25 moments Netflix’s remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender MUST get right
Aang reaches out to Zuko
The Last Airbender is full of great characters, but if we’re talking about who has the best character arc, it’s almost definitely Prince Zuko. The son of the Firelord starts out the series determined to hunt down the Avatar, bring him to his father, and regain the honor he lost when dear old dad banished him from the country. By the end of the series, everything is different, but getting there is a slow, painful process, one that Netflix will have to keep pace with every step of the way.
One of the first big steps comes in “The Blue Spirit,” where Zuko assumes a disguise and actually frees Aang after he’s been captured by the Fire Nation, because if Zuko doesn’t capture the Avatar himself, it’s all for naught. Zuko is knocked unconscious, and when he wakes up, Aang tries to reach him with a deftly written little monologue:
"You know what the worst part of being born over a hundred years ago is? I miss all the friends I used to hang out with. Before the war started, I used to always visit my friend Kuzon. The two of us, we’d get in and out of so much trouble together. He was one of the best friends I ever had, and he was from the Fire Nation, just like you. If we knew each other back then, do you think we could have been friends too?"
Zuko, of course, responds to this moment of vulnerability by trying to blast Aang with a gout of flame, and the Avatar flees. But it’s one of the first moments we see that there’s more to Zuko than just a Fire Nation zealot. He’s a wounded kid who wants to belong, and thinks that making his awful father proud of him is the only way to do it. He’s slower than we are to realize he has other options, but he does get there…eventually.
Zuko is older than the other members of Team Avatar, so finding an actor to play him in a live-action series should be a little easier. For the right actor, it could be a career-making part, because Zuko goes through the whole range of human emotion before his journey is done.
