THE LEGEND OF KORRA - Season 2, Episodes 5-8 (Patreon)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 / Season One Finale 

Season Two - Part 1 

Onto the next four episodes!

5. PEACEKEEPERS

There’s a moment in this episode where Korra shouts “I’m not neutral!” And I think it’s really interesting because it brings us to the weird nexus of the show’s changes in both identity and intention. Originally, this show was supposed to be about the difficulties of navigating the moral complexity of the modern world. But to actually do this, Korra would have had to feature episodes that center around complex decisions that challenge the character’s belief system. She would have to do what we thinks is right, then it would go one way or go another, and the results could either showcase the character learning why they were wrong, or provide a meditation on why we stick by our decisions. There can be such dramatic power to these sorts of portrayals. For if you want the both the humane beauty and crushing depths of relativism? Look no further than superlative shows like The Wire, which dive into complex systems and yet send empathy in all directions.

But The Legend of Korra did this… poorly.

And the reason sort of might be part of the DNA of the show and conflicting instincts. When I think back to Avatar it was a show with empathy in all directions, too, but it had different dramatic construction. There was straightforward goals of training Aang to become the Avatar, find balance within himself, and take on the super clear bad guy from minute one. Everything that was complex still operated within that operatic hero space. And in writing out the comparisons between Avatar and The Wire, it’s interesting seeing The Legend of Korra get caught between the two competing instincts and often gets tripped up on both. It mistakes vagueness for complexity, it renders bad guys not into humane portrayals, but cartoonish architects of master plans, it “both sides are wrong” virtually any moral issue to remain above it. It falls short of virtually every requirement.

There are bigger root problems, of course. For one, I don’t think the show understands empathy building in quite same way (or at least doesn’t know how to construct it as clearly). Don’t get me wrong, The Legend of Korra is “sensitive” in all directions, but everything that could really get us truly involved in deeply emphasizing with a character and their goal instead crashes against the rocks of this constant web of convolution. As I’ve said for the millionth time, so many of Korra’s decisions aren’t actually complex, they’re either vague, poorly motivated, or fall into the obvious trap of some bad guy machinations. As an audience, we can never get our feet under us, nor get them under her.

That’s what makes this “I’m not neutral” moment so interesting. In one way, it should be a character defining moment where she’s tossing aside the parameters of her job and realizing there ISN’T such a thing as neutrality. But on the other hand, that lack of neutrality is SO damn obvious in this case because her family’s life is on the line that it it’s too easy a realization to make. But on other other hand, it also feels like the show shirking off its original mission statement and embarrassing the idea that what better powers the dramatic engine show is objective-based bad guy war-ing (a la Avatar). And yet on the other other other hand, it somehow feels like the show isn’t treating her family being at risk as ENOUGH of a worry and often loses sight of it during her exploits. It’s all part and parcel of how the sense of urgency feels like it emphasizes in the wrong places in the wrong ways, emblematic of how little this show seems to know about how to milk drama. It just knows how to display wrath and disagreement. And so, what should be this huge moment, like so many things in this show, becomes a half-measure that feels more like lip service than full dramatic catharsis.

But as murky as all that is? The real obstacle to the empathizing with Korra is the ham-fisted way they contrive her errors. The moment where Mako comes to Korra with conflicting evidence and she’s just ignoring him and shouting like, “of course [the northern water tribe] are responsible, who else would it be???” As an audience, it just pushes us away. But it’s not that Korra is headstrong and stubborn, that’s totally okay! There’s a crucial difference between that being willfully obtuse to the point it makes her seem STUPID. Which is sort of an unforgivable writing sin when it comes to this kind of character. And yet, the narrative thinks it needs to do this because it needs Korra to behave a certain way in order for the bad guy plot to unfold. It’s working backwards in all the worst ways.

And if we’re talking about bad motivations for characters: MAKO FUCKING NARC-ED. Like seriously? Is he really THAT duty bound to being a cop?? To the point he’s so concerned with his precious honor at this point??? That he would literally put her family at risk???? Which is totally a thing that was a big deal earlier in motivating Korra, but not at all brought up in this fight????? Ugh, the storytellers love to cherry pick what’s relevant and ignore established issues, often to disastrous results. But perhaps the worst part about this execution is that it pares down the sheer horror of Mako’s choice and just turns it into fodder for a melodramatic teenage break-up. In terms of text? This should be a massive betrayal. And yet right after that it gets this joke from Lin about Tenzin breaking up with her and I’m not just flabbergasted by the ignorance, but a deeper question: why the hell is every single love story in this show treated like middle school romance??? No matter if they’re adult??????? IM SORRY I’M DOING A LOT OF THIS?????? I’ll stop. But speaking of questions…

“So, uh, what should I be doing?” 

Good question, Bolin. Especially for a show that never seems to know what to do with characters who aren’t involved in the main plot (or even with the ones that are). But the answer is thankfully that you become a mover star! I like it because it feels refreshing and funny (and while we’re here, let’s celebrate the fact that P.J. Byrne does top notch voice work in every episode). We get so much the joke, but it makes me wonder: where is the show’s emotional pathos in the treatment of this clown?

Because there’s this little detail that conveys so much about how the writers come at these characters. It’s this moment where Bolin total admits he cries himself to sleep to sleep at night and it’s treated as this “ha ha, what a pitiful guy!” joke, but I’m like… Wait, where’s that plot line? I’m serious. Because as much as Avatar would have Sokka be the idiotic comic relief, it also treated him as a real person with real strengths and real wounds and real wants and real needs. But this show just keeps skipping right over that stuff to make a joke. And it’s at the point I have to ask a devastating question…

Do they even know the pathos is supposed to be there?

RANDOM THOUGHTS

-I joked about them being too similar, but I literally just saw a shot Unalaq and had to be like Wait is that the uncle or her dad?” It was her Uncle. That’s not a good sign!

-It sort of sucks that I knew the master trainer plot line with Meelo wouldn’t really go anywhere. Also it’s doing this patented Korra third act thing where we don’t actually see the character enact the learning of the lesson because I’m convinced they have no idea how to actually dramatize a change at this point? The lack of show this moment has gone on so long it’s almost funny at this point. Moreover, it glosses right over the moment that’s so utterly devastating where Meelo says “It’s lonely being the alpha.” This should be so much more than an observation. It should be the point of the entire subplot. It should be a haunting thing that teaches TENZIN a lesson, or shows somehow does more Meelo, and yet it’s another wry observation that just gets lost in a lack of actual dramatization and gives way to a distracting joke.

-Me, watching another building explode: “Wow, there’s a lot of terrorism in this show, huh?”

-I talk a lot about how good storytelling is about “therefore” and “buts” but this show doesn’t even play in that space.

-Varrick: “Being famous is like getting hit with a rock all the time!”

-Asami: “And I have to make some sales!” I hate when certain shows are like, hey remember this plot line and character motivation? It’s like, “yeah I remember it, YOU were the one who seemed to forget about it.” Again, so many shows only have a hard time juggling character arcs when they don’t seem to even know how to do one.

-“If you can’t make money during a war, you just flat out can’t make money.” This line is fantastic but so dark I feel like it needs more… attention.

-The ending fight with the twins cause is at least fun??? Again, the problem is there’s just no meaty emotional through-line to power it.

Moving on!

6. THE STING

Did… Did I just like an episode of this season??? I did!! I did like it!!!

But I have to say that this episode also makes me feel better about what I’ve been writing so far. Remember how I talked about HOW to properly do a set up with misdirection? That you make us like a character and make us never suspect that anything could be wrong? Where you take the narrative and are like “hey, there’s nothing wrong with this goofy tycoon who has silly ideas and seems like an energizing part of the team?” And then BAM - turns out this guy knows a lot more than he’s letting on and is carefully playing his cards to take Asami’s business. Everything about the execution of this, right down to the moment that Mako walks in and finds Varrick there is fucking aces. It even makes the war profiteer line in the last episode work better, too! It also makes all his propaganda films part of the plan! It’s all been to a purpose! I’m so happy!

The other stuff in the episode is less good!

At first I was really excited about seeing the twins with their father and getting a sense of the actual architecture of their bad guy plan / maybe they show us their motivation, but nope, we just get more classic plot-blocking! Twins: “Were you just in the spirit world?” Uncle: “Never mind that!” And it makes me want to shout, NO, DO IT NOW. ENOUGH WITH THIS STUPID DELAY, YOU’RE JUST WHEEL SPINNING. IT WOULD WORK SO MUCH BETTER IF YOU JUST TOLD THE TRUTH *NOW* But instead, the show will just keep doing this kind of delay stuff because it mistakenly believes that’s good writing.

Back in Mako land we sadly have to face more artificial conflict. To be clear, it’s not that the IDEA that Mako would get railroaded and misunderstood by Lin and the other cops that’s the problem, it’s the flimsy as all hell explanation of WHY they’re not listening to him. Worse, like the Korra problem last episode, it makes Lin seem like an obtuse idiot and that’s not who she is. And yet, the narrative (and Mako outright) are calling her one anyway. Still, the plot turn wth the ship adventure being a double-cross was a functional one! And turns out, even a good lead in to the Varrick turn! 

But also less good? The kiss with Asami. Not just because I thought we were done with this, but because the show doesn’t even seem to get the pulpy point of teenage love triangles. Which is all about the intensity of feelings and yearning and steamy glances and sexual tension between characters that spill into these moments of intensity and frailty. Instead, these idiots just keep falling around kissing each other like wet noodles and none of it is even set-up in terms of establishing want interiority beforehand. Because guess what folks? What makes fun Twilight-ism work / fun is ALL character interiority.

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

-The animals talking in the movers version is such a great little touch.

-Varrick’s put himself out there as basically a Simpson character and I accept this because his lines are fantastic: “I can’t believe they blew up my fifth favorite ship in the fleet! Named her after my mom. Rest in peace, Rocky Bottom!”

-To wit of how good the misdirection with Varrick is, I actually wrote this in my notes: “how is the fire nation involved? I want to know!”

-When Asami says that Future Industries is “all I have left of my family” I’m reminded how flimsy everything is when it comes to their understanding of her. It’s not just that she has GOT to have a better articulated personal motivation than that — it’s that this sort of family connection could be best represented in an actual relationship with a character from that world / story. Alas!

-Asami: “You broke up with the Avatar?” Why didn’t you tell me?” Mako: “I don’t know.” The answer is because this show, time and time again, doesn’t know how to tell stories and evolve plots so characters always BRING UP the conflict in the first scene, deny it, then simply let out the information in the second scene to make SEEM like the story is evolving when really, it is just nonsense delay before they don’t really do anything with it then completely distract you with something else in the third scene… It’s, you know, the complete antithesis of scene structure and THE LEGEND OF KORRA way!

-Regarding the end question: “Who is Avatar Korra?” It’s funny, what would likely be an infuriating delay for another show is actually a great chance for this show to give a reset, give her a real goal, and, you know, maybe actually get to the heart of that important question. Over all, I’m so down for this development!

-It’s funny, I was smiling a lot after this episode and right when the title card hit it said “Joshua Hamilton!” And I was like, “Gasp! I remember that name!” He was a staff writer from Avatar and he and Tim Hedrick came in to work on this season, too. And look, writing credits are prickly things to lend too much credence to. In the end, I just have to say the episode really, truly felt different and executed with more coherence on the whole and this maybe totally isn’t an accident, but a better combination of influence. Because…

Sometimes good things happen when strong writing and direction come together.

7-8. BEGINNINGS - PART 1 / PART 2

I just realized how strange it was to enter a new episode and be… excited?

That’s not a good sign for the show overall, but bears well for the present state of affairs. Anyway, I hope it’s okay that I write about these two episodes this as one big entry because it’s telling a singular parable story. And what a relief it is to have a singular story focus for once! One that just happens to play into their strengths the creators!

The first is with episode’s direction, for it’s clear to note that the episode utilizes what I’ll call that “older Japanese painting style” I’m so ignorant I don’t know even know where to look for the proper name of it. More than that, all my attempts to google revealed even more ignorance (let’s hope their own treatment of the art style was more dignified / specific?). All I know is that from my ignorant position, the animation is often gorgeous; a marriage of styles and ideas that delicately play with the established look of the show. Sure, it’s a surface detail, but one that reminds how much DiMartino and Konietzko always think in terms of direction first. 

As for the episode’s plot, Korra has amnesia and has to go into a dream state on this mysterious island and learn about The First Avatar and Raava, for it seems it will be necessary to the story! The myth that unfolds is just that: grand myth making. For the story of Wan, the first Avatar, is a direct mashup of Prometheus (stealing fire from the gods) and Pandora’s Box (unleashing evil into the world), but then becomes deeply entwined to the iconography of Avatar, what with the lion turtles, element gifts, and now battle with the spirits of the world. I don’t want to get bogged down in regurgitating the plot. Basically, it’s born of the age old story of light and dark, along with the cycles of devastation that go on and on throughout time. But it is the Avatar’s role to keep the light alive, to imprison darkness, and yet we are told this is the goal of “balance.” 

But it’s one of those interesting ideas because it invites the obvious question: what does balance actually mean? With Avatar, we started with a world completely out of balance. Without the Avatar, the fire nation had grown strong, waging incredible war on the rest of the world. It was something to be corrected. Likewise, so much of Aang’s journey was learning how to find character balance. How to go from being a carefree, silly, and seemingly-incorrigible child to a noble soul, one capable of taking on such immense responsibility. We also got to see the hardship of finding that balance, the way that fire and earth juxtaposed with his nature. And most of all, we got to see the way these deeper issues blocked his psychological breakthroughs in order to find peace within himself (The Guru episode is such an amazing look at how to do this).

But here in “Beginnings,” the idea balance of balance is much less about character work or psychology and much more the grand the broad archetypes where these storytellers seem comfortable. There is Raava and Vaatu, the forces of light and dark, forever intertwined. It tells a neat story of how Wan accidentally freed chaos and had to come together (with the shrinking Raava) to help contain the evil of the spirits every 10,000 years. As is often the case with this show, the most poetic parts of the story are very much in the little details. Like the idea that fire was always this temporary gift to hunt and survive (which sort of falls apart when thinking about other weaponry?). Or that the lion turtles are the ones that bestowed the gifts of power. Or the way Raava becomes something carried inside us.

At the same time, do I wish there was a better motivated reason for Wan suddenly wanting to learn air bending? Of course. But the grand myth making tropes are more forgiving of such “it happens because it happens” plotting. It’s also what allows for such reductively simple statements as “as darkness grows, light fades!” But if this is the kind of storytelling style where the creator’s style works best, it invites a question: why did they therefore aim to make a show so needlessly convoluted and full of plot intricacies? Well, again, it just comes down to the storytelling problems that come out misunderstanding, hiding, and false belief. But at least for the here and now, those problems seem so far away.

That is until the end of the episode. 

When Korra awakes, she does so with a sense of purpose and a goal to stop the harmonic convergence! The clarity feels nice. We have been dietetically given a sense of parameters of what she has to do and more importantly, WHY she has to do it. Even making the Avatar state a a personification with raava feels like the sort of retcon I can actually get behind. But there’s this deeper question of “why” behind all of this that I can’t help but think of…

Early in the episodes we’re told that Korra “must confront her own past to move forward!” I get the logic of the past lives stuff, but if we’re being honest, that’s not really what this is. It’s not actually her past, but the stories from lives before. In fact, there’s been very little of her own personal journey in any of this. Ultimately, the whole point of this subplot plot was just to set up Mcguffins of tell us what she has to do. In essence, you are telling one (better) story to show you the playbook for what she has to do in future one. Again, I like this better that a lot of the episodes that have come before, but I can’t shake the sense that the show is still mistaking “the duality of shape” for actual story growth (cue the George Lucas poetry bit).

The biggest problem is always how easy it makes everything while never inviting the deeper look into the meaning behind it. It’s like the larger questions: what is this temple Korra has arrived at? Who are these people? Why are they there? Why do they magically have an air bison to hand to her? This isn’t logical nitpicking. This is looking at the idea of connected events at the heart of storytelling. And I have to ask, what does any of this have to do with anything? The answer: convenience, you see! I joked that the story always likes to stop the narrative to tell a story that puts things into place and here, we have that. Sure, it’s a really nice little bit of myth making that in the end, plays into all the ways that both the conflict and solutions in this show are created out of outrageous convenience.

At the end, she tells us “I’m Korra, I’m the Avatar!” like it crystalizes some moment of growth. But outside of providing basic objective information, losing her memory meant nothing to this story (it didn’t even lend to any good gags!). None of this was a personal. It was purely about giving her the logistical framework to do an end battle and one big “okay, now it’s your turn!” And so, the same question lingers…

“Who is Avatar Korra?”

After all that, I still don’t know.

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

-Wan was Steve Yeun! Yes!

-I love the sequence where Wan first goes into the spirit forest and we see both the paranoia and exhaustion that comes with CONSTANT danger.

-Pretty sure there’s some direct references to Spirited Away in that hot springs scene! But my personal favorite was Carrot Man.

-Okay, the spirt possessing them and turning them into HALF human, kinda terrifying!

-Eating fruit that turns into bees is a fate worse than death.

-“Stinky is more accurate” - Lemur guy is the best.

-There was this little animation where Raava was hurt on the ground and lifting its arms up that struck me as so damn funny that I laughed out loud.

-Wan: “You need to stop fighting now, before you destroy each other!” Once again the series keeps coming back to that “great divide problem” where simply admonishing people for fighting is the solution instead of actually providing the humane solutions that are the foundations of peace and stop people from needing to fight in the first place.

-There’s this really telling Legend of Korra-esque moment where Raava is like: “we are bonded forever!” Audience: “Why? Cause you made a choice based on the synthesis of your characters?” Wan: “No, it’s because I touched this magic light thingy!” Showrunners: “yay for meaningless lore and power-ups over character synthesis!”

-The last thing I want to touch on is the discussion of “number of episodes” when it comes to this show. Because whenever I talk about it, some people comment that Korra always feels too rushed because it doesn’t have enough episodes or there’s too much plot to rush through, etc. I’m telling you that episode length has nothing to do with it. The economy of these two episodes prove that. It’s never about space, it’s about using your space wisely. This season could be 3 episodes and still fit ALL of it in. It could be 30 episodes and still feel rushed and convoluted (besides, the latter is a symptom of the former). It’s an issue of know-how, not actual time to do x or y. Because all these episodes do is wheel spin and put pieces into place ACTUAL story and avoid the core conflicts. Meanwhile: short? Long? More episodes? Less? Avatar always just rolled with its constrictions. 

It’s not the production history, it’s the quality of the aims within it.

<3 HULK