Four episodes into Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2, Ba Sing Se's secrets are out in the open. Long Feng is the Dai Li and the Earth King is effectively a prisoner of his own cultural minister. The group still doesn't have the key piece of information about when exactly Sozin's Comet will arrive and if there is any window before then where the Fire Nation can actually be beaten.
Episode 5, "Ten Thousand Things," answers both questions, at considerable cost. It is by some distance the most eventful episode of the season, and probably the best.
The Spirit Library has been referenced since episode 3. It's the lost repository of Wan Shi Tong folded out of the human world after firebending spies used its knowledge to destroy an entire wing. Getting there requires going through a spirit scar, which the group locates with Jet's help. The episode pays this off, and then takes something else away in exchange. Also, past Avatars Yangchen and Kyoshi both appear in this episode.
Episode 5 recap
In Ba Sing Se, Aang and the gang are deep in the spy game against Long Feng. Katara's been secretly meeting with General Sung to plan resistance against Long Feng, while also juggling guilt over almost blowing her cover as the Painted Lady in the Lower Ring. Toph gets blindsided by a letter from her mother who is coming to Ba Sing Se to make amends, and she isn't sure she wants to hear it.
Elsewhere, General Sung greets the Kyoshi Warriors (Azula and Co. in disguise), who've delivered a captured Fire Nation officer. Sung is surprised they personally escorted the prisoner rather than delegating it. She explains Aang and friends are tied up with "matters of state" and unavailable, but offers the warriors housing in the city. Sung cautions them that Ba Sing Se operates as its own semi-independent nation-state separate from the military, and that war matters are not to be discussed within the city walls.
Sokka and Professor Zei have been searching for the Spirit Library's location, and Katara recruits Jet to help as he knows the Lower Ring's streets well enough to find the spirit scar. Safe to say it's an uneasy alliance. Jet has been slowly earning back some goodwill over the past two episodes.
Later Joo Dee shows the Kyoshi Warriors to their rooms. Long Feng then makes a personal visit to flatter them with gifts. He offers his help through Joo Dee, then pulls Joo Dee aside privately. Azula and Ty Lee analyze Long Feng's reaction as Ty Lee notes he nearly lost his composure at the mention of Sung's name, meaning he didn't know about the prisoner. Azula concludes that information like this is the currency of power for someone like Long Feng and that he's likely to report it straight to the king.
Meanwhile, Zuko finally has it out with Iroh. Iroh owns his failures as a father figure, admitting he tried to mold Zuko into the son he lost instead of helping Zuko become himself, and tells him the path forward is Zuko's to choose but his love isn't conditional on the choice.
Jet leads the group to the spot he remembers from his early days in the city which Aang confirms is the spirit scar. Aang meditates everyone into the Spirit World while Appa and Momo guard their bodies. Toph, initially left out since she can't bend in the Spirit World, talks her way into joining anyway. Wan Shi Tong, the owl spirit who runs the place, allows them in after they offer a worthy piece of knowledge and promise that nothing they learn will be used to harm anyone. Inside, the group splits up. Sokka searches in vain for some trace of Yue. Toph meets the spirit of Avatar Kyoshi, who gives her advice about family and not being defined by her last name. Aang talks with Avatar Yangchen, who lays out the stakes of the Avatar State including the terrifying reveal that dying in it would end the Avatar cycle forever. Toph learns the date of an upcoming solar eclipse from Kyoshi, during which Firebenders lose their powers completely. The "Day of Black Sun" is their shot at striking the Fire Nation.
Zuko finds Aang and the gang while he is deep in meditation and completely vulnerable. He stands in front of Aang but is unable to bring himself to attack him. And then he walks away.
Back in the library, Professor Zei has an unsettling realization about why Wan Shi Tong sealed the library away from humanity. Humans, he admits, are driven by ignorance, greed and power lust. In that moment of guilt (or perhaps self-preservation), Zei goes to Wan Shi Tong and reports that the group has broken their promise having used the library's knowledge to plan a wartime attack.
Aang is horrified at Zei's betrayal. Wan Shi Tong then turns on Zei as well and kills him before going after the others, sinking the Library with them. The group fights through Wan Shi Tong's onslaught. Jet actively holds the spirit off buying the others the time they need to get out and doesn't make it. Toph, who exited early to keep the entrance open, discovers that while she was outside and separated from the group, someone took Appa. Without her earthsense inside the library she couldn't feel it happening. Aang calls for Appa across empty sand. There's no answer.
Episode 5 review
This is the episode where we finally see the stakes escalate and it mostly delivers. The Spirit Library is visually the show's most ambitious environment and Wan Shi Tong is a pretty compelling antagonist in the final scenes, and his willingness to sink the library with everyone inside was plain terrifying to watch.
The Avatar conversations are perhaps its biggest success. The whole library sequence is going to be among the show's most memorable ones. Though Jet's death is handled well, it felt like it came too quickly. But then again, the show has been rehabilitating him across three episodes and the payoff is that when he decides to sacrifice himself so the others can get out, it registers as a genuine loss just when we were starting to trust him.
Professor Zei's arc ends differently here than in the animated series, and more harshly. Rather than choosing to stay in the library forever out of scholarly devotion, he betrays the group to Wan Shi Tong and is killed for it. It's a bleak turn for a character who has been genuinely likeable. A little more time with the decision between the pull of the library against the cost of what he's about to do, might have made it hit harder.
Zuko finding Aang in meditation and choosing to walk away is the episode's most quietly significant beat. It's perhaps the clearest signal yet of where his story is heading. Appa being taken while Toph was outside and separated is the gut-punch the episode saves for last. Toph's distress, trying to explain that she tried, that without her earthsense inside the library she couldn't feel it happening is so painful watching precisely because Toph is almost never distressed.
This is the season's best episode so far.
Episode grade: A
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