Avatar: The Last Airbender: "Chapter Sixteen: Appa's Lost Days," "Chapter Seventeen: Lake Laogai," and "Chapter Eighteen: The Earth King"

(This is the fifteenth 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 Sixteen: Appa's Lost Days” (originally aired October 13, 2006)

“Chapter Seventeen: Lake Laogai” (originally aired November 3, 2006)

“Chapter Eighteen: The Earth King” (originally aired November 17, 2006)

I didn't cry before.

Well, that's not true. Until I was 9, I cried all the time. I remember how embarrassed I was to cry as much as I did, how people used to stare at me having meltdowns, how harshly my parents would treat me when I couldn't seem to stop crying. But I didn't know another way to deal with the world.

There was an immense gap inside of me, and instead of trying to fill it, I tried to empty it instead. So I cried, and I cried, and I cried, in hopes that someone would hear me and realize these sobs were actually echoes, bouncing off the walls of a canyon deep inside. I didn't want people to soothe me; I wanted them to see that if given the chance, I would never stop crying. My tears were not shed because of their proximate cause. They were shed because when I was tiny, I told the wrong person I was a girl, and there were consequences.

So I cried a lot back then, and then, at some point, when I was 9 or so, I stopped. I don't remember the specifics, but I realized one day at school that I didn't have to cry. I could simply seal the part of myself that did up in amber and store it away, never to be retrieved. I shut off those emotions and cut off all access to them. The handful of times when I did cry — usually in extreme emotional situations — the result was so terrifying that people would simply shut down communication, rather than try to deal with whatever was happening.

So I didn't cry before. Not even at movies or TV shows. I could go through the motions. But on some level, I knew I was faking tears, and I started to wonder if I were a sociopath. I felt awful about it. I'd see my friends, going to see some big weepie movie or another and bawling their eyes out, and I'd see how cleansed they would seem, and I wanted to feel that too. But I couldn't. I thought I had broken myself. (The one exception, weirdly, was Arrival, which made me ugly cry right around the time I was in the early stages of self-acceptance. No idea what that was about.)

The pivot you're expecting here is that when I went on estrogen and got in touch with my core self, I was finally able to cry. To some extent that was true. The amber started to break down, and I let out the feelings hiding back there bit by bit. I did start crying again. I even cried a few times at movies and TV shows, most notably the Mr. Robot finale (which I wrote about here). But most of the time, I felt the places where I would cry if I did. The safeguards held fast, because behind them I could feel a howl I might never be able to stop.

The above is all a long-winded way of saying that I didn't cry when we saw how badly Appa was treated in his time away from Aang and his friends, nor did I cry when the gang was reunited.

But I wanted to.

"Appa's Lost Days," "Lake Laogai," and "The Earth King" are Avatar firing on all cylinders and driving toward what's sure to be a thrilling conclusion. "The Earth King," in particular, unfurls a whole host of terrific cliffhangers that establish a new status quo, then completely shatter it in the space of about two minutes. You think that Aang leaving for the Eastern Air Temple while Sokka and Katara head off to find their father will be the episode's ending, but then a bunch of other stuff happens.

Like Toph getting captured (though you probably saw that coming)! And then you see the Dai Li revealing they're still loyal to Long Feng. So maybe that will be where the episode ends? But then you learn Azula, Ty Lee, and Mai have disguised themselves as Kyoshi warriors, pledging their services to the Earth King. Just like that, everything you think you know about the show is shattered to pieces. I loved it.

One thing I love about Avatar's approach to serialization is that it consciously doesn't push too hard toward making you remember lots of bits and pieces of information. Yes, you can if you want to, but both the Guru Pathik and Kyoshi warrior story beats that close out "The Earth King" are set up in "Appa's Lost Days," while the fate of Jet in "Lake Laogai" is teased in "City of Walls and Secrets." The show makes a special point of calling these things out the first time through, too, so you have a good sense of what to pay attention to going forward. And it's always continuing its character serialization, even in very silly little side-plots like Iroh slowly raising through the ranks of Ba Sing Se's greatest tea merchants.

But what's most remarkable about these episodes — and this season in general — is how hard they go. "Appa's Lost Days" is a pretty dark episode of television, giving Appa a few small moments of solace with Suki and Guru Pathik but also leaving him dirty and injured, with matted fur. He nearly starves, gets sold to a circus, and barely escapes with his life a couple of times. "Lake Laogai" features full-on brainwashing and what sure seems like the death of Jet, a relatively major character. (I know, I know. He might come back, but I hope not. For as little as I liked Jet, that final sequence was a memorable way for him to go out.) And then "The Earth King" features all those amazing cliffhangers.

But the episodes are peppered with so many other moments of startling maturity and emotional storytelling. Zuko's selfless act of freeing Appa so resonates inside of him that he all but collapses into a tiny puddle. (I never understood why so many of my trans woman friends read Zuko as a pre-self-acceptance trans women until this episode, which broadly reflects all of our experiences with realizing who we really were.) Toph gets tricked because she still feels residual guilt over how she left things with her parents. And all of the characters realize just how little they can affect the sticky political situation they find themselves trapped in.

Season two of Avatar, at least so far, has been a huge improvement over season one, despite rough patches here and there, largely because of its refusal to offer easy answers. The right thing to do is usually clear, but the path to get there almost never is. "Save the Earth Kingdom" is a good goal, but figuring out what that means for a place as corrupt as Ba Sing Se is trickier than it would be in many other kids shows. The dilemmas that Aang and his friends face are rarely, like, complicated philosophical problems, but they are actual dilemmas. You can see what might be gained by Aang just saying, "Screw this" and riding off into the sky on Appa now that the two of them are reunited. But he never does.

I was trying to explain to my wife just how much I like the show despite Aang being perhaps my least favorite major character, and what struck me is that my comparison of the character to Superman back in my very first recap of this show has mostly held true. Aang is not a particularly complicated or complex character. He's usually offering up exactly what he seems to be offering up, emotionally. But he's also a character who has a very firm sense of what's right, and that carries him forward. That makes him perhaps the least interesting character on the show but also the most necessary one. Remove Aang and you have something a little more like Game of Thrones for Kids. With him, you have a good, old-fashioned morality tale that takes its morality seriously. It's a neat trick, and I suspect it's why the show still works, even for those of us who find Aang beside the point for when it comes to reasons to tune in.

I stay up late many Thursdays, trying to think of things to say about this show. For as much as I enjoy it, it's not always a show I have the easiest time recapping. But this trio of episodes reminded me of some of my favorite times writing up some of my favorite shows over the years. I'm still up late on a Thursday, a little bit bleary-eyed, but at least it feels like it's for a good cause.

I didn't cry, is the thing.

I'm a bit resistant to media made for kids and media that aims to "comfort" me on some level. I always feel like it's trying to pull a fast one on me, because my own childhood was filled with people who sought to placate me rather than to engage with me.

The handful of times when a children's show has almost made me cry, however, have very nearly reduced me to complete emotional rubble. Over the Garden Wall, certain episodes of Hilda, the last few scenes of Spirited Away, bits and pieces of a lot of Pixar, "Appa's Lost Days" — they all remind me that whatever gulf is inside of me is very old and very deep. I don't want to fill it, because doing so is impossible. I want to expel it, which is also impossible.

So sometimes I sit, and I watch something, and I want to cry, but I can't. Not all of the pieces are in place just yet, but someday, they will be. And every so often, I watch a scene like Suki treating Appa with supreme tenderness, and I remember that I know where all the pieces are. Someday, they'll be waiting for me. For now, I practice the motions, for when the time is right.

Other thoughts I thought:

• It is incredibly important that I note that the Earth King's bear made a plot relevant return to the story in this batch of episodes, which is something I really never thought would happen. All hail the bear!
• Long Feng is really a fantastic villain, because absolutely everything h does makes complete and total sense. Compare him to, say, Admiral Zhao from season one, and you see just how far the show has come in establishing these minor antagonists.
• The Earth King should be played by Michael Cera in the movie version.
• I really cannot stress enough how much I love Iroh living out the plot of the 1988 Mike Nichols film Working Girl but for making tea in the city of Ba Sing Se. I wish the show would do an "Iroh makes tea" spinoff. Maybe in the Avatar extended universe.
• "Appa's Lost Days" is a wonder of non-verbal storytelling for much of its running time, and then it's also "Appa hangs out with all of the supporting cast members, conveniently when they can't mention to Aang that they saw him," and I love that.
• Look, I love Toph, but a lot of the "haha, she's blind!" jokes are a little mean-spirited. Maybe we don't need them!
• I like that Long Feng apparently has a massive collection of spare Joo Dees, just in case he gets into a scrape and needs a brainwashed bureaucrat to get back out. This is what makes him such a good villain!

Next week: We close out season two with the two-part finale "The Guru" and "The Crossroads of Destiny." Those aren't weighty titles at all!