3! And because the season's only been running for
three weeks, having a State of the Show-type of
conversation feels decidedly weird—but here we
are, so I suppose it's time to discuss everything
we've seen thus far.
At this point in Book 2, we were entering
the "Beginnings" two-parter, which would turn
out to be the season's only legitimately good pair
of episodes. And many viewers pretty firmly
believed that Korra had taken a severe dip in
quality, both in terms of narrative and in terms of
animation, and that there was very little the show
could do to recover. In contrast, at this point in
Book 1 we had just finished "And the Winner Is..."
and "The Aftermath," episode that escalated the
plot and then dealt with that escalation. In other
words, by the time we had diagnosed Book 2 as
beyond saving, Book 1 was just getting cooking.
Book 3 is somewhere in between, as it exists
somewhere in between Books 1 and 2 in terms of
quality. There's no clear sense of what the second
half of Book 3 will be about—presumably Zaheer
and his gang about to step up their game now that
they've determined where Korra is, and I suspect
the Earth Queen will return in some capacity—but
at least it's a more coherent and entertaining set
of episodes than what Book 2 offered at this point.
But it also comes down to expectations. While
Book 2 was a mess, it was a quasi-ambitious mess
that the writers hadn't properly planned out and
didn't want to commit to...or in the other words,
the exact opposite of Book 1, which was grandly
ambitious and paid off those ambitions. Book 3
has dialed all that back. It's good, and it's
entertaining, but a good bit of me misses that
ambition. I'm hoping that things will shift in the
back half of as we uncover Zaheer's plans. I want
to know about his apparently "righteous" path,
and what it has to do with the Avatar.
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