天下制覇

Seriously? That’s it?

Impressions:

What the hell kind of ending was that? "Ha ha! We revealed what we spent 8 minutes learning last week, but then he got away. Luckily, his brother killed both him and himself for ill-defined reasons (saddest story ever, remember!) and then let’s just go ahead and cheapen a whole bunch of stuff by having Aang pop up to give her back all her powers and you know what? Why not everybody else too? After all, she’s depressed. That’s the key to unlocking your true potential." In fact, just about everything after Amon went running off pained me. That was seriously it? He just ran off with his tail between his legs after being revealed without even trying to fight back or conquer everything the old fashioned way? Seriously? No murderous rage, just "I’m going to go find my brother, jack this speedboat, and sail off into the sunset?" What were they thinking?

I won’t say that the episode was going particularly well up to that point either. It began with Team Moron walking into an electric fence followed shortly thereafter by their animals somehow bypassing it and breaking them out so they could go save the other fleet from about a half dozen planes. It’s a good thing too because the fleet… uh… The fleet… uh… What was the point of the second fleet again? Or the first fleet? Ah right, fanservice. Asami’s father made a terrible secondary antagonist and that horrible speech about him being too full of hate to love anymore… Ow. My brain.

Ugh. Final thoughts at the end.

Final Thoughts:

I’m very underwhelmed. Far heavier focus on CG mecha/cars tromping around instead of the martials arts, long pro-bending nonsense arc that went absolutely nowhere, massive focus on terrible teen melodrama, and the whole thing resolved not by the main character doing anything of note, but because she was really depressed. Couldn’t she have at least called on the power of her friends? Or overcome something? Anything? At least let her fight back against Amon afterwards and give some pithy speech about how even without her powers she’s still the Avatar. But alas, no. Depression and then "Because you were depressed, you win!" Christ. Had the ending not been so bloody convenient for Korra without her doing a damn thing to earn it, I’m sure I’d probably feel a bit better about it, but thinking back to the wasted pro-bending time, the relationship time, and then ending with a weak 5 minute squishy flop against the pavement… Yeah, not feeling incredibly charitable right now.

The core cast is the biggest problem though, especially compared to the secondary ones. What I wouldn’t have given to just have more of Lin and Tenzin beating things up. The main group’s just not very interesting and their characterization is all over the place. Remember way back when in episode 3 when Bolin and Mako were associated with the street gangs who were also running rampant through the city for approximately two episodes? Or how it went from Lin fighting for her life to protect Tenzin’s family to his kids farting on the enemy’s faces in the span of about 20 seconds? You are not selling your antagonists here. Korra’s probably the biggest offender, although it’s hard to tell how much of that is because they have her horrible love triangle melodrama significantly more focus than any of her other issues.

So it wasted a whole lot of time and spent the entire season building mystique around Amon just to have the big reveal be as interesting as a dead herring with an even more unsatisfying end to him. Korra learned nothing, didn’t grow or change, and just had magic fix her about three minutes after being broken. Maybe we should’ve evened out the pacing here a bit, eh? Like I said, I’m underwhelmed and disappointed. The first couple episodes had promise, but then they proceeded to squander it all on melodrama and poor pacing without almost any of the martial arts fun that I liked about the first series in the first place. Feh, says I. Feh.