Some Thoughts on Legend of Korra's First Season, Finale, and Future

On the whole, I was thrilled, entertained, and surprised by the first season of The Legend of Korra. I'd known that initially Korra was planned as a 12-episode mini-series, but I was unaware until last week's finale that the creators had not extended their planned storyline over the course of two seasons once they got the second season pick-up. Thus, what I was expecting from the season one finale was something along the lines of The Empire Strikes Back: a plan to defeat the villain goes wrong, a revelation comes to light, and by the end, everything is in generally worse shape than it was before. To my great surprise, everything actually went swimmingly. (Anyone unwise enough to have read this far without having seen the season finale will hopefully be wise enough not to read any further.) Korra discovered Amon's true identity. Amon was killed by his brother. Korra connected to the spirit world. Everyone got their bending back. In truth, I found the episode a bit rushed. I'm impressed by the way the creators have learned to pack so much story into such short episodes, but in this case, and perhaps in the season on the whole, I think we could have done with a little more breathing room. Amon is scarcely floating (flaming?) dead in the water before Aang's popped up and Korra's energy bending Lin back to normal. I'm glad the show was picked up for a second season because as a series finale, that last episode would have been disappointing. As a season finale, though, I am deeply intrigued.

I have never seen a show so thoroughly wrap up all of its dangling plot threads in a season finale as Legend of Korra did in its past episode. Each time the finale approached a moment where I thought "Aha! Here's where they'll lay the groundwork for the next season," the episode thwarted my expectations and brought that storyline to a close. (I was sure, for instance, as Tarlokk slipped that electro-glove on, that Tarlokk was going to kill Amon and become the new villain of the show. And then of course he exploded.) After its last episode, Legend of Korra doesn't need to go on. It has wrapped up its story and could, more or less satisfactorily, end now. That it will go on anyways leaves me scratching my head wondering where it could possibly go next.

And after thinking about this exact topic for too long no doubt, here are my guesses!

One area in which Legend of Korra really let me down was in its conflict between benders and non-benders. I had some issues with this conflict from the start because in three long seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I don't remember a single instance of non-bender oppression at the hands of benders. Probably the worst non-benders ever suffered in the original show was Sokka being made fun of for his boomerang. Not exactly the centuries-long history of oppression to spark a civil rights movement.

(I'm about to go off-topic here but whatever, it's my blog, I do what I want: I don't know how planned this was, if at all, but one intriguing layer of Avatar's world is the way that its women, even in a pre-industrial society, occupy the public sphere in ways that women in the real world didn't until very recently. It's not that sexism is entirely out of the picture in Avatar: Katara had to convince that one guy whose name you can't make me look up on Avatar.wiki.com to teach her waterbending. But still! The Kyoshi Warriors run around unsupervised. There have been just as many female Avatars as male ones. Azula holds the second highest military command post in the Fire Nation army (which she uses to fight a race war with, but hey, at least the charred citizens of the Earth and Water nations will die knowing that women are just as capable of mass murder as men!). Point is, if male oppression of women hinges in large part on men's sheer physical strength, maybe bending explains why women in Avatar so successfully achieve gender equality. It's hard to oppress someone who can light your face on fire.)

Nonexistent though non-bender oppression was in Avatar: The Last Airbender, I was willing to shrug off the lack of continuity in the interest of seeing what Legend of Korra would do with the material. And as Legend of Korra went on, it raised the intriguing possibility that maybe the Equalists had a point. Korra and Tarlokk's crew violently attack a group of Equalists. Even more memorably, Tarlokk's police force rounds up and arrests non-benders for peacefully protesting. The show seemed to be hinting that as the Avatar, Korra would have to find some middle ground between the legitimate complaints of the Equalist movement and her obviously pro-bending stance as the ultimate bender in the world. These themes, however, tapered off as the season went on, and the Equalist movement gradually just became a general-purpose group of bad guys for Korra & Co. to fight. I hope that in the coming season, the show spends more time grappling with the Equalist movement and with what its philosophy means for Korra.

Finally, and this is pure speculation, but Legend of Korra is now noticeably missing a villain (assuming Amon didn't parachute to safety like every single one of his men seemed to). Perhaps the show will move on without a main villain, perhaps an existent character like Hiroshi or that mustachioed Equalist will step in to fill the part, or perhaps someone new will enter the scene. I'm going to make a completely wild guess on what will happen based on the absence of an important part of Avatar's universe: we did not see the spirit world in season one of Korra at all. In the original series, there was a whole two-part episode about a spirit's attacks on a village that was chopping down the spirit's forest. If that was how the spirit world reacted to the destruction of a single forest, how are they taking the rapid industrialization of Korra's time? You don't get Republic City without chopping down a few trees, among other things. I don't know how all the creatures in the spirit world feel about the spreading modernization in the Four Nations, but I'm willing to bet that some of them are pretty pissed off about it. Whether that means Avatar will gets its first non-human antagonist in the next season of Korra remains to be seen, but it would certainly tie in well with what's been set up so far.

Doctor Who: Season One

The longest-lasting franchises tend to have rebooting built into their very structure. A fresh-faced James Bond takes over the 007 movies every few years, superheroes die and resurrect constantly, and Doctor Who sheds his current body and dons a new one when he pleases. These franchises can lie dormant for years (16 in Doctor Who’s case, 1996 TV movie excepted), but when someone wants to pick them up again, they’re already ready to go. Fans can’t complain because rebooting was already integral in the show’s DNA, and newcomers have a potential portal into the world with every new update.

As a gateway into the Doctor Who universe, the 2005 series is an effective primer. Beginning its first episode not with the Doctor but with ordinary Londoner Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the show uses Rose as the viewer’s avatar into the Doctor’s world. Her naïveté enables the writers to play audience catch-up, filling new viewers (like me) in on the rules of the “Whoniverse.” As an actual character, Rose is a winning enough companion, although the show dwells perhaps a little too frequently on her home life when it’s the Doctor’s life that sounds far more intriguing. Christopher Eccleston plays the Doctor’s ninth incarnation, a comparatively “cooler” update, at least in dress, bedecked in t-shirt and black leather jacket as he is. Eccleston brings a kind of cheerful daffiness to the Doctor as he bumbles through time and space, but it’s tempered with flashes of darkness and calculation. The Doctor is, after all, the last of his kind, and when things take a turn for the worse, Eccleston reveals a grimmer, more serious side of the character.    

Although cumulatively, the season is quite good, it’s nonetheless very problematic in parts. I’m referring not to the low production budget or the cheesy special effects (if you watch sci-fi television on any kind of regular basis, you learn to roll with the bad FX punches) but to poor writing and character development. A major problem in the early episodes of the show is the way it expects us to do its heaving lifting for ourselves. Characters who have scarcely met dash into the TARDIS, have off-screen adventures together, and by the time we meet them again, they’ve bonded and we are expected to accept their new, deep friendships. It’s lazy writing, and it makes the characters’ relationships less believable and thus the characters less sympathetic. Fortunately, although more nuanced development would have no doubt made for more involving television, by simply hanging around the characters long enough, we do eventually come to like them and to buy into whatever relationships are supposed to exist between them.

If there’s another major flaw with the new Doctor Who, it’s the ham-fistedly handled themes. The show far too frequently tries to pose moral dilemmas where they don’t convincingly exist. In the sixth episode, the Doctor encounters a member of his oldest group of enemies: the Daleks. Overall, the episode is pretty terrific. Each new reboot of Doctor Who is faced with the unenviable task of instilling in new viewers the utter terror that the tea-kettle-like Daleks are supposed to inspire. On that front, the episode succeeds magnificently, first openly admitting that the Dalek looks ridiculous and then transforming it into an unstoppable killing machine. The issue comes when the Doctor unsurprisingly tries to kill the Dalek, and the show tries to pass this off as a horrifying “thou hast become what thou hast fought against” moment. Only the Dalek is a genocidal maniac and the Doctor is trying to kill it before it can kill anyone else. By that logic, David is as bad as Goliath.  

The season progresses in quality as it goes along, its second half superior to its first. With the “Dalek” episode, Doctor Who hits a stride of greatness that doesn’t stop until four episodes later when the show inexplicably brings back farting aliens (and clumsy moralizing to boot). In that interval of good episodes though, the show demonstrates how great Doctor Who has the potential to be. By far, the strongest arc of the season is a two-part storyline set during World War II. Although I implied I wouldn’t make fun of the show’s production budget, the World War II saga makes such effective use of its special effects, that I wonder if I shouldn’t go harder on the other episodes. This two-part storyline, entitled “The Empty Child,” plops the Doctor and Rose in the middle of the London bombings where something decidedly creepy is going on. A little boy in a gas mask wanders the streets of London like a juvenile Grim Reaper, his touch spreading something more disturbing than death. The boy seems to have supernatural power, taking mental control of electronic devices and vocalizing through them the same eerie question over and over: “Are you my mummy?” Meanwhile, Rose discovers that she and the Doctor are not the only visitors to the time era, as a spacecraft hovers beside Big Ben. Its pilot is the Han Solo-like Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), who is prepared to sell an empty alien medical ship that has crashed in the center of London. The storyline build in intensity as the gas mask boy begins to hunt down the Doctor who races to unravel the mystery behind what’s going on. When the Doctor and Rose finally discover the truth, it leads to an exciting and moving finale to the finest episodes of the season. “The Empty Child” saga exemplifies not only the potential of Doctor Who but of science fiction in general: frightening yet funny; fantastical but scientific; grand yet intimate.

As Christopher Eccleston bows out of his tenure as the Doctor at the season’s end, I hope that the David Tenant era brings with it the intelligence and excitement this first season proved the show was capable of.