Avatar S2E10: "The Library"
A visually fantastic and imaginative adventure | Grade: A
Thanks for tuning in to my thirtieth of 61 daily reviews of Avatar: The Last Airbender! Incredible to think that we’re just about halfway through the series, and things are only getting better and better. Yesterday, we watched S2E9: Bitter Work.
What stunning imagery this episode brings! The grand library, sunken beneath the desert sands is an incredible feat of imagination. Wan Shi Tong, “he who knows ten thousand things,” is up there with Koh as one of the most unique and memorable spirit antagonists in the series. Avatar once again leans on a horror aesthetic for the spirit. I loved his Exorcist head-swivel, his freakish serpent-like transformation, and that striking shot of Sokka in his huge, jet-black eyes.
Team Avatar’s search for the library is instigated by the typically goal-oriented Sokka, who hopes to dig up some intelligence that they can use against the Fire Nation. They run into the bookish Professor Zei, head of anthropology at Ba Sing Se University, who recounts his many failed attempts to find it. Luckily, it makes things a lot easier when you can fly over the desert on Appa instead of trudging through it.
Inside the library, they’re greeted by a hostile Wan Shi Tong, who tells them that humans are banned from his library. This is the same library that Admiral Zhao referenced in The Siege of the North. There, he found the physical locations of the Moon and Ocean Spirits, and as it turns out, he also torched most of the information about the Fire Nation. This understandably pissed off Big Bird.
The Gaang is able to lean on the Avatar’s street cred to get themselves in anyway, after promising to “not abuse the knowledge in your library” to wage war. It’s a lie, of course, and when Wan Shi Tong finds out later, he won’t accept Sokka’s explanations and throws their actions into a moral gray area. “You think you're the first person to believe their war was justified?” It’s a good point, and speaks to the difficulty of making moral judgments from one side of a conflict. What if it turned out that this whole time, everything we’ve learned about the war is just propaganda, and the Fire Nation are really the good guys? (Trippy, bro.) OK, well, that’s not the case, but when it comes to real-world wars, things are rarely so black-and-white.
Though Wan Shi Tong sinks his great library completely underneath the dunes, taking back his knowledge for good, Team Avatar doesn’t leave empty-handed. Through a planetarium-like device, Sokka is able to figure out the meaning of “the darkest day in Fire Nation history”: a solar eclipse, which temporarily deprives firebenders of their power. And conveniently, there’s another one coming up in a few months! A plan begins to form.
But the intelligence comes at a high price. Team Avatar leaves with two fewer travelers than when they arrived. The first is Professor Zei, who decides to stay in the sinking library, unwilling to be parted from his life’s ambition. (For a smart professor, it’s a pretty brainless idea. Unless Wan Shi Tong is running a cafeteria in there.)
The second is Appa, who gets captured and taken away by the shady, mummy-like sandbenders who’d been eyeing him earlier. Toph tries to save him, but she can barely “see” in the grainy sand, and she’s too busy (impressively) holding the library from sinking. It’s still a humbling moment of powerlessness for the boastful Toph, and the damage is done. A single tear rolls down Aang’s horrified face when he finds out. How will the Avatar cope without his oldest companion? And how will the Gaang get out of the desert without their flying bison?
See you tomorrow for Episode 11: The Desert! Share your own thoughts on this episode in the comments.
Spare observations
The Gaang ditched Appa’s saddle in The Chase. They must have gone back for it.
“You gotta work here a little longer before you qualify for vacation time.” This joke hits way harder as an adult.
“Shush, chatty monkey!”
Toph’s blindness is reliable comic fodder. “There it is! …that's what it will sound like when one of you spots it.”
“You should leave the way you came. Unless you want to become a stuffed head of anthropology.”
Each visitor to the library must donate one piece of knowledge. The owl approves of the overachieving Katara’s waterbending scroll. Not so much of Aang’s wanted poster of himself, and Sokka’s butterfly knot (it technically counts as knowledge!).
“That’s called Sokka style. Learn it!”
Friends of the White Lotus [SPOILERS]
Foreshadowing for much later in the series: “Look at these weird lion-turtle things.”
Wan Shi Tong’s library does reappear in The Legend Of Korra. Coincidentally (or not), it’s in Season 2, Episode 10 of both series.
In that epsiode of Korra, Professor Zei’s grotesque skeleton is sitting up against a bookshelf.
Appa’s side of the story will be revealed in the tear-jerking Appa’s Lost Days.