Thursday, July 10, 2008

Avatar: The Last Airbender --- Update

[Warning: Minor spoilage follows for anyone who hasn't seen anything past The Day of Black Sun]

Praises be! Let all Avatar: The Last Airbender fans rejoice!

Seems like Nickelodeon, prior to releasing the final Book 3 DVD on July 29, 2008, will be showing the last several episodes on TV beginning July 14, 2008!

The schedule begins with with The Western Air Temple, where Aang and those that escaped the tragic events of The Day of Black Sun find refuge in a hidden temple complex. Zuko follows them there, and tries to convince Team Avatar that he's now on their side.

Tuesday, July 15, has The Firebending Masters, where both Zuko and Aang have to seek out the origins of firebending from the first masters, the dragons. But how can they do so when all the dragons are now extinct?

Wednesday, July 16, has a one hour special showing both parts of The Boiling Rock. This two-part story and the previous two episodes have actually been available on the internet for some time, so chances are you've already seen them. Up to this point, I will definitely say that The Boiling Rock is the best story in Book 3. There's so much character development in this story that it puts the entire Book 2 to shame. Zuko, Sokka and Suki were awesome as usual. But Mai puts them all to shame.

Maaaaaiiiiiiiiii!

If you weren't a Mai fan before this, YOU WILL BE.

The succeeding episodes have not been seen by anyone yet.

Thursday, July 17, shows The Southern Raiders, where we discover how the Fire Nation wore down and defeated the Southern Water Tribe. Here, Katara confronts the man who killed her mother. Will there be closure? Good thing this is Katara we're talking about. If I encountered the person who killed my mother, there's a hundred different ways I'd use waterbending to make him suffer. I am such a vengeful bastard.

Friday, July 18, is the calm before the storm. With The Ember Island Players, the gang sees a play about them and all their previous adventures. They don't like what they see, as inevitably, the story and portrayals are revealed to be far from accurate. The main purpose of this episode of course, is to summarize the whole series before the big finale. This has been done before in many other series, but I doubt it's ever been done this creatively.

Finally, on Saturday, July 19, we get all 4 episodes of Sozin's Comet as a 2-hour TV movie. Awesome stuff. Everything comes to a hopefully satisfying end, leaving Avatar fans with fond memories and a faint dread of how M. Night Shyamalan will violate the series in his live action movie trilogy.

Expect that as I see each new episode, I'll be blogging about it right here. It's Avatar. I won't be able to stop myself. Hehehe.