Angua wrote:They really took the fight scene straight out of TLA. There were the same stone pillars and flying evil dude.
And the villian ended up trapped in a small pyramid of earth and mocked by the Avatar's friend. Of course, this time jet boots was the hero and the airbender was the villian. Similarly, on ground level, we're rooting
for the lightning bender to zap the water bender this time around.
I don't think the random guard is a Red Lotus mole. She saves the life of the chief of the Southern Water Tribe so he can help the Avatar. That's pretty much the opposite of what a Red Lotus operative would do. She's voiced by Zelda Williams (the late Robin's daughter), so I'm guessing it was just a cameo, like when Sarena Williams played the guard in AtLA that Iroh warns to take a sick day during the elipse. If you're a fan of the show, and famous enough to get their attention, they'll let you voice a random guard. I don't know if this offer extends to people not named Williams.
Bolin defeating Ghazan in a lavabending battle would have been too much. Even Zaheer, who seems to be something of an airbending prodigy, needed help to fight an actual airbending Master.
Zaheer might get some of what he wants. Tenzin's speech about the new airbenders helping the world and fighting corruption, regardless of national boundaries, while the Avatar can't has a bit of overlap with Zaheer's speeches about people helping their loved ones without regard to nations. It's like the show is trying to teach two sides of the same moral simulataneously. First, the ends don't justify the means; you can have a noble cause and still be a villian. Conversely, someone being a villian doesn't make everything they believe wrong. But when you put them together, the overall lesson is that if you're willing to sacrifice yourself, you should take the most extreme measures possible to reach your goals; the heroes who stop you will then do what you want.
As sad as Korra was while being wheeled around, she didn't cry until Tenzin's speech about the world going on without the Avatar. Given how young Korra was when she started making everyone else deal with it, she might not even remember not being the Avatar. I could picture her meditating her way into the Spirit World more and more to escape her poisoned body, figuring the physical world doesn't need her, anyway. That could be interesting as long as it doesn't turn into some ham-fisted anti-drug metaphor.
I wonder if we'll see more airbenders learning to fly. The novice airbenders probably lack the skill, and it might require more spirituality than Tenzin has, but maybe Jinora could pull it off. I wonder why noone followed Lahima's example until Zaheer. Other bending specialties (metal, blood, lightning) have become more common than they were just a generation ago.
Given the scene where Zaheer's reading Lahina's writing and the following conversation with P'Li, it might be that he needed to sever his earthly ties by losing his loved one. That would match up with Aang's lesson about letting go of Katara to open his 7th chakra, and Zaheer does touch down when telling the others about P'Li. Having to be that severed from earthly ties would make flight rare, but you'd think there'd be enough lonely airbenders that flight wouldn't have died out.
That conversation with P'Li didn't really resonate with me since I'd just read that week's
Tom the Dancing Bug. I did notice the hypocracy of P'Li showing her appreciation for being rescued from a warlord's service by helping to capture a child to train as a weapon.
Given that the metal poison is liquid without being hot enough to burn, it might be mercury. They showed it splattering into pools when Suyin pulled it out. I think that's what mercury does, but I'm not sure. If it was, the Red Lotus mooks who applied it to Korra were the first people we saw bending an actual
element.
This isn't finale related, but I didn't think of it until now. I've read, and had, some complaints about Tenzin never getting any better at teaching. But, that actually makes sense. Remember when he's giving a day-by-day recap of some guru's fast? All the new airbenders are bored out of their minds, except for the one Acolyte who's just eating it up. That guy is the type of student Tenzin's had for his entire adult life. He's always had people willing to follow his way unquestioningly, so he never learned to motivate anyone.
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