at every turn, the show all but uses a yellow highlighter pen to say, "You know... these boys... they seem like they might want to kiss? Just sayin'." And as reasons to commit a genocide go, "I'm sad about my boyfriend leaving to go do his Avatar training" is at least a reason.

I'm not sure this episode works quite as well if you just buy the textual read that these two guys were super best buds, but this is a newsletter written by a queer trans woman. We're going to give this episode a queer reading. C'mon now.

And even if you want to say, "Okay, maybe this is subtextually queer, but the characters don't feel anything" or whatever, I would say, "Sure." But there were tons of people I knew growing up who made me feel intense, burning emotions I could barely understand, to the degree that I just sort of stopped thinking about them. Now, as an adult, I realize that many of those emotions were driven by incipient queer feelings. The girls I fell headlong for were sometimes just girls I wanted to be pals with and sometimes were girls I wanted to kiss but as a girl, not as the person I tricked myself into being. And when I had a crush on a boy, I had to literally force my brain to stop thinking about it, because it led to too many stress fractures in the version of myself I had constructed for the benefit of others.

This is a lot of heaviness to put on a single episode of television that is pretty good and has some cool dragons! But "The Avatar and the Fire Lord" works way better if it's queer. The end.

Some good lore shit and some nice back story. Probably won't watch again.

Other thoughts I thought:

• Normally, I would hate something like Toph turning the little meteorite chunk into the Nickelodeon splat, but I thought it was cute. Score one for corporate branding!!!
• I don't know how to tell you this, but: I kinda think buff Iroh is hot.
• The scenes at the party and around the campfire in "The Beach" are about the most believable "teenage" scenes in this whole show so far. The characters have that perfect blend of innocence and world-weariness that starts to hit around 16.
• Also, for a scene clearly cooked up to give a bunch of supporting characters some backstory, the scene around the campfire is really, really good. Sometimes, just doing a bunch of exposition is best, if the characters have reason to exposit.
• I dunno how I feel about forehead eye man. Seems bad.
• Greg Baldwin, bless him, is really trying as Iroh, but I can't get over how different he sounds from Mako. The show was in a really difficult spot, but I wish it had cast a different actor of Japanese descent who could then try to do a Mako vocal match. It probably wouldn't have worked (Mako's delivery is half of Iroh's charm, and it's hard to do a match for an individual actor's delivery), but I think it might have had a better shot at feeling on roughly the same continuum as original Iroh.
• That moment when Roku and Aang look at baby Aang in the moments after Roku's death is really powerful. The show's mysticism rarely works for me, but it was terrifically utilized there.

Next week: It's our last three-episode recap, as we dig into "The Runaway," "The Puppetmaster," and "Nightmares and Daydreams."