2 ways Avatar: The Last Airbender improved on the original show (and 3 ways it was worse)

The remake is better because...we spend more time with the airbenders

The original Avatar show opens with Sokka and Katara finding Aang frozon in an iceberg, where he's been resting for the past 100 years. We only find out later the full story of how he got there. The remake goes another route, spending some time with Aang at the Southern Air Temple before he's frozen, hanging out with friends like Monk Gyatso (Lim Kay Siu) and dealing with the revelation that he is the Avatar.

This sequence isn't perfect. Like I said on the first slide, despite the show telling us over and over, we never really get a sense of Aang as an irrepressible prankster who has to struggle with the weight of his responsibilities. The show seems determined to make him more serious. For example, in the original show, Aang ends up in the iceberg because he runs away from the Southern Air Temple after finding out he's the Avatar out of fear and confusion. In the remake, he makes a level-headed decision to fly around and clear his head. This sequence could have, but didn't, show us that more playful side of Aang.

Still, it is fun to see airbenders back when they were still around, using their powers and living in peace, not knowing the horrors that were about to be visited upon their people by the Fire Nation. It was also nice seeing more of Aang's relationship with his mentor Monk Gyatso in particular.

The remake is worse because...the spirit world is incoherent

In the fifth episode of the remake, Aang comes upon a village being tormented by a creature from the spirit world, which exists parallel to ours. Aang, as the Avatar, has the power to make contact with the spirit world and do what he can to moderate things, which he tries to do.

Thus kicks off a very convoluted series of events where Aang travels to the spirit world (accidentally bringing along Katara and her brother Sokka, played by Ian Ousley), they meet the spirit plaguing the village, and then they meet another spirit played by George Takei, and then that spirit traps Sokka and Katara in the spirit world, and then Aang has to leave the spirit world and travel somewhere else in the real world to meet with a long-dead Avatar to get a clue about how to defeat the George Takei spirit, and then Aang gets kidnapped by the Fire Nation on the way back, and by the end we can barely remember what we were supposed to be doing at the start.

This episode takes a few standalone episodes from the original show and mashes them together in ungainly ways. The ecological message of Aang's journey into the spirit world in the original show is lost, Katara and Sokka sit out pretty much the entirety of the second episode, and the whole thing feels more complicated than it needs to be.

A lot of these problems come down to writing. For the next couple of seasons, I hope the writers take the time to make sure the scripts say what they're supposed to say, give the characters room to express themselves through their actions and not just their words, and remember that Avatar: The Last Airbender can be fun and funny as well as dramatic. The bones of a good show are there. I want to see this series walk tall into greatness.

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