ATLA Marathon: "Bato of the Water Tribe" & "The Deserter"

 

I never realised until recently that Bato is Sully from Uncharted (Richard McGonagle). Sailing with him would take a bit of getting used with mix-ups in technical terms though.

Bato of the Water Tribe

June appears to be arm-wrestling Ryu from Street Fighter. This episode has some good stuff going for it, but it's also one of the weaker ones.

During their travels, the party finds a beached Southern Water Tribe boat owned by a warrior named Bato, a close friend of Sokka and Katara's father, Hakoda. While Sokka and Katara catch up on old times, Aang begins to feel left out. He later intercepts a message from Hakoda with rendezvous coordinates. Fearing that Katara and Sokka will abandon him, he hides the message. Meanwhile, Zuko and Iroh enlist the aid of a bounty hunter named June in their hunt for the Avatar.

Overall, Aang's actions feel out of character. While feeling like a tagalong is something I can relate to, and kids often make emotional mistakes, he doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would withhold things the way he did in this episode. Even when he does come clean, Sokka's response of wanting to go to his father instead of travelling to the North Pole also comes across as mean-spirited. We also get some tragic ironies when they tell Bato that they need to make sure Aang gets to the North Pole before they can see their father again. Their interactions with Bato are quite sweet.

Having said that, June is a pretty cool character. She travels on a mount known as a shirshu, which has a paralysing venom and sees via scent. Zuko uses this trait to hunt for Katara using her mother's necklace which he'd found after she lost it during "Imprisoned". This leads to a pretty sweet fight scene as Aang goes to save Sokka and Katara when they get captured by June. There's a monster melee between Appa and the shirshu, a pretty impressive one-on-one fight between Aang and Zuko, and another example of Sokka's ingenuity when he uses perfume made at the abbey which sheltered Bato to confuse the shirshu. Although I wasn't keen on Iroh being a creep.

Despite the weak middle, I do think it's nice to see the party see each other as a family even through the hard times.

The Deserter

This might be the first episode to draw attention to an underlying issue with Aang's quest: Where will he learn firebending if most firebenders are loyal to the Fire Nation? Although it's unlikely that anybody in the target audience has seen Apocalypse Now.

The party finds themselves near a Fire Nation colony which is hosting a "Fire Festival" cultural celebration, complete with firebending tricks and a hefty dose of propaganda. Believing he might be able to find a firebending teacher, Aang opts to investigate but is recognised. He and his companions are rescued by an eccentric follower of Jeong Jeong "the Deserter", a Fire Nation admiral who went rogue. Hoping to learn firebending, Aang asks Jeong Jeong to teach him but is rebuffed by the latter, who believes that he lacks discipline. He eventually relents, until Aang accidentally burns Katara.

Jeong Jeong is a curious character, who believes that firebending is a curse after failing to teach disciplene to another pupil. This brings with it a reluctance to teach Aang which results in the pair butting heads, and the teacher's fears are pretty much proven after Katara gets burned. The incident ultimately weighs heavily on Aang to a point where he vows never to fire bend again. Meanwhile, Katara discovers that she can use waterbending to heal, and Jeong Jeong expresses lament that he wasn't a waterbender.

As stated above, this episode seems to draw a lot of imagery from Apocalypse Now. Jeong Jeong is very similar to Colonel Kurtz, one of his soldiers reveres him kinda like that journalist played by Dennis Hopper. We have Zhao leading a riverboat expedition to find the Avatar, and his boats resemble PBRs. It's impressive, but it strikes me as an odd choice.

That said, we get a cool action sequence at the beginning as the party escapes the town with their newfound ally. This is followed by another great sequence as Aang confronts Zhao and realises that he was Jeong Jeong's other disgraced pupil. He uses the admiral's lack of discipline against him and tricks him into torching his own boats before making his escape.

Despite the odd choice of references, this is actually a pretty strong episode.