‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Season 2 review: Netflix’s pale imitation

TV review

In “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” the acclaimed animated adventure series that ran for three seasons from 2005 to 2008 on Nickelodeon, one of the most memorably chilling scenes came when the brave young Aang crossed over into the spirit world to meet a terrifying being: Koh the Face Stealer. A menacing, marvelously designed and malevolent trickster, Koh’s body is like an enormous centipede; his face can suddenly distort into the visage of anyone, including those you love deeply. That morphing is a ploy to manipulate those who encounter him into showing even just a hint of emotion as, if you slip up, your face will become the next he steals.

“Avatar: The Last Airbender,” the live-action Netflix reimagining now entering its second season, is the embodiment of Koh in television form. It steals the faces of the animated series, impersonating them in an attempt to manipulate you into feeling some of the emotion you did upon first beholding them.

However, once you begin to look closer, you can’t unsee how this show is merely that: an impersonation. It’s one that, like Koh, may trick you in brief moments, but only because it recalls something you already have an emotional connection with. Even as the story, about a child and his friends who must save their world from a fascist power hellbent on destroying them, remains relevant and resonant, the way it’s shallowly mimicked here never does it justice. Though the show’s narrative bones remain strong, the face it bears is only all the more garish because of how familiar yet empty it remains.

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This season centers on Aang (Gordon Cormier), Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley) journeying to the Earth Kingdom after battling alongside the Northern Water Tribe while Fire Nation outcasts Zuko (Dallas Liu) and Iroh (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) hide out. Unfortunately, it speeds through some of the best bits of the original series without slowing down to appreciate what made them work. Key moments of development for the characters, as they deal with loss, pain and eventual self-discovery, are rearranged in ways that prove increasingly scattered, obligatory box-checking rather than truly bold storytelling.

Much of this is likely due to the show only having seven episodes to cover what the animated series did in 20, but that isn’t an excuse for how horrendous the dialogue can be. Even as the original show was written for children, it never talked down or held their hands through the more complicated ideas it grappled with. In this live-action take, we get so many painfully stilted scenes of characters explaining things we’ve just witnessed or laying out things that are already clear if you’re just watching. This is unfortunately the Netflix special, as it feels designed for people only half-paying attention while punishing those who are following it closely.

Where the original show was playful and poetic and even quite profound, this one strains to recapture that same spark. Even when it comes close to doing so, like when a familiar bit of the original’s score rises up or a key line of dialogue is uttered with reverence, you can’t shake the feeling that you’re just feeling emotion that this show hasn’t remotely come close to earning.

Put another way that fans will understand, this adaptation has more in common with the production put on by The Ember Island Players in the original series’ final season. That humorously terrible play, which attempted to chronicle the heroes’ journey as they watched in the audience, proved revealing as a funhouse mirror image of what they had accomplished. Only this adaptation is not darkly silly and is mostly just sad.

The only silver lining to it all is that it may get viewers, both new and old, to return to the original series instead of sitting through this pale imitation. Because even when it effectively mimics the past, all this season succeeds at doing is stealing your time and yet more faces for it to trick you with in the future.

‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Season 2
All seven episodes of the second season premiere June 25 on Netflix.

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