Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2 episode 3 finally takes us where the gang was headed: Ba Sing Se, the destination since the end of episode 1. The great walled city is the seat of Earth Kingdom power, the place where Aang can warn the Earth King about Sozin's Comet and hopefully turn the tide of the war. Now Ba Sing Se is strange. The walls keep the Fire Nation out, and apparently they keep everything else in too, including the truth.
"City of Walls and Secrets" is the most purely political episode the show has done so far and it's the better for it. It's also the episode where Katara quietly becomes the Painted Lady for the first time without telling anyone.
Episode 3 recap
Before reaching the city, there are two things worth noting from the ferry crossing. Iroh, whose health has been declining, teaches Zuko a technique he designed himself by redirecting lightning through the body, a defensive move built for surviving Azula. Zuko also crosses paths with Jet on the ferry, and the two of them end up stealing food and medicine together for Iroh. It's an uneasy alliance and Jet's presence is being set up for something.
The group arrives at Ba Sing Se's outer wall and immediately runs into trouble. Sokka, Katara and the refugees are detained by soldiers and locked in holding cells. The city clearly isn't welcoming. Toph uses her family name to get the four of them through (the Avatar's personal retinue) but everyone else including the Omashu refugees they've been travelling with gets left in holding.
They're assigned a guide called Joo Dee, who gives them a pleasant tour of the city's rings and deflects every attempt to discuss the war or arrange an urgent meeting with the Earth King. When Katara brings up the Fire Nation directly, Joo Dee tells her, pleasantly, that there is no war in Ba Sing Se. Come to think of it, it's the episode's defining line and nobody says anything for a moment.
At a royal party that evening, things get stranger. The city's elite talk about the war as though it ended long ago, as though the Fire Nation's siege failed and that was that. A general credits the wall's fortifications and seems genuinely baffled by the suggestion that anything might be happening beyond them. Long Feng, the city's Cultural Minister, corners Aang and explains that the Earth King forbids talk of war. His guards, the Dai Li, enforce it. The city runs on a kind of willed ignorance that Long Feng describes as the king's rigidity, framing himself as a put-upon civil servant doing his best. He offers to help Aang get an audience if Aang will be patient and show the king he cares about Ba Sing Se. Aang agrees.
The party has more smaller moments happening. Toph is ambushed by wealthy families angling for a marriage arrangement with their sons, because of course she is. Katara defends her by bending two women's drinks into their faces and the two of them have a moment that tips into sweet camaraderie.
Toph then quits as Aang's earthbending teacher mid-argument, they fight and Aang unconsciously earthbends for the first time while too angry to think about it. Toph immediately claims this as proof she's the greatest teacher in the world.
Sokka, meanwhile, is working through his feelings after drinking some mind-slowing cactus juice. Earlier in the episode, Said the Mechanist told him that Suki and the Kyoshi Warrios left the city. There was no need for warriors in a place with no war, apparently. Katara finds him at the party, and they finally talk about Yue and about how Sokka has been pushing Suki away because he's afraid of losing someone again the same way. It's a quiet sibling scene and I think Sokka's best moment so far this season.
That night, Katara slips out. She has taken golden nettles from the palace garden and dressed herself as the Painted Lady to bring them to a sick girl in the Lower Ring without anyone connecting it back to Aang. And Sai, the Mechanist, is taken away in the night by Dai Li agents on the Earth King's orders.
Episode 3 review
Ba Sing Se is such an important location in the original series and the show seems to handle it well. The city's particular kind of aggressively pleasant atmosphere is harder to dramatize than open menace and "City of Walls and Secrets" earns its title. By the end of the episode we understand that the walls are as much psychological as physical, and that everyone inside them from the king down has agreed to maintain a version of reality that keeps the outside world at a safe distance.
Long Feng is the most interesting new addition. He's written and played by actor Chin Han as someone who seems reasonable. He agrees with Aang, he explains things patiently, he frames himself as an ally burdened by a difficult king. And yet almost nothing he says is quite trustworthy. The scene where he describes the king's "rigidity" while offering to manage Aang's access to him is doing a lot of work for the audience. We don't know exactly what his angle is yet, but we know he has one.
Joo Dee is a simpler but effective piece of the same puzzle. The performance keeps her just the right side of uncanny. The running gag of her restating that there is no war in Ba Sing Se would get tiresome if the episode leaned on it too hard, but it's used sparingly enough to avoid being so.
The Sokka and Katara scene is definitely my favorite. The show has occasionally rushed past such moments in favor of plot momentum and giving it the space here pays off. The line about Katara not being over their mother either, that grief doesn't have a finish line, is simply written and properly emotional. The cactus juice that follows is a nice reset. Toph's party storyline is also fun.
I am so excited to see the Blue Spirit (if you know, you know) alongside the Painted Lady in the next episodes. The ending with Sai being taken in the night is the episode's most chilling beat. Sinister but not overtly. That's what this episode has seemed like.
Episode grade: B+
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