Avatar S2E11: The Desert
A desperate test of the team’s fortitude | Grade: A-
Thanks for tuning in to my thirty-first of 61 daily reviews of Avatar: The Last Airbender! More than halfway done now. Yesterday, we watched S2E10: The Library.
Things are looking dire for Team Avatar. They’re trapped in the middle of the Si Wong desert, with no Appa to fly them out. They’ve exhausted their supply of food, and are almost out of water, too. Toph can barely see in the sand. Sokka is hallucinating and can’t think straight. And Aang is feeling too bitter, vengeful, and nihilistic to be much help.
The Desert is an episode where not much actually happens. But Katara quietly shines as she fights to keep the Gaang together and keep everyone moving. She’s the only one taking responsibility for getting out of there while all the other kids flail around aimlessly. In the desert, inaction is death. Since her own mother died, Katara has been forced into acting in a motherly role, so it’s a job she’s all too familiar with.
The limits of Aang’s kindness and pacifism are deeply tested under the strain of his grief. He starts out by picking a fight with Toph, who he blames for losing Appa. “You never liked Appa! You wanted him gone.” Then he abandons the group to go look for any trace of the missing bison. In his turmoil, it’s the only way Aang can relieve his feelings of powerlessness. But he’s an emotional short fuse, primed to lash out.
I did all I could! What's anyone else doing?! What are you doing?!
Later, when a buzzard wasp captures Momo, he kills it with a vindictive strike even after his lemur is already freed. The malice in the young Avatar’s eyes is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in him before. But it’s not hard to understand why Aang is so deeply affected by Appa’s disappearance. Not only is the sky bison his only friend and companion, but also his only remaining direct link to his own past and culture. Without Appa, Aang must be feeling the same solitude and emptiness that he felt when he discovered the extermination of his people in The Southern Air Temple.
Of course, I would be remiss not to spend a minute on Sokka’s mushroom trip. It’s one of the best gags Avatar would ever do. They first toyed with a delirious Sokka in The Blue Spirit, and here they just nailed it. Kids, of course, won’t understand the subtext here. But is the moral of the bit that drugs are bad? Or… that drugs are fun?
At the same time, we follow Zuko and Iroh, who are on the move once more. But they have some new adversaries on their trail. They’re accosted by Colonel Mongke and his Rough Rhinos, who we saw in Avatar Day. The put up as lame a fight here as in that episode, and the uncle-and-nephew duo easily scatter them and escape. Then, in the run-down desert oasis town, they’re spotted by Xin Fu and Master Yu, who have been tracking Toph since The Blind Bandit.
But they’re able to sneak away thanks to a mysterious old man who runs a flower shop in town. He and Iroh recognize each other with a few cryptic words and a game of Pai Sho. Iroh reveals that “Pai Sho is more than just a game.” It’s also an ancient ritual for the Order of the White Lotus, an international secret society in which Iroh holds the rank of Grand Master. Through his White Lotus affiliations, Iroh is able to secure them two passports to the great capital of Ba Sing Se, where the pair can blend in as just two more refugees. Can they find a new life there?
They’re not the only ones with business in Ba Sing Se. When Team Avatar finally encounters the sandbenders, whose design seems inspired by the tribes of the Sahara and Arabian deserts, Toph recognizes the honorable chief’s son as the man who stole Appa. As a wrathful Aang obliterates their sand-sailers, the thief reveals “I traded him! To some merchants! He's probably in Ba Sing Se by now.”
Sokka leads everyone to run away from the Avatar’s uncontrollable storm. Everyone except Katara. The shot of her sadly standing behind Aang is incredibly haunting. Without any words, you can feel her and Aang’s pain so viscerally. She knows what she needs to do, because she’s done it before. In a shot that perfectly mirrors The Southern Air Temple, she grabs him by the arm and pulls the sobbing boy into an enveloping hug while everything fades to white.
Due to its lack of plot, The Desert isn’t the most memorable episode — besides Sokka’s hilarious cactus juice trip, which has become one of the most enduring memes of the entire series. So upon rewatching it, I was surprised and stricken by the raw emotional heft of this episode, which doesn’t need to rely on monologues or exposition. And the animators use the striking contrast of the setting to create a number of visually stunning compositions. It’s another powerful entry in Avatar’s incredible Season 2 hot streak.
See you tomorrow for Episode 12: The Serpent’s Pass! Share your own thoughts on this episode in the comments.
Spare observations
“Hmm... old friends that don't want to attack me…”
Toph bumps into Sokka. “Can’t you watch where you’re…” “No!” “Right, sorry.”
“It'll quench ya! Nothing's quenchier. IT’S THE Q U E N C H I E S T!”
“It's a giant mushroom. Maybe it’s friendly!… Friendly mushroom! Mushy giant friend!”
Friends of the White Lotus [SPOILERS]
When Aang blows his bison whistle, Appa hears that.
In Appa’s Lost Days, we see how the sand-sailer got buried under the dunes during Appa’s bison-napping.