Avatar: The Last Airbender: "Chapter Nineteen: The Guru" and "Chapter Twenty: The Crossroads of Destiny"

(This is the sixteenth 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 Nineteen: The Guru” (originally aired December 1, 2006)

“Chapter Twenty: The Crossroads of Destiny” (originally aired December 1, 2006)

I love a lot of the Avatar two-part season-two finale in theory, while finding its execution a little harder to take. But before we dig into the details, let's just admit one thing: Even when this show is ripping off plot points from The Empire Strikes Back wholesale, it's still going hard. "The Crossroads of Destiny" ends in a bleaker place than I think I was expecting, and I was expecting it to go somewhere pretty bleak. At least Bosco the bear survived. I was worried about him for a second there.

But "Crossroads" isn't the episode I have problems with here. We'll get to "Crossroads." It's great. Trust me.

Instead, let's talk about Aang.

The central idea of "The Guru" is that we're going to see Aang meet Yoda, more or less. Guru Pathik is supposed to help Aang confront his fear, figure out what's holding him back, and help him master the Force Avatar State. Aang learns something horrible has happened to his friends (or, rather, just to Katara), and he rushes back to save her before he has learned the last lesson, which is to let go of his attachment to Katara. It's Luke Skywalker shit, in other words.

And like Luke Skywalker, Aang is fulfilling a very specific power fantasy that I just don't have. But unlike Luke, Aang doesn't have the vague trappings of "small-town boy makes good" to fall back on. When Luke wanders off to Dagobah, he at last has R2-D2 and Yoda to hang out with. You all know how much I love Appa, but he and Pathik aren't quite a match for Luke's duo.

Thus, the core of "The Guru" is providing character development for a character who isn't particularly interesting. Worse, the show isn't really showing us any of this but, rather, telling us what Aang is supposed to be locating within his soul, locating that thing, then expelling it. The storytelling is so compressed — Aang nearly gets through all seven chakras in one 23-minute episode of television — that none of these beats register in the way I think they're supposed to. Unless you're already all in on Aang, the episode is a little, well, boring.

Avatar doesn't fall apart or anything. We still know that Toph has been captured, and we know that Azula and her friends have infiltrated the palace. Those two story beats provide a lot of tension to "The Guru." And, again, I'm so into the idea of what "The Guru" does in theory that I can't help but applaud it at least a little bit. After Aang's slow ascension to near godhood across this season, it's good to be reminded that he's kind of a bratty little kid some of the time.

But where the show depicts him letting go of something, we never get a sense that he's actually letting go of it. We see him, say, confront his fears, then learn to quietly bear their weight. It's sadly too similar to the show's other Aang-focused character development, where the kid's character is mostly conveyed by people telling us things about him. That's the problem with characters whose whole deal is that they always do the right thing, even when they don't want to. You kind of get the idea right away.

Yes, Aang is a variation on this type, since he rejected the call before the series ever even began, which means he's always trying to soothe a guilt he will never be able to heal. And yes, it's important for a story like this to show the hero ascending to a better self both spiritually and emotionally in addition to physically and psychologically. But "The Guru" is so pressed for time, and Aang is so uninteresting a character that the whole thing just kinda sits there. I enjoyed it, but it felt like a speed bump in what had to that point been an incredibly impressive build toward the finale, a little like we had some assigned reading to get done before we could start summer vacation.

But once "The Crossroads of Destiny" starts, the show is right back to its best self. This finale has everything! Aang almost dies, and Katara has to revive him! Zuko's loyalties are tested! The Earth Kingdom falls! Azula shows Long Feng who's boss! Toph is the best earthbender ever! Sokka and Katara's dad doesn't really matter, but he's there! Bosco escapes with his life! Katara somehow has romantic tension with both Zuko and Azula!

And most importantly: I don't know how they're gonna get out of this one.

I snarked above about how this finale feels like a retread of The Empire Strikes Back, and you have to admit that it kind of is. But if it's a retread, it's one that has learned all the right moves and knows exactly how to deploy them. There's an efficiency to "The Crossroads of Destiny" that this show can manage where many other shows cannot. So many things happen in this episode that doesn't even run for a half-hour. I'm deeply impressed by the sheer economy of storytelling involved.

Most of all, though, "The Crossroads of Destiny" does everything "The Guru" tries to do but does those things better. Character is best revealed through action and not dialogue, so when Aang chooses to release his attachment to Katara precisely when she's in the most danger, because he realizes the only way to save her is to stop caring about whether she is saved, it's much more effective than anything he got up to with Guru Pathik.

Similarly, Zuko's arc across the entire season is encapsulated in his choice to fight alongside his sister, just when you thought you might be ready to give the guy another chance. Every major character gets a defining, iconic moment in this episode, and those moments seem designed to hold us over until we are able to watch the premiere of season three. (Over nine months would pass before season three debuted, which was a very long time in 2000s TV time. I cannot imagine waiting for the next episode after this one.)

Avatar is that rare thing in TV: a trilogy. Its three seasons correspond almost perfectly to classic trilogy structure, too, which may suggest all the winks to Empire, another trilogy middle that had to stand as more than a bridge from one thing to another. And as such, both "Guru" and "Crossroads" have to stand in place of some very important act two business, getting us to a place where things are in such bad shape that we can't imagine the good guys will ever succeed in their mission, even as we've seen stories before and know they (probably) will.

But "Crossroads," especially, also dovetails with a long tradition of season two finales in serialized shows that seem to exist to let viewers know that the story can go deeper and darker than they previously thought possible. Buffy's "Becoming" duo is a great example of this, as is The X-Files' "Anasazi" and even The Sopranos' "Funhouse." These episodes exist as signposts indicating that things will get rougher before conditions improve, that the adventures you've been enjoying will become more complicated as we go. "The Crossroads of Destiny" fits ably into that tradition, and if I might critique it for perhaps trying to cram too much into its running time, well, you can see what it had to live up to.

But while things are grim, they're not hopeless. I've been noticing the ways in which Avatar uses shots of the characters riding atop Appa to indicate how, slowly, Aang's little group is expanding. What started out as just a boy on his sky bison has now grown to such a degree that an actual king is hanging out with our crew. (Granted, a deposed king, but who's keeping track?) Even as the world is falling apart, you have more and more people you can call your friends — and something tells me there will be even more allies to come as the story enters its final chapters.

Other thoughts I thought:

• The action in "Crossroads" is just phenomenal. That sequence featuring the many different characters facing off in various permutations as Aang and Katara try to rescue the Earth King and Azula and Zuko try to stop them really shows off just how far the show's action choreography has come this season. In particular, the use of bending powers is just miles beyond similar usages in season one.
• I always feel like American media depicts a character being asked to let go of attachments as this horrible self-sacrifice that probably should not be asked of the characters, no matter how heroic that action might be. But this also feels like a vague misunderstanding of the various religious precepts that are being remixed in our storytelling? Getting rid of attachment doesn't mean you no longer care about the things you care about; it means that you understand the transitory nature of all things and blah, blah, blah. But Aang accepting that there is nothing he can do to ensure Katara will always be in his life feels like less of a sacrifice than him deciding he must CUT OUT KATARA FOREVER, so we go with the latter.
• Toph's escape from her imprisonment is really a triumphant moment for her character, while also letting her be kind of a smug asshole about it. I love Toph.
• That said, I kind of just want Azula to be my best friend now. I know I shouldn't love her as much as I do, but gosh, she's just such a fun villain — at once campy and also deeply wounded in some way I can't quite pin down.
• Of all of the tragedies of this finale, perhaps the most tragic of all is the fact that Iroh's never going to have an awesome tea shop he can be proud of.
• Having Katara offer to heal Zuko's scar with her spirit water is such a smart way to remind us that she's toting that water around, so when she needs it later to heal Aang, we remember, ah, yes, the spirit water.
• WHEN DO KATARA AND ZUKO KISS DON'T TELL ME
• Look, I know this thing is gonna end with Aang and Katara together, and that's going to be the one thing I complain about when I write up the finale, but just... give me this, Avatar. I know you finished production over a decade ago, but please go back in time and get Katara and Zuko together. They just make sense!
• Updated power rankings: 1. Azula; 2. Katara; 3. Appa; 4. Toph; 5. Zuko; 6. Sokka; 7. Ty Lee; 8. Iroh; 9. Aang; 10. Suki (with a bullet); 11. "My cabbages!" guy; 12. Bosco the bear; 13. Whomever eventually gets to eat Momo; 14. Momo (I do like Momo a lot, which shows how much I like this show... but someone should eat him)

Next time: Before we dive into season three, I'm going to take a look at the movie, by which I mean, I'm going to watch James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar. See you then! (I'm going to take a week off somewhere in June, but I'll try to prepare you.)