Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2 – drastic cutbacks, still delivers
No, Avatar: The Last Airbender isn’t perfect. Quite often, the second season races through its story too quickly and cuts some of our favourite moments painfully short. And yet, it still nails an astounding number of essentials.
Don’t worry, the following series review contains no spoilers. I won’t be revealing anything more than what’s already in the public domain or has been shown in trailers. Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2 premieres on Netflix on 25 June.
I’ve known this world ever since I was a teenager. Water, Earth, Fire, Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished.
I could recite the opening sequence of the animated series in my sleep. And, to be honest, it feels like a curse hanging over me as I watch Netflix’s live-action adaptation.
The fan’s curse
While writing my review of Netflix’s One Piece earlier this year, I enjoyed a rare privilege. Although I knew of the manga and anime, I had never read or watched them, and wasn’t bothered by preconceived expectations. I was able to simply watch. Enjoy. To let myself be swept away into a world without constantly noticing what had been moved, deleted or merged.
I’m not as lucky with Avatar. I’ve been a fan from the very start; before the first season was released on Netflix, I rewatched the entire animated version and realised it’s even better than I remembered. Funnier. More emotional. Even deeper. That’s the standard I’ve been using to judge every episode of the live-action show ever since. Unfortunately…
«Ah, they moved that then. Cut this. And they combined those three story arcs into one. Interesting. Not ideal. But interesting.» This monologue kept repeating in my head.
Source: Netflix
You can’t blame the show for this. It’s my cross to bear as a fan of the original – I can never quite let go, and I end up getting in my own way when all I really want to do is just enjoy it. But whenever I did manage to silence that inner gatekeeper – even if only for a few minutes – immersing myself in that world was still wonderful.
«There is no war in Ba Sing Se»
«Earth is the element of substance,» Uncle Iroh once said. «The people of the Earth Kingdom are diverse and strong. They are persistent and enduring.» Season 2 has taken this to heart. Its world isn’t a caricature; instead, the show delivers one that feels real and alive. It didn’t simply crawl out of a cartoon – it’s always been there.
Things felt different in Netflix’s One Piece adaptation. There, I often felt I was standing in front of sets and costumes that seemed deliberately artificial – almost endearingly cheap – in order to emphasise the cartoonish nature of the source material. With Avatar, Netflix takes the opposite approach. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ba Sing Se, the capital of the Earth Kingdom.
Source: Netflix
In fact, Netflix built a massive set – oppressive, walkable and weighty. Rightly so: Ba Sing Se is the largest and most heavily fortified metropolis in the Earth Kingdom, surrounded by multiple walls and virtually impregnable. The residents are barely aware of the war that’s been raging for decades right outside their gates. They’ve been made to look away. To not ask questions. To carry on living as if nothing had happened.
This collective self-deception is the very essence of Ba Sing Se, where nothing is as it seems. It’s exactly why designing the city to feel so grounded and real is so ingenious. A fantasy setting would trivialise the lie. A place with real weight, on the other hand, makes it truly unsettling. And it is here, of all places, that Avatar Aang (Gordon Cormier), Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley) must join forces to convince the elusive Earth King to form an alliance against the dreaded Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim).
Then – almost imperceptibly – this atmosphere of forced normality begins to hold up a mirror to its characters.
Too much material, too little time
By the way, this isn’t a choice made by Netflix alone – even though the adaptation streamlines and simplifies the story here too, attempting to squeeze the many plot threads of its source material into just seven 60-minute episodes. Characters, events and entire settings are combined or even omitted entirely. All I’ll say here: farewell, drill outside the walls!
That makes it a little difficult for me to watch. Especially early on, the series practically speeds through a number of beloved animated episodes. Bumi’s apparent helplessness in Omashu is heavily shortened – the swamp and the visions there are even cut out entirely. Netflix condenses the story of blind bandit Toph, the library in the desert and Serpent’s Pass into barely more than two episodes before Team Avatar finds itself standing right outside the walls of Ba Sing Se.
Source: Netflix
But no sooner has the series arrived there than it shifts gears. Even in the animated series, Book Two: Earth is the season that slows down the pace in favour of depth and character development – and Ba Sing Se is the perfect setting for this.
Remember, the city is divided into three rings: posh folk reside in the Upper Ring, merchants and artisans in the Middle Ring, and those who fall through the cracks fill up the Lower Ring. Refugees. The poor. The forgotten. A city where inequality is made invisible, just like war. In this environment, Aang and his friends can neither flee nor fight openly, nor can they lose themselves in their next adventure. They have to stay. And those who stay will eventually have to face themselves.
The series makes clever use of this – and nowhere is this more evident than with Katara.
River goddesses and blind bandits
Something interesting happens here: the adaptation moves up a storyline from Season 3 of the animated show. Katara learns about the legend of the Painted Lady, a water deity, and takes on that role herself in Ba Sing Se. In disguise, of course, she explores the outer ring at night to help those who have long since been abandoned by the city.
To me, it’s one of the best decisions of the entire season. It gives Katara her own active storyline in Ba Sing Se, instead of just using her as the group’s maternal, emotional anchor as the animated series does.
Source: Netflix
The same is true of Toph, the blind earthbender and Aang’s new teacher. Even in the animated series, she’s a fan favourite. A sort of cross between Yoda and Han Solo.
Like Yoda, she’s initially underestimated by everyone. But nobody knows her secret: this supposedly small, delicate, blind girl sneaks out at night to take part in Fight Club-style underground bouts as the Blind Bandit, hurling even the strongest opponents away like pebbles. Yet there’s a lot of Han Solo in her too. Brash, impatient, unhampered by the wisdom that comes with age and completely unprepared for what it means to have true friends.
By the way, the show really struck gold with Miya Cech in the role. Not only does she look strikingly similar to the cartoon character, including her build and slightly annoyed facial expression, but she also sounds remarkably similar to Toph’s original English voice from the animated series.
To be honest, though, I can’t clearly distinguish how much of my affection for this character comes from the adaptation and how much from the original, which I know so well. After all, the first half of Toph’s season in the animation – those countless episodes in which, layer by layer, you come to understand why she’s the way she is, why she rubs people the wrong way and that she still has a soft core – is condensed into one and a half episodes here.
Source: Netflix
The series does attempt to fill this gap by relocating parts of the discarded storylines to Ba Sing Se. But I’m not sure if it’ll work for people who aren’t familiar with the original. I could imagine that, without knowledge of the cartoon, Toph might just be too much to handle at first. If you’re reading this and weren’t familiar with the animation, feel free to let me know in the comments.
Fathers, sons and old wounds
To me, though, the biggest positive surprise of the season is Long Feng, played by Chin Han. In the original, this character remains largely two-dimensional. Here, he’s introduced as the Grand Secretariat – warm, welcoming, and with a presence that seems almost fatherly. Someone who makes you feel truly heard and understood. It’s exactly what makes him so fascinating: this blend of charisma and omniscience, without giving away too early where the character is actually headed. Chin Han carries this duality with an ease I hadn’t expected.
Zuko, on the other hand, remains the most compelling character in the entire series, just as in the original. Dallas Liu delivers his best performance yet here. The real driving force is his inner conflict: a man who’s deeply compassionate and empathetic in truth, but who constantly tries to suppress precisely these qualities in order to become the proud, ruthless conqueror his father wants him to be.
Source: Netflix
Meanwhile, his uncle Iroh returns to the site of his greatest personal defeat – though defeat is hardly the right word for it. Anyone who knows Iroh only as a warm-hearted, tea-sipping philosopher forgets who he once was: a feared general of the Fire Nation who stood before the very same walls that now lie behind him. His siege of Ba Sing Se failed back then, and it cost him the life of his only son. That loss made Iroh the person he is today. And now he has to walk through a city that reminds him of it with every step.
Ba Sing Se isn’t just a place for him. It’s a graveyard.
The series goes way deeper here than the animated original. It confronts the supposedly ever-good-natured old man with his wartime atrocities, reopens old wounds, and gives Paul Sun-Hyung Lee the stage he deserves in doing so. The best bit? The arguably most moving scene in the entire animated series didn’t get cut. Brilliant. Thanks to this inclusion alone, the adaptation deserves a pass for some of its other shortcomings.
In a nutshell
Water, Earth, Fire, Air – one star for each
Once again, witnessing the elemental mastery on display in season 2 is a feast for the eyes – no, more than that. It’s grown. The bigger budget is evident in every scene: water bends and surges as if alive. Earth bursts forth from the ground, just waiting for its moment. Fire doesn’t just burn – it devours. Anyone who still remembers M. Night Shyamalan’s infamous flying pebble from 2010 knows how far this franchise has come since.
And yet, the curse persists. I’ll never be able to watch this show the way I’d like to – without constantly comparing it in my head, without being aware of what made the original better, deeper and funnier. You can’t blame Netflix for this. It’s the burden of a fan who knows the original too well and loves it too much.
What I can say with conviction, however, is this: anyone unfamiliar with the animated series will get to enjoy a magnificent, lovingly crafted fantasy masterpiece that was clearly made with passion. Anyone who does know the original… well, tough luck. It’s tricky, lifting a curse.
I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.
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