Avatar Recap: Book 3, Chapter 3
After leaving the Fire Nation school with a severe case of happy feet, our heroes move deeper into the land of flames. Encountering a river full of sludge and gunk, they find a small village atop it, and learn about the mysterious Painted Lady
What's going on in this quiet little villa? And who is The Painted Lady? If you love spoilers, be sure to click the jump!
This week's episode may seem a bit filler-esque on its own, but when you add it in with the previous one, it makes both seem more substantial. It seems as if they're going to be spending a bit of the first part of the season showing that the Fire Nation residents aren't all war-mongering and aren't all prosperous for living in the most powerful nation in the world. It'll be a good way for our team to learn that the lines of good and bad are not always easily drawn. They probably learned it a bit in Ba Sing Se, but until this point, we and they have pretty much always seen that everyone from the Fire Nation is really mean and out to getcha.
We didn't get to see any of Zuko, Azula, or Iroh this episode, which is kind of interesting. It seemed as if the dichotomy was going to be a recurring theme for this season, but I guess it will only go so far as to when it fits. I suppose with Iroh not talking and Zuko sending the assassin after Aang, they don't have a whole lot going on over there. At least, nothing interesting to show us.
Momo and Appa aren't getting much to do right now, as they both need to stay hidden. Although Momo is always good for a quick sight gag, hiding under the grass blanket thingy like Appa, just to peek his head out and then cover himself back up again.
Anyway, yeah, the town sucks because of all the pollution from the evil war machine factory nearby. Blah blah, we get it. But luckily they don't focus on spoon-feeding it to us like so many kids' shows do and it doesn't end up becoming a really heavy handed message about environmentalism. It's just, "The factory is there. They dump their crap in the water. That makes the water really dirty." Kids don't usually have to be talked down to. They can gather info from what's going on rather than having Aang becoming Captain Planet for a day and beating the message into the audience over and over and over.
Of course, Katara, being the healer that she naturally is, cannot keep herself from helping people in need. It's a strength of character for her and though she may have her faults, being a good person isn't one of them. And she looks awfully pretty all dressed up as The Painted Lady. When she first shows herself to be The Painted Lady, I kind of wondered that even though she's not a real spirit guardian or whatever, that might be how it was intended for that village's protector to protect them. To act through the kindness of others. Or perhaps an actual spirit was working through Katara directly. This show does a great job of not always going the way that you'd expect a children's cartoon to typically go, so you can't always predict exactly how it's going to end.
And while I have mentioned several times that I love how they animate all the martial arts and bending moves, I feel the need to point out that they also do a great job of making the bending fit the situation or combining the bending of two people to do something together. Aang and Toph are able to clean some water for them to drink by earthbending and waterbending together to filter out the crud. And once again, the creators of the show don't insult our intelligence by having Aang and Toph have a conversation about how they could do it. They just do it.
So the evil Fire Nation army is forced out when Aang and Katara go to their factory and start wrecking everything. The army blames the village, which forces Katara and her friends to save the day by playing dress-up one last time. Again, I love how everyone works together here using their various abilities. Even Appa gets into the act. The scene plays out quite well with The Painted Lady appearing to be a legitimate powerful threat. And they didn't go for the reveal until after the badguys were defated, which is another way that Avatar differs from other cartoons. Normally, one of the good guys would slip up and suddenly the army would be all "Hey! She's not a spirit at all!" and then they'd have to fight.
But when she does become revealed to the people, they're not stupid. They know right away that she's a waterbender. This show doesn't make people stupid for no reason, and I really like that.
The whole show is wrapped up nicely by an appearance of the real Painted Lady spirit at the end, showing up that perhaps this is indeed the way it was meant to happen.
Once again, I have blatantly stolen pictures from AvatarSpirit.net, in case you couldn't tell by the watermark. Generate some traffic for 'em will ya? Gotta make up for my theft somehow.
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