Season 1 of Netflix's live-action Avatar left fans in a somewhat complicated place. The Northern Water Tribe had been saved, Zhao was gone and Aang had shown us what the Avatar State looks like when it's not under his control. But the victory felt incomplete, because it was. While everyone was focused on the North, Azula quietly took Omashu. The Fire Nation lost a battle and won a piece of the board and season 1 ended on that note.
What Season 1 got most right was its two central performances on the Fire Nation side. Dallas Liu as Zuko brought a real restlessness to the character and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Iroh gave the show much of its warmth. Where Season 1 sometimes struggled was in giving the main trio of Aang, Katara and Sokka room to breathe between the plot.
Season 2 opens with a cleaner sense of what it wants to be. "Somewhere Safe" introduces a ticking clock in Sozin's Comet, gives Azula a real mission that puts her on a collision course with both Zuko and the Avatar, and plants the earthbending arc that will be pretty much at the center of the rest of the season. Ba Sing Se, the great walled city that loomed over the best stretch of the original animated series, is now the destination.
Episode 1 recap
Avatar season 2 episode 1 picks up shortly after the battle at the Northern Water Tribe. Aang (Gordon Cormier), Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley) are still in the Earth Kingdom, now escorting a large group of refugees who fled Omashu after Azula's forces took the city at the end of season 1. The southern route is blocked by Fire Nation soldiers and the only path left is through somewhere called Serpent's Pass. The sign at the entrance literally says "Abandon All Hope," which is not the welcome mat you want to see when you're already exhausted.
Along the way they run into Suki (Maria Zhang) and her Kyoshi Warriors, which is a warm reunion. Suki has been fighting in the Earth Kingdom since season 1, and she and Sokka clearly have unfinished business. There's a moment with a peach pear that goes about as smoothly as Sokka usually handles these things. Aang's first move of the season is to try and rescue his old friend Bumi (Utkarsh Ambudkar) from his prison cell in Omashu but Bumi, in classic Bumi fashion, refuses to leave. He surrendered the city deliberately, choosing to do nothing rather than lead his people into a fight they couldn't win and get them killed for it.
He also uses the visit to tell Aang his first real lesson toward earthbending, the concept of neutral jing. There are apparently 85 different kinds of jing (Momo knows all of them), but the one Aang needs to master is neutral jing. Bumi tells Aang his real earthbending teacher is out there somewhere and sends him away.
Through Serpent's Pass itself, the group has to cross a long underwater path through what turns out to be genuinely dangerous water. Aang and Katara raise a walkway from the seabed together. Halfway across, a sea serpent attacks and Aang fights it off without going into the Avatar State (which he's decided not to use until he has full control of all four elements, after what happened in the North). He ends up not killing it and then Katara uses the moment to teach him healing by guiding the water through the serpent's wound. It's a nice gentle scene that works well as a way of showing where Katara and Aang are as a duo right now.
At the end of the crossing, a young astronomer named Sai (Danny Pudi) delivers the news everyone's been dreading. Sozin's Comet is coming and when it arrives, every Firebender's power increases a hundredfold. That's the same comet Sozin used to wipe out the Air Nomads a century ago. The group decides they need to get to Ba Sing Se, the Earth Kingdom's massive capital city, to warn the Earth King and hopefully build a coalition before the comet hits.
Meanwhile, on the Fire Nation side, things are moving fast. Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim) strips two generals of their command for slow progress in the Earth Kingdom, and gives Azula (Elizabeth Yu) a separate mission to bring Zuko home. There's a chilling moment where Ozai essentially tells Azula that her own brilliant plan to take Ba Sing Se has been handed to another general who is going to execute her exact strategy and likely get the credit for it. Ozai does this completely casually and Azula smiles and says she serves at the pleasure of the Fire Lord.
Azula then recruits her two friends, Mai (Thalia Tran) and Ty Lee (Momona Tamada), through a deeply uncomfortable loyalty test where she essentially forces them to fight each other to the edge of actually hurting one another, then stops it and says she needed to know they'd go all the way for her. Ty Lee looks shaken. Mai looks like she's filed it away somewhere.
Zuko and Iroh, meanwhile, are hiding in the Earth Kingdom, working as farm labourers under fake names. Iroh is genuinely enjoying it but Zuko is not (obviously). He's furious and restless and eventually has it out with Iroh, blaming him for everything including failing in the original siege of Ba Sing Se years ago, for not stopping Ozai when he could have, for the chain of events that led to Zuko getting burned and exiled. Then he walks off to find the Avatar himself, alone.
Episode 1 review
This is a solid season opener and maybe the most confident the show has felt so far. It doesn't try to do too much in one episode, which was a real problem in parts of season 1.
The Bumi scene is probably one of the more memorable in the episode. He's played with this kind of unhurried eccentricity that fans of the animated series will love. The Azula sections are uncomfortable in a way the show hasn't quite managed before. The countdown scene is pretty tense and Elizabeth Yu plays Azula's particular brand of controlled menace well.
The reveal that Ozai just casually reassigned her own plan to someone else is also nicely done. You can see exactly what her father does to her and we understand her without having to be told to sympathize with her. Zuko's blow-up at Iroh was coming anyway.
The sea serpent sequence is really cool. The action is competent and the healing moment that follows reminds us so much of the anime. The Sokka and Suki peach pear exchange is sweet in its awkwardness. The weakest part of the episode in my opinion is the comet reveal, because it's delivered a bit flatly. Everyone sort of nods and pivots to logistics. I thought there would be more to it.
Overall, "Somewhere Safe" sets season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender up pretty cleanly. We know where everyone is going and what the stakes are, and the show seems to have found a more comfortable pace. We're heading to Ba Sing Se, which is where the best of the original animated series lived. So there's reason to be hopeful about what's coming.
Episode grade: A-
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