Avatar S3E5: "The Beach"
A moment of reflection for our villains | Grade: A
Thanks for tuning in to my fourty-fifth of 61 daily reviews of Avatar: The Last Airbender! Yesterday, we watched S3E4: Sokka’s Master.
For the first time in the series, Team Avatar has been relegated to the B-plot. The Beach primarily follows Zuko, Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee as they take a forced vacation to Ember Island, a seaside resort that the royal siblings used to visit when they were children. Though Ozai owns his own mansion on the beach, the four teens are staying with Lo and Li, much to their chagrin. The two old crones tell them, somewhat incongruously, “it can help you understand yourselves and each other…. Ember Island reveals the true you.”
As promised, it’s an episode of fun and character development for our antagonists. The friends hit the beach dressed in swimsuits, where Ty Lee in her comparatively skimpier outfit gets a lot of male attention. Zuko is sitting in the shade with his girlfriend Mai, but he can’t seem to do anything right. Azula drags them all into a pickup game of volleyball, where she hysterically brings her typical Type A self to absolutely crush the opposition.
Their performance impresses nearby dude-bros Chan and Ruon-Jian, who invite them to a party that night. Somewhat improbably, they don’t recognize Zuko and Azula, who is about to tell them but changes her mind. “For once,” she explains later, “I just wanted to see how people would treat us if they didn't know who we were.”
Meanwhile, Team Avatar are in their own swimsuits as they relax at a secluded lake. But Aang gets himself spotted by two Fire Nation lookouts, who send a messenger hawk to warn the Firelord that the Avatar is alive. But the hawk is intercepted by Zuko’s scary, tattooed assassin, who burns the evidence and tracks down the Gaang for himself.
He makes a dramatic first impression with his unique power: he can shoot beams of energy from his forehead, detonating a devastating explosion on impact. In a tense chase sequence, Aang lures him into a field of rock columns, and barely managing to evade the blasts before he escapes with the rest of the Gaang on Appa. As they leave, Katara warns ominously, “I get the feeling he knows who we are.”
Back on Ember Island, Zuko, Azula, Mai and Ty Lee are at the party, where they arrive exactly on time. It’s incredible to watch the four of them attempt to navigate the most normal setting they’ve ever been, where Azula and Zuko especially seem very out of place. It can sometimes be easy to forget that the siblings are just teenagers, but the irony of these super-powered characters struggling to grasp social norms really highlights the extent to which they’ve been denied a typical childhood.
The Beach uses the same joke over and over — Azula bringing her sociopathic tendencies and drive to dominate to mundane interactions — and it’s hilarious every time, offering some of the best one-liners in the series (see the spare observations section for some highlights). The Fire Nation pricess really shines in this episode, which reveals a side of her we’ve never seen; though she acts supremely confident, she also reveals her very human desire to be liked, not just feared. Seeing Ty Lee surrounded by boys once again, Azula makes the other girl cry by telling her they only like her because she’s “so easy.” But for the first time ever, she shows remorse and admits:
I didn't mean what I said. Look, maybe I just said it because I was a little... jealous.
Is this the beginning of Azula’s own arc, like that of her brother? Only time will tell.
Zuko also shows his insecurity and maladjustment as he jealously frets over Mai, ultimately starting a fight with another boy who committed the grave error of speaking to her. She breaks up with Zuko, and he Chan kicks him out of the party. He walks to a familiar place: Ozai’s beach house. The house, which is boarded up and covered in cobwebs, represents and reminds Zuko of his happy childhood. Both are long since abandoned. Azula finds him there, and brings him back to the beach, where he symbolically burns mementos and family portraits from the house.
Around the fire, Azula, Zuko, Mai, and Ty Lee, tense from the events of the night, begin to turn on each other. The resulting dialogue is a stirring, John Hughes-esque masterclass that adds a new depth and humanity to our antagonists. Ty Lee drops her bubbly, joyful persona and admits that she felt worthless, without individuality, as a child.
Do you have any idea what my home life was like? Growing up with six sisters who look exactly like me? It was like I didn't even have my own name.
The typically glum, emotionless Mai shows another side of herself, too, when Azula provokes her out of her shell. “You want me to express myself? LEAVE ME ALONE!” she yells.
Zuko finally lets out all the rage and confusion that’s been building up inside him since he betrayed Iroh. Clearly, he’s having regrets over his decision, but the damage is done, and it’s tearing him apart. At least his show of vulnerability is enough to move Mai, and the two reconcile.
For so long I thought that if my dad accepted me, I'd be happy. I'm back home now, my dad talks to me. Ha! He even thinks I'm a hero. I should be happy now, but I'm not. I'm angrier than ever and I don't know why!
The others pressure him to explain who he’s angry at and finally, he snaps, punctuating his words with a massive pillar of fire.
I'm angry at myself! … Because I'm not sure I know the difference between right and wrong anymore.
Even Azula, who smirks and laughs as her companions lay bare their emotions, eventually admits that she was hurt by her own mother’s rejection. We saw in Zuko Alone how Ursa favored her brother, saying of the already-devious Azula, “what is wrong with that child?” But the princess acknowledges, cheerfully, that she is a “monster,” indicating she’s fully aware of her own tyrannical, manipulative, murderous tactics. She does not regret that part. But who knows would have happened if Azula’s mother had given her more attention and affirmation. Instead she was forced to seek that from her genocidal father, whom she worshiped, and who used Azula the way she learned to use others.
See you tomorrow for Episode 6: The Avatar and the Firelord! Share your own thoughts on this episode in the comments.
Spare observations
The boat that takes the teens to Ember Island is pulled by a manatee whale.
This episode is a parody of the common trope of fan service beach episodes in anime… or at least, I think it’s a parody. Apparently the first set of swimsuit designs were redrawn after they were deemed “too sexy” by Nickelodeon.
[Zuko offers Mai ice cream, but drops it on her lap.] “Thanks, this is really… refreshing.”
Azula is a graceful winner at volleyball. “Yes! We defeated you for all time! You will never rise from the ashes of your shame and humiliation!”
“You don't know who we are, do you?” “Don't you know who we are? We're Chan and Ruon-Jian.”
Chan is the son of Admiral Chan, who was mentioned in The Awakening. He’s one of the few characters with a last name (or he gave his son his own name).
The tattoo on the forehead of Zuko’s hired assassin is the same one worn by Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. In a deleted scene, he kills the two lookouts who spied Aang.
“That's a sharp outfit, Chan. Careful. You could puncture the hull of an empire-class Fire Nation battleship, leaving thousands to drown at sea. Because, it's so sharp.”
“For some reason, when I meet boys, they act as if I'm going to do something horrible to them.” “But you probably would do something horrible to them.”
“If you want a boy to like you, just look at him and smile a lot and laugh at everything he says even if it's not funny.” “Well, that sounds really shallow and stupid… let’s try it.”
“Your arms look so strong.” “Yeah.”
Azula and Chan kiss, but she comes on a little strong. “You and I will be the strongest couple in the entire world! We will dominate the Earth!” “Uhh… I gotta go.” (The line is delivered so perfectly by Californian Erik Thomas von Detten.)
“This much negative energy is bad for your skin. You’ll totally break out.”
“My own mother thought I was a monster. She was right, of course, but it still hurt.”
Friends of the White Lotus [SPOILERS]
Mai and Zuko’s reconciliation in this episode is real, and they get back together, but they break up again when Zuko abandons his home on the day of the invasion. Though they’re back together at the end of the series, there’s no confirmation either way whether they eventually got married or whether Mai is the mother of Zuko’s daughter in The Legend of Korra, Izumi.
Zuko will return to Ozai’s beach house after The Day of Black Sun to hide out from his father, knowing that he’ll never come there.
This episode is truly the beginning of the lead-up to Azula’s downfall. Seeing the tension between her and her soldiers/friends, and her acknowledgment of her own insecurities, in hindsight it’s only a matter of time before something snaps.