THE LEGEND OF KORRA - Series Finale and Last Thoughts (Patreon)

And so it all finally comes to end. This has been a wonderful journey. Please read all the other recaps here. Thanks so much for being a part of this. With that, let’s look at the final episodes of the show and then appraise it as a whole…

11. KUVIRA’S GAMBIT

In this episode, Kuvira marches on New Republic City and makes demands as everyone prepares for battle. There’s isn’t much to say about the plotting of these things, as they are fairly clear in their table-setting. Instead, what I can’t stop thinking about is a few core issues…

For example, I can’t stop thinking about how Kuvira SHOULD work better. I can see the architecture of her character, whether it’s the hints at her background or the ideas of control and stopping at nothing to succeed. But I also keep feeling like something critical to her characterization is getting avoided and / or delayed. I somehow worry this is all leading to some kind of grand revelation that may have her make more sense, but I the problem is that we keep suffering in the now. Because much like season 1 and 2, where those villains were cloaked in mystery and twists, there’s something critical about Kuvira that feels unengaged. The core difference, which both helps and hurts, is that Kuvira is also operating her villainy in plain sight. This saves us from unneeded mystery boxing, but it emphasizes how little we’re actually dealing with the core issue that’s right in front of everyone’s faces, especially by now (remember, even with Zaheer they got to his righteous motivations by episode seven).

I also can’t stop thinking about the framing problems too when it comes to her handle on her troops / people. The initial episode was a good start to framing the uneasy way that people signed up for Kuvira’s empire, but I desperately want to understand more of those who are devoted to her. Because when her people scream “all hail the great uniter!” I can’t help but think of the naked embrace of this. What’s that story? What’s motivating these people? I know it’s so easy to project easy answers, but from the viewers perspective, it can’t help but feel a little hollow (especially when it comes to how good Avatar was at humanizing the fire nation in season three).

I also also can’t stop thinking about the way the narrative seems like it keeps siding pro-monarchy? I mean the prince Wu character is purposely ridiculous, but the more they start framing a jokey growth arc around with it, the more confused I honestly feel (editing note from the future: I’m putting the conclusion here because there’s nowhere else to really talk about it in the finale, but ultimately I feel like they take the easy way out with Wu kind of giving up power in a way that feels… you know, easy).

I also also also can’t stop thinking about how the Zhu Li / Varrick plot line feels super weird. When their dynamic played like a one note joke that’s one thing, but the more real it becomes, the more icky it feels. What with the established power dynamics, the faithless devotion, in reality, it has co-dependency written all over it. And thus, to turn it “real” with marriage feels super messed up in a way I don’t even think the writers are aware of.

But most of all, I can’t stop thinking about Kuvira’s relationship with Bataar. Once again, it’s just like this static presented thing that happened off screen. We have to take EVERYTHING they say about one another and how they feel at face value. How much more interesting would it have been if we actually got to see some kind of build-up and arc in their relationship? I mean, what’s stopping us? We’re spending the time on their emotional real estate anyway. Why not telling a story? Instead it just goes from the repetition of “We’re a couple and we want to get married.” to “I have to kill you to get what I want.” This is the huge difference of demonstrating versus storifying something which should feel like Kuvira’s tragic arc. And it’s why I ultimately have a tough time caring about any of it.

Still, it’s an episode Kuvira shows up with a giant mech and that is at least fun!

RANDOM THOUGHTS / BEST JOKES

-Ooof, it seems really feel the animation budget slash with all fades over the evacuation? And is it me or has the bad-guy-mech animations seemed… not as great?

-Oooh, the two weeks thing ended up being a nice feint! I fell for it!

-I feel like Tenzin has been a little toooooo much on the sidelines this season. I get that it’s like his family is stepping up, but he’s really just hanging back and doing, ya know, nothing.

12. DAY OF THE COLOSSUS

And so, we come to the giant battle part of the season, which always has the dignity to at least be pretty cool. This episode is now exception.

For here, Korra and the entire gang spend the entire episode battling Kuvira’s mech and eventually succeed in getting inside. To the show’s continued credit, there’s a lot of strategy and a great sense of geography and environment. But the most critical thing I can say about the battle is that I still wanted a few more surprises and reversals? And you also have to ignore some weird moments reckless endangerment (which is normally not Korra style?). The honest truth is that beggars can’t really be choosers, especially when there are plenty of good action moments with in: like Kuvira’s laser swipe slicing most of the buildings in half, or the moment where Meelo essentially being the one to Hulk-catches-Iron-Man his father and Ikki saves Jinora (I kind of wish those were two different moments though, so it wouldn’t undermine Ikki’s move by comparison).There’s even a good call back to the badger moles.

The thing that’s nagging me is two complicated moments.

The first involves a character’s death. Because early in the battle I had one of those gnawing thoughts where I was like, “i really feel like someone needs to die.” The phrasing is obviously blunt and reductive. The truth is this desire as an audience member is not really about the actual death, it’s about the desire of drama. We know that the specter of death can builds stakes, but you can only feint so many times before the audience can read the trick and feel cheated by the dynamics. Similarly, so many people just outright use death in a perfunctory manner. They treat it like math: one death + one person screaming “no!” = good storytelling. But that’s not really it, either. You have to engineer something that feels fraught, earned, and purposeful.

Ultimately, the storyline with Asami and her father is one that gets us halfway there. Part of the problem is the way Asami always has been sidelined from the story and her father even more so. Heck, he comes back into the fold to help in the battle, but it’s almost an obligatory gesture to serve for the moment that comes next. But at the same time, I’m not sure it could have been anyone else from a top-down level (given Nickelodeon’s violence standards / treatment of death). It practically had to be a criminal character acting out of penance and doing so as an act of love. But in the end, what hurts the sacrifice is one of those nagging logic issues of how it’s executed.

Because it genuinely looks like he had finished breaching the hatch and could have ejected both of them? I mean, it’s genuinely animated like he’s just resigning himself to a needless death as a matter of perfunctory sacrifice. And what’s strange about this action is it would have worked so much better if he ejected her just a beat earlier and then kept working to the last second. That way, she could screamed as it was about to happen (remember, drama is about anticipation, not reaction). But the last-second ejection not only undermines the emotional nature of his sacrifice, the little beat gets as it happens means it doesn’t even work as a last second save. It’s like they were trying to accomplish BOTH goals and ended up slightly hurting the execution of both.

The second complicated moment that’s nagging me comes with Bataar Jr. It happens when he’s talking with his mother and having the the about face with his entire betrayal. Innocently he asks the most important question of the hour: how? How could Kuvira try and kill him? And then Suyin says: “I don’t know sweetie, she’s a complicated person.”

I’m going to be honest… that’s when I kind of lost it.

Because, no. Kuvira’s not fucking complicated. The answer, at least thus far, that you don’t know. The writers never figured out how to convey the reason for the severity of her character, nor her core motivations. So they are hiding behind “she’s complicated.” But she’s not complicated, she’s convoluted. And the verbiage of this to his question is the full admission of this in a way that is plain to see. It might be the worst case of lamp-shading with vagueness that we’ve had in the show yet (which is saying something).

With that, I actually want to say that I’m sorry, I know I’m hard on this stuff, but that’s just because it’s my job. As a writer, you HAVE to figure this stuff out. It is the very core of your job. Because if you don’t understand your character motivations? Then you don’t know them. And you end up hiding them under postures and threats and everything surface oriented, and then renders everything else but a hollow exercise in fisticuffs.

Let’s hope the finale can do better.

RANDOM THOUGHTS / BEST JOKES

-I think the show has had an ongoing Varrick crisis, not because there’s a problem, but because they simply love him too much. I get it. In a show that doesn’t have a lot of true stand outs and Varrick is the manic fun energy with a gifted sense of levity (the fact that’ he’s voiced by the incredible John Michael Higgens of Christoph Guest troupe fame certainly helps). And the moment in this episode where he alludes to his backstory with circus people is emblematic of that… but when it comes to the Zhi Li marriage proposal? I just shout: NO, THIS IS NOT A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP, I DO NOT LIKE THIS THING. They can lampshade it with great jokes all they want, like “now let’s go attach these barely functional rust buckets to a giant killer smashing machine!” / “It’s how i always pictured our engagement,” but it does not change the impossibly problematic nature of what it’s depicting, I’m sorry. I genuinely feel like the creators were blinded by the love of this character in make the choice. There were so many more interesting ways to get as growing humility, but this “love story” is alllllll sorts of wrong.

-Bad guys: “Turn around slowly and please stop that singing!”

-I’m putting this here because there isn’t a “random thoughts” section with the finale, but how many things in media have been called “the last stand”… I”m guessing a lot.

-In general, I’m sort of amazed at how little I have to say with these final episodes. There’s a lot of spectacle, but aside from a few moments that hit the shows repetitive problems, I weirdly don’t feel one way or the other about it? Like, I feel like I got the most out of what I wanted with this season with Korra’s recovery story in the first four episodes. The rest of this feels like something else completely.

And with that, let’s come to the end of that something else…

13. THE LAST STAND

“I think I get it now”

With those sudden words, the writers went with the last second save of Kuvira’s explicit motivations. But while it’s finally offering SOMETHING, I feel it’s too little, too late.

The truth is I know I’m beating this subject into the ground. But when one’s whole thing is looking at the writing of something on the function level, I’m going to have to keep coming at it on that level. I’m just trying to help possibly explain “the why” behind your own feelings. But this is never a simple act with a simple cause. The truth my thoughts on this particular storyline end up being pretty complex and feature a lot of moving parts.

Because I wholly get the intent of this approach with Kuvira. For it is here, after the final duel between the two (which was awesome by the way), that Korra chooses to save Kuvira and there in the spirit world, they finally talk out their problems. It should make sense, right? This is the resolution to the climax! This is where they can get to the root of WHY Kuvira wanted this! And in knowing why, they can heal her pain and find grace! We can wrap it up with nice neat bow! But as I’ve talked the problems of this before, its going back to the magician instinct of “Ta da! We knew what we were doing all along!” The problem is this often fails spectacularly (behold my ongoing conversation about John Carter vs. Finding Nemo) But what always complicates things is that when the “ta da” moment is rooted in something real enough, then it always kind of works, which makes it harder to see the problem.

Which is certainly true here. For the ending conversation between Korra and Kuvira is what I would call “barely serviceable enough,” which is not exactly anything to disregard. It’s hard to make something barely serviceable. Hell, sometimes it’s a miracle. And I now realize that when many of you thought I was being too hard on Kuvira’s character, some of you alluded to the importance of seeing the whole season. And after the realization, we get something that definitely elevates her above the cartoonish nonsense of Iman and Unalaq (which isn’t that hard), but the lingering complications are two-fold.

The first complication is that the actual psychological analysis of Kuvira is flimsy at best, especially in the way it makes the orphan angle and abandonment issues feel convenient and trite. Usually because those issues just create anxiety around intimacy, so the idea that it would just feeds Kuvira’s instinct to be a controlling dictator is… well… the problems should be obvious. Not only is it utterly misunderstanding the psychology, it ignores that these are VERY REAL subjects to people. And when your very personhood get fumbled as fodder for villainy, then there is nothing that feels more disingenuous or belittling. Even getting at the idea that “suffering brings compassion” is deeply complicated view of trauma.

Similarly, Korra talks about them not wanting to feel vulnerable, but unlike Korra, we never ONCE got to dive into Kuvira’s feelings vulnerability. We never got to see the mechanisms of shame that fueled her steely resolve. We only go the villainous surface. And the comparison of their two characters coming down to just, “fierce, determined to succeed without thinking things through” feels equally reductive, especially when that that’s not really been Korra for two seasons now.. Likewise, I don’t think that description fits Kuvira AT ALL. She was constantly confronted with what would happen. She totally thinks it through, she just doesn’t care about the evil results (which is something NEVER addressed).

All of these issues feel like really pressing issues of characterization, but the truth is that the narrative can now get away with because it doesn’t really have to dig deep. The story’s over. They can just say some magic words that seem nice as the quick fix. It’s the lip-service-y turn around. And because they held on so long, the story doesn’t have the obligation of dramatize fucking any of it.

Which brings us to the second complication, which happens to be the problem they’ve had since season one. It is the problem of hiding “the story,” which always seems to be the villains driving motivations for far, far too long. Where Zaheer succeeded due to the right balance of mystery and coming forward with motive, Iman, Unalaq, and now Kuvira all suffer from it. And out of all of them, there is no character who could have benefitted more from dramatization than she. Hell, using the EXACT same framework they established, I can see this version of the character that is so utterly compelling, they just never went there.

I mean, if the final stand-off is ultimately the story of duality between Korra and Kuvira, then you have to tell THAT story. You have to demonstrate their similarities from minute one. I already talked about how much more impact this would have had if you dramatized Kuvira stepping up to fill Korra’s void, of demonstrating her as a well-intentioned soul who could be taking on the OTHER villain. But instead they jump into her character at the very end of her change and speak out of both sides of their mouth, trying to cover all of it. There’s no storifying. And as a result, none of it works as a fight for her soul. Because it takes a lot more than allusion to backstory of some version of her we’ve never seen to believe it. Just as it takes more than seeing a few visions during fights and a last second, rushed, simplified conversation to fix it. All that stuff needs to be THE STORY.

But instead we get something confused and scrambled. Which is exactly what happens when you have a show that always rather hide than do the work. The climax with Kuvira should be some grand catharsis, but it’s ultimately feels so much more hollow than it should be.

With that, we’re only left with the aftermath.

Which would be Varrick and Zhu Li’s wedding, I guess? Again, I find this troubling, but it mostly serves as a setting to give us a few amusing moments, along with age old joy of seeing people in their dress up in nice clothes for once. But really, these sorts of scenes show serve to offer some viewpoint on the final arcs of the show. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most people don’t really get much to do, if anything at all. We have our good bye with Tenzin, which at this point feels more ceremonial than anything. Their story felt more felt like it finished when they parted ways in season three. We also get a goodbye scene with Mako’s devotion to being Korra’s ally, but I wish that there was something more understood as part of a culmination to this particular season. And then, there is the final ending, which evokes something powerful and new… I’m talking of course about Korra and Asami.

We only got two brief teases as to their budding relationship, but as Korra and Asami go off hand and hand on their “vacation,” we seams of what was likely intended and also likely prevented from being explicit (again, Nickelodeon’s conservative nature is well known). It’s not their fault this time, but it’s unfortunately yet another gesture at something that could have been transcendent. Which is a feeling that is sadly all too familiar in this show. So whether it’s Kuvira’s late stage motivations or the general prettiness of surface imagery, the fourth and final season ultimately represents my feelings about THE LEGEND OF KORRA on the whole…

I like what it wants to be.

Season one wanted to tell the story of a young, sheltered girl coming to the big city and learning the world was a lot more complicated than she thought. Season two wanted to go beyond the mere limitations of element bending and into the spirits and existential questions of a world beyond. We know that neither of these seasons really worked. You can tell me all about the crippling production history all you want, but they were also plagued by general writing problems of obfuscation, confused motivations, and haphazard dramatization.

The fact that season three worked so absurdly well highlights how much of this was a simple matter of intended execution. They knew what they wanted and, for once, didn’t let other story inclinations get in their way. They didn’t try to hide it. They didn’t let things get overly complicated. They did the work. They dramatized their characterization through the events of the story and built new relationships before our eyes. They even figured out make its hero vulnerable and create a great cost for her. In short, they knew what they wanted to be and had clear ideas on how to deliver that.

I wish they were able to take that success and drive forward, but honestly, season four ends up being a strange mix of all of this.

To say I liked the season “second best” almost feels obvious, but it genuinely reaches it’s highs early on. I love how it goes into Korra’s interiority and makes it a personal journey. It makes her growth earned and well-observed to her psychology, often striking at something that feels true to our own experience. But instead of it all perfectly harmonizing into a story of her battle against Kuvira, it can’t help but revert into hiding. And so the last second, lip-service-y saving throw only gets them half way. I know it seems nice, but it feels much like the ending reveal of the new spirit portal at the heart of the city… it’s something pretty, unspecific, and perhaps empty.

But the real question of The Legend of Korra comes in its inescapable comparisons to Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s not that we want a repeat of the show, it’s simply wanting a repeat in quality. Which was never an easy task because the original show, from start to finish, is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life. But the thing is that The Legend of Korra seemed at once haunted by and yet enamored with it’s own past. At it’s worst we’d get reduction allusions to prior characters or events. In better moments, we’d get glimpses of the fun and function that made that show joyful. And at it’s best, like season three, we’d get the full vision of embracing what this new show could be. But if I can pin the core difference on one solitary thing,..

It was the failure of “show, don’t tell.”

Because Avatar: The Last Airbender always showed us. Perhaps it was that they had a more expansive creative team. Or perhaps it was it was because they had to build a new world for their audience brick by brick, or perhaps I should say step by step. Because they were giving us tightly-focused episodes that introduced us to new places, new characters, and new ideas. They solved issues and kept things contained and always felt like they were all growing. As an audience, we felt like weren’t just along for a fun adventure, but along on a meaningful journey. And we felt kinship with the characters because we always felt like we truly understood them.

In comparison, I can’t help but notice how little The Legend of Korra felt like an actual journey. I get that they didn’t want to be repetitive. I also get that they wanted to make something slightly more adult, but they forgot they often forgot the lessons of functional writing that went along with that. Instead of showing us, they were constantly telling us, whether by alluding to backstory, or giving us a lip-service reduction of why someone was doing whatever they were doing. So even though characters were always zipping around the world, rarely did we as an audience feel like were going somewhere. And the times we did where when we got the glimpse of the show that could have been. Like in season three, where I genuinely got to feel like could soar with the new air nation in climactic battle. But when I have to take The Legend of Korra on the whole?

I love the show it wanted to be.

But I only sort of liked the show it was.

<3HULK