Chelsea, you’re a theme park blog, why are you writing a tv show review? Because it’s my blog, I own a flying bison, and I felt like it. This would have been up on Thursday but I had some coding to fix before I could access the blog.
My general consensus on the live action Avatar: the Last Airbender series is that I liked it, I liked it a lot the more I think about it. There are things I didn’t like, but there are things I loved, and a couple things I think were improvements on the animated series.
That being said, spoilers ahead, so tread carefully friends.
My first concern was how they were going to cram twenty episodes into eight. And I am happy to report that they managed this BEAUTIFULLY. The storytelling was my favorite part of the live action. While things were rushed in some places and compressed, they told a cohesive story that took things that shouldn’t necessarily go together and made them work. Where the animated series used chapters, these are episodes. It’s strange, but it works.
- Episode 1 Aang covers: The Boy in the Iceberg, The Avatar Returns, The Southern Air Temple, and half of the Storm
- Episode 2 Warriors covers: A bit of the Southern Air Temple and The Warriors of Kyoshi
- Episode 3 Omashu covers: The King of Omashu, Jet, The Northern Air Temple
- Episode 4 Into the Dark covers: The King of Omashu, Jet, The Northern Air Temple, and weirdly the Book 2 Episode The Cave of Two Lovers
- Episode 5 Spirited Away covers: The Spirit World, Avatar Roku, and has elements borrowed from Siege of the North
- Episode 6 Masks covers: Bato of the Water Tribe and The Blue Spirit
- Episode 7 The North covers: The Waterbending Master and Siege of the North
- Episode 8 Legends covers: Siege of the North, and includes elements from the Book 2 episodes The Avatar State and The Cave of Two Lovers.
Look, if you’d told me they were sticking Jet, the Mechanist, and Teo in Omashu, I would have been horrified. It was probably my favorite episode.
We also got some original content. Azula has a storyline set in the Fire Nation and we see a whole lot of Ozai. While I’m not fond of adding content when other canon things had to be cut for time, I was a big fan of this. It makes Azula much more interesting, and Ozai was probably the best casting in the whole show. There are also references to elements from The Search comics and the Kyoshi novels.
Zuko has what is arguably one of the best character arcs I’ve ever seen. I wrote an essay on his journey for an AP English class my senior year of high school. The live action show made it better. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. But the emotion this kid had was phenomenal, and they added pieces to his story and rounded things out. We get to see Ozai banish him instead of hearing Iroh tell the crew about it. (Show, don’t tell, first rule of storytelling!) We get to see more why this matters to him. We get to see how he spent the time searching for the Avatar, three whole years instead of two like in the cartoon. Aang swipes a notebook of Zuko’s where he’s been studying the history of the Avatar, so Aang gets a look into Zuko, and he understands him a little better. Zuko is probably the world’s leading expert on the Avatar, and he can draw! The poor kid probably needed a hobby, let’s be real. His crew even gets some backstory.
They chose to take out Sokka’s sexism, which I feel was a mistake because that character growth was so important. He went from “There’s no way a bunch of girls took us down!” to “My girlfriend is a better warrior than I am!” And that’s so cool because hey, if you were raised with some incorrect beliefs, you can learn and you can grow and change! And that is an important message! But Sokka was still the best written of our three good guys and stole pretty much every scene he was in. He’s not the sarcasm and meat guy anymore. In fact, there’s almost no sarcasm and honestly I don’t remember much in the way of meat.
The costume design was fantastic, oddly with the exception of Aang, Katara, and Sokka. Frankly, I’ve seen better cosplays. But I love how much of everything else they got right design wise. Suki’s makeup was perfection, the Firebender helmets were accurate, and Jet’s armor was an exact replica.
Katara’s fight with Pakku was almost a shot for shot recreation. Some of the positioning was reversed, but we even got the ice disc almost taking his head off.
Somehow they made Yue’s fiance likable? I wasn’t prepared for that.
Cabbage Merchant. Amazing. 10/10. No notes.
Avatar Roku’s temple has a shrine to all past Avatars, with collected relics. I really need someone to get some high quality screenshots on that so I can pour over it. The temple also somehow replaces the Spirit Library from Book 2, and Wan Shi Tong showed up in the Spirit World.
This show managed to tell a fantastic story. It’s easy to focus on the bad and the things that made me angry, but honestly I liked so much more than I didn’t.
Now it wasn’t perfect, and I’ll admit to that. I spent a lot of my day yelling like Harrison Ford in The Force Awakens, “THAT’S NOT HOW BENDING WORKS!” Aang can fly without his glider, except when he can’t for plot reasons. Ozai can set someone on fire just by touching them. People aren’t wet after Katara hits them. Aang puts out fires by throwing air at them rather than draining the air from the fire.
The CGI is rough in some places and flawless in others. Appa and Momo were not… loveable. Nyla? The Shirshu? Looked like she was a real creature. The bending effects were pretty solid all the way through.
Aang, Katara, and Iroh all felt super flat to me. If you take a drink every time Aang says “save the world” or “I’m the Avatar”, you will have an Appa sized hangover. There’s nothing fun loving about Aang. Katara is just sort of… there. She’s not passionate. She’s not driven. She’s not even particularly powerful. We only got like two hope speeches. Sokka got more funny lines than that and he barely got any funny lines. Iroh isn’t cunning. His silly old man act is just that, an act, at least most of the time in the cartoon. He’s not silly in this, but he’s also not the Dragon of the West of legend.
They erased Zhao’s backstory in that he already knew Zuko and Iroh. He was there the day Zuko got his scar in the cartoon, and yet in this he’s a “nobody in the Southern Seas”. It makes him both less interesting and less of a threat, so his whole “Moonslayer” speech is really weak. Also, this man can’t project to save his life when addressing his troops.
My biggest complaint is that there is no build up and no pay off. Everything is revealed from the very beginning. We see Sozin’s Comet in the very first episode in a flashback, and Gran Gran talks about it as soon as Aang wakes up as she reveals he’s the Avatar. We don’t get to learn that Appa is a flying bison and then see him fly, he just zooms on up. (Yet we don’t get a “Yip yip! Until like episode four.) Aang recognizes Bumi almost immediately, and he’s not a clever old man or a mad genius. He’s just a bitter old asshole. Katara sees her mom die in a flashback, and she knows her mom said she was the last Waterbender so there goes that big season three storyline. We meet Kyoshi in the second episode, and even Kuruk by the last. There’s no foreshadowing, no promise of things to come, because it’s all just handed to us from the start.
The season does end really well, I will give them that. It sets it up perfectly so we can dive right in on the next season, skipping the first two filler episodes because we’ve already covered them. I’m really looking forward to Book Two. I like the pieces we’ve got in play and the story blocks where they are. Whenever we get it.
I hope it’s sooner than 2026.
