11.01
"Torture chamber?" No, I meant Tourist cha...mber. See, totally different!
Anyone else notice how besides Zaheer, almost all of the Avatar villains have had family drama taking over their plot at some point or another? Zuko wanted to appease his father. Azula wanted to kill Zuko for her father. Their father wanted to conquer the world because of his grandfather. Amon started the Equalists because of his father. Unalaq was a bad father (and the whole evil uncle thing). And now, we have the deal between Kuvira and her surrogate mother Suyin. Yeah, it’s a stretch, but she’s going to be her mother-in-law anyway. Throughout it all, I feel like this family drama serves as an easy way to give your villain conflict. If you want your villain to be “deep” or something, give them angst between their dad/mom/brother/all of the above. It works, occasionally.
This formula gets abused in this episode, where all the reason we get for Kuvira and Junior becoming evil is because it would mean escaping their mommy’s shadow. We get all the explanation from a short flashback Suyin exposits after talking about how Kuvira was just like a daughter to her. It makes that Tarrlok flashback from a few seasons ago look more detailed by comparison. There, you get multiple flashbacks slowly explaining why Amon wanted revenge on Republic City. Here, you get little more than “Kuvira was a good kid, but then she left home and became a dictator. The End!” Show scenes where the horrors of an anarchic country harden her spirit until any empathy she has left runs dry. Give her personal scenes where she tries to explain all of the re-education camps. Hell, explain her romance with Junior. If Suyin was like a mother to her, and Junior was her mother’s son, wouldn’t that old Westermarck Effect apply or is she just into that kind of thing?
Though I think the show is trying to focus on her as Korra’s shadow than any of that. Like she left home to become an aggressive beacon for the world, so Kuvira has to leave home to become an aggressive beacon for the world. I’m reminded of that scene where Korra threatened to kill a judge in order to free her dad from imprisonment. Then you would see all of these complaints throughout Book 2 that Korra was too prone to acting before understanding, or too self-centered, or nothing like what a proper Avatar would do. I believe that Kuvira represents the writers taking those concerns and seeing how they would work if Korra embraced all of those traits with pride. She’s a realization of the Dark Korra from a few episodes ago, showing all of her vices and none of the virtues she’s gained from the past two seasons.
There’s also the issue with how Korra tries to co-exist with spirits, Kuvira tries to utilize them as weaponry. She doesn’t even try to manipulate the spirits personally. She just takes a spirit root and makes Varrick turn it into a Yamato Cannon. That’s what I like about Kuvira. She doesn’t have some convoluted plan to become a giant monster and take Republic City with her own hands. She just looks at the magic in the world and decides to turn it into a giant spirit gun. Of course, she’s crazy and has enough of a big ego that she can’t see what’s probably a double agent maneuver from Zhu Li. Maybe she is insane enough to pull off some of the incoherent schemes of her predecessors, like trying to kill the moon or becoming the Phoenix King. But at the very least, Kuvira probably won’t try to fuse with Vaatu and fight Korra in yet another giant monster battle, right?
But seriously, don’t turn your villain into some giant spirit monster, and then your hero needs help from a preteen Jesus girl to save the day.
With all of the Zaofu siege drama out of the way; let’s look at Asami’s visit to Hiroshi’s prison. It’s small yet charming, where Hiroshi looks like he’s brushed aside his hatred of benders to try and make peace with his daughter. This is probably one of the more understated parts of the season, and it feels more relatable for that. As one family crumbles, another reunites. Sure, he came off like that during his first appearance, so this might be foreshadowing for him breaking out and becoming Kuvira’s next tech genius now that Varrick’s been camped. And there was that scene in the Book 4 trailer of him in an aviator’s outfit. Speaking of, I’m sure Suyin’s plan to infiltrate Kuvira’s base will go absolutely swimmingly.