Just as the TV series was about the events leading up to a battle to end a war, the books are about what happens as they try to put the world back together after the war. They’re basically an additional season of the show, added from 2012 to 2017. There are five accompanying graphic novels, but they don’t retell the story, they extend it. This only becomes clear in the first graphic novel, The Promise. If you’re wondering why Katara is wearing a green Earth Kingdom dress at the end of 3×21, it’s because she (and the rest of Team Avatar) were about to attend an event hosted by Earth King Kuei. Also the beginning of season 3 had some distracting digital artifacts, turning smooth animation into digital jaggedness. And the Apple TV application doesn’t have any concept of skipping intro and recap, which is not great because the first minute and a quarter or so of every episode is intro and recap. The screen just suddenly goes black, for a noticeable amount of time. The iTunes versions don’t do a good job of smoothing over the commercial breaks. SIDEBAR: There are some issues with the iTunes versions and the Apple TV application. The downside to the omnibus is that it doesn’t separate out the episodes by book, it just lists them 1 through 61. Stargate SG-1 did play-within-a-play fairly successfully in 5×12 – Wormhole X-Treme!, and much less successfully in some other episodes.Īvatar: The Last Airbender is available on iTunes as three separate seasons, or as a single omnibus. In animation, I thought Reboot did it well, revisiting their adventure as a musical, but they only spent five minutes on it, not an entire episode (in the last episode of Reboot season 3, “End Prog”).
It’s made particularly hard because the show is already self-aware, so it’s hard to have an extra layer of awareness on top of that. It’s a very hard balance to strike, because the play-within-a-play has to be self-reflective but also entertaining. The purpose of the episode, as they come near the end of their story, is to give dedicated fans a reminder that this is in fact just a story, to give them a chance to get a bit of distance as the end of the three season arc approaches. To the extent that it ever hit a false note, it is more in playful experimentation, in the teen episode 3×05 The Beach.įor me the play-within-a-play episode 3×17 The Ember Island Players didn’t work, but what they’re trying to do is both necessary and complex. General Iroh is a really interesting character, warm-hearted and strong, and gets an appropriately powerful Tale of Iroh in the anthology episode 2×15 The Tales of Ba Sing Se. It has fully-realised characters, with their own personalities and motivations. It is amazing what they accomplished particularly considering they have about 22 minutes to tell each episode of the story. It also does some clever things to subvert expectations. The episodic and travel-quest nature of the story open up the possibilities of many different tales, and the show takes advantage of this freedom within the larger narrative arc. Sincere, thoughtful and heartfelt but also with a great sense of humour. It is self-aware without being too self-aware. The world-building, the characters, the writing, the animation and the voice actors all work together to make a great story. Each season is titled as a book – Book 1: Water, Book 2: Earth, Book 3: Fire – with individual episodes as chapters. Avatar: The Last Airbender is an animated TV series that aired in three seasons from 2005 to 2008.