S1E17: "The Northern Air Temple"
Aang confronts a new reality | Grade: B+
Thanks for tuning in to my seventeenth of 61 daily reviews of Avatar: The Last Airbender! Yesterday, we watched S1E16: The Deserter.
This episode begins with our heroes huddled around a campfire, where a local storyteller shares a tale of “air walkers” that his grandfather spied recently. Could airbenders have evaded the Fire Nation and survived at the nearby temple? As they approach, Katara is amazed to see several people whizzing through the air on gliders, but Aang’s face falls. They’re not really flying, he says.
Gliding maybe, but not flying. You can tell by the way they move, they're not airbending. Those people have no spirit.
What ensues is an episode that explores how we deal with change and what we owe to the past. The new residents of the Northern Air Temple are a community of Earth Kingdom refugees, led by a nameless mechanist who is introduced by way of wrecking ball. After a flood destroyed his village, killing his wife and crippling his infant son Teo, the mechanist resettled at the temple and used his technological prowess to construct a number of industrial renovations. Sokka and Katara are wiping away tears as he explains that he invented the mechanical gliders to give the wheelchair-bound Teo a new life in the air.
We're just in the process of improving upon what's already here. And, after all, isn't that what nature does?
But Aang isn’t buying it, shocked and seething over the changes that have completely transformed a sacred home for his people. “Nature knows when to stop,” he retorts. Aang’s bitterness is relatable to anyone who has grown older in a city or town only to realize that things are not as they once were. Are the new residents wrong to destroy precious history? Or are they justified in ensuring their own survival, rather than protecting relics of a now-lost civilization?
It’s not a simple question, although it’s less complex than its real-world counterpart of gentrification, in which displacement is also a factor. Aang fixates on the idea of “spirit” as an important quality that must be preserved within the air temple. Eventually, he comes to realize that it’s a quality that the new inhabitants have, and their spirit keeps the temple vibrant even as its structure inevitably changes. In a moment that recalls Aang’s message to Hei Bai in The Spirit World, Teo helps change the Avatar’s mind by showing him a hermit crab that descends from the ones that lived there a century earlier.
I'm really glad you guys all live here now. I realized, it’s like the hermit crab. Maybe you weren't born here, but you found this empty shell and made it your home. And now you protect each other.
The question of what is justified in the name of survival is taken further when the Gaang discovers that the mechanist has been designing weapons for the Fire Nation, in exchange for the continued safety of his community. “You must understand,” he pleads to his son, “I did this for you!” But, Teo counters, “how can I be proud of you when your inventions are being used for murder?” When the Fire Nation’s representative comes to collect, Aang intervenes and stops the deal, setting up a fight for the fate of the Northern Air Temple.
Outside the sanitized confines of a kids’ show, it’s a decision that the Avatar makes a little too lightly. The show wants to tell us that, when we have the means to resist, we should not quietly accept extortion that contributes to the world’s suffering. But we don’t see Aang really consider the consequences. Even if the residents of the air temple can mount a successful defense, what if someone were to die in the battle? Is the Avatar ready to accept that responsibility?
Ultimately, Avatar doesn’t make us worry about it. Thanks to their aerial control, the air temple fighters win the fight and nobody dies. Things are looking a bit dire when the Fire Nation sends a squadron of tundra tanks, nearly-indestructible armored vehicles that can scale steep cliffs with a grappling hook and right themselves when overturned. But Sokka, who has spent the episode showing off his smarts and learning from the like-minded mechanist, saves the day by blowing up a massive well of natural gas, which forces the Fire Nation to retreat.
Afterwards, the denizens of Northern Air Temple bask in glow of victory. “As long as we've got the skies," Sokka cheers, “we'll have the Fire Nation on the run!” But off to the side, the mechanist looks downcast. Perhaps he knows the consequences of losing their newly-perfected war balloon. In a final scene, a group of Fire Nation soldiers re-inflate the downed aircraft, and the officer smiles. “This defeat is the gateway to many victories.”
See you tomorrow for Episode 18: The Waterbending Master! Share your own thoughts on this episode in the comments.
Spare observations
“Are you saying I’m a liar?” “I’m saying you’re an optimist. Same thing, basically.”
The candle clocks display time by flashing, but the Mechanist says “look at the time!” before it happens.
The hermit crab is another rare normal animal in the world of Avatar.
“The question became: how do you keep a lid on hot air?” “Ugh, if only we knew.”
Katara fights very well in this episode, showing strong command of her freezing power to take out the tanks. It’s striking to see her improvement since The Waterbending Scroll.
It’s our first encounter with tundra tanks and the war balloon, but if the final scene is any indication, it won’t be the last.
Friends of the White Lotus [SPOILERS]
At the beginning of the scene where Sokka drops the rotten egg, the mechanist can be seen working on a blueprint for the drill from Season 2. That said, he presumably stops working for the Fire Nation after this episode, so it’s unclear how they obtained the designs.
The mechanist’s Fire Nation handler is War Minister Qin, who is also featured in The Drill.
The Fire Nation’s improvements to the war balloon are displayed to great dramatic effect in The Day of Black Sun: Part 2.