Mark Watches ‘Avatar’: S01E05 – The King of Omashu

In the fifth episode of the first season of Avatar, Katara and Sokka indulge Aang in a side journey to an Earth Kingdom city to ride mail chutes. REALLY. When the trio get caught, the kingdom’s strange leader makes Aang complete three deadly challenges–but what for? If you’re intrigued, then it’s time for Mark to watch Avatar.

I’m so happy to see an episode like “The King of Omashu” so early into the season, as the writers give us a great example of how the premise and medium of this show can be used for humor.

A note before I begin, since I wanted to acknowledge this before I continued on for the rest of the review, but I think a lot of this episode utilized a metric shit-ton of ableist slurs and ideas, most especially that CRAZY PEOPLE ARE VIOLENT!!!1!1! and CRAZY PEOPLE WILL HURT YOU!!!111!1! I do understand that the reveal at the end kind of erases the idea that this was meant to be an attack on people with mental illnesses, since Bumi was always just a strange and silly person, but it was a tad distracting to hear/see so much of this sort of stuff in a kid’s show.

I don’t know what my expectations are when it comes to popular media, as I know things don’t exist in a vacuum, so I don’t know if holding this show accountable really even matters anymore. I mean…it’s over? They can’t go back and fix things. I think that just saying, “Hey, this isn’t cool,” might mean that people don’t do it in the future, or that people won’t make these sort of equivocations when they’re writing their next story.

I commented recently on my Tumblra (WHICH YOU SHOULD ALL ADD ME ON TO READ A STREAM OF SILLY AND RAGE IF YOU’D LIKE) that I think we can all figure these things out for ourselves, that we should approach various media forms with a critical eye, but that ultimately, we have to decide for ourselves where to draw the line. I don’t like prescriptive activism that claims you cannot like x if you are an activist for y, because that leads us to a really weird, slippery slope of awful that I’d rather avoid. This show hasn’t done anything to make me dislike it as a whole, but I just wanted to say something before we moved on to what otherwise makes this one fantastically entertaining episode of television.

As I said in the opening, this episode features a tonal shift more completely away from the serious and adventurous storytelling we’ve seen so far, and it’s done rather flawlessly. I was impressed that it did not feel jarring at all to the story at large, and then we’re given this huge new piece to the greater mythology at the end. (I actually like that meta-parallel, that we had to make it through Bumi’s games in order to learn about Aang’s destiny.) It’s a chance to show that Aang is still a kid and that it’s perfectly acceptable for him to have fun.

Well, there’s a bit of a qualifier to that. It’s acceptable for him to have fun as long as he’s not destroying half of a village in the process. I was initially worried that this wouldn’t be addressed. I mean, he destroyed the cabbage seller’s food!!! THAT MADE ME SAD. Also, I really like cabbage, so I’m probably just predisposed to hate cabbage bigotry.

I know this is going to sound really ridiculous. I will acknowledge it upfront. Sometimes, I find it comical how easy it is for me to completely miss the obvious, to be tricked by narrative sleights of hand, especially ones as PAINFULLY OBVIOUS AS THE ONE HERE in “The King of Omashu.” Honestly, I have Google open and I’m looking at photos of Bumi from Aang’s flashback, contrasted with the king of Omashu…..

HOW THE FUCK DID I NOT IMMEDIATELY FIGURE THIS OUT????? As soon as Aang guessed the name of the king, I actually hung my head in shame. IT WAS RIGHT THERE THE WHOLE TIME. Seriously HOW. And I think that’s actually an interesting thing about my brain. If there’s a God and he/she/they made me this way, they chose a real fun way to go about it. They gave me utter domination and brilliance over certain things and then they just stopped. That point where they stopped? The ability to figure out plots. Despite that I can point out tropes and narrative devices quite easily, somehow I can’t guess plots. Did you know that M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village GENUINELY SURPRISED ME? Did you know that I am actually embarrassed to admit that? I actually pains me to tell the truth, but I am here to share my pain with all of you.

But let’s really just talk about what a good part of this episode is about: having fun. I think that the overall message of “The King of Omashu” is that you can be serious, but that it’s fine to take breaks to enjoy things that are silly and absurd. The two are not mutually exclusive at all! That is an entirely relevant message to myself, for the record, since sometimes I lose sight of having fun when I allow things to get too serious. I wasn’t exactly sure where Aang was going when we arrived in this specific earth Kingdom, but from the start, he seemed to be having a good time. The disguise scene will probably be one of my favorites once the series ends, adding a fantastic bit of silliness to what is, admittedly, a journey to the North Pole to learn Waterbending to then learn Earthbending to then learning Firebending to then destroying the Fire Nation. Or getting them to calm down? IDK GUYS. But if you think of it that way, there is a LOT for Aang to go through before he even can fight the Fire Nation in a proper battle. And this journey is going to be lengthy and difficult, and probably heartbreaking too.

I’m reading The Book Thief right now over on Mark Reads and I feel it’s the same thing happening here: I am going to appreciate the happy, silly moments, because I know AWFUL SHIT IS ON THE WAY. How awful? Of course, I am never prepared, but for me, it’s something I just do naturally. It doesn’t work for everyone, and I get that, but I appreciate the moments of calm or joy or ecstasy that I get because historically, they are few and far between for me.

That’s not what Aang is doing here, by the way, and I don’t want to project all over his character. It’s just nice to see that here in the episode, you know?

As the action moves inside the palace/castle/whatever this thing is, the trio captured by the guards after crashing into Cabbage Man, this episode immediately takes another turn for the weird: the king of Omashu does not punish them for what they’ve done. He invites them to a feast. A feast. And then, the greatest line so far in the entire series:

King: So tell me, young bald one. Where are you from?

Aang: I’m from…Kangaroo Island.

King: Kangaroo Island, eh? I hear that place is really hoppin’……

I LAUGHED SO HARD I CHOKED. I don’t care, that was an AMAZING JOKE full of BRILLIANT PUNNERY.

What follows after this is interesting because it became clear that the King had alternate plans for the trio, specifically Aang. After determining that he’s the actual Avatar, he sets forth a plan to have Aang complete three tasks in order to leave, sticking them all in a dungeon. Well, the nicest dungeon of all time, but a dungeon nonetheless. (Sidenote #1: So Aang cannot Earthbend and Firebend yet? Why can he Waterbend already though?) (Sidenote #2: I couldn’t help that my brain went straight to The Goblet of Fire. HARRY DID YA PUT YA NAME IN THA GOBLET OF FIYA?!?!?!?) To make matters more difficult

But even with the dangerous task of saving his crystal-encased friends, or facing the terrifying challenges ahead of him, Aang’s journey in “The King of Omashu” never forgets the humor of it all. That first “task” is GREAT. There was a part of me that hoped that that was going to end up the ACTUAL first task, just because that would have been so in-tune with Bumi. But that doesn’t make what the three tasks are any less great than they end up being. The first task, admittedly, is not all that funny, but it’s a great chance to force Aang to think out of the box, to imagine the possibilities that are not obvious. (That’s kind of a neat message, isn’t it?) Aang suffers at first, but he manages to do just what Bumi intended, getting the key to the king in time.

The second task…oh my god. At first, of course, it seems that merely getting the king’s flop-eared bunny (appropriately named Flopsy) involves fighting a ferocious monster but, yet again, there’s an angle of hilarity to it all: Flopsy is actually the monster itself. (Please, I don’t care how many times it’s posted in the comments, but when Flopsy spills over the side, belly to the sky….that is one of the greatest things ever and I want a GIF of it. Now.)

The final task isn’t so funny, but that’s because it’s the end reveal that makes it so. I mentioned that the specific medium that Avatar: The Last Airbender is made in allows the writers to be so much more creative than anything else, so the battle between the king and Aang is a fantastic chance to see what other interesting ways all of this bending can actually do. Even though we’ve seen the Earthbending practiced by the warriors of Kyoshi, here’s a chance to see how someone from the same nation does it completely differently. The King is just as creative as Aang, and actually more so for the majority of this little fight. It’s also here that I got the sense that the King suddenly became very serious about what he was doing. This was not just a battle but a legitimate test for him, for Aang. And I don’t mean that as a complaint that this seemed so obvious, because it’s not. It’s a slight shift in the direction of the tasks and it completely works.

This is what makes me love the end of this so much. The naming thing at the end did remind me a bit of Rumpelstiltskin but whatever. The important thing is that Bumi tested Aang and saw that his friend (strangely un-aged, and I’m glad he pointed this out) still possess the same wonder and imagination that made them friends so long ago. He tells him half of what he already knows, that he’ll need to learn Earthbending and Firebending. But then he shares something completely new: He needs to defeat the Fire Lord Ozai in order to bring harmony back to the nations. Which, of course, brings a new puzzle piece to my mind:

WHO THE HELL IS LORD OZAI?

THOUGHTS

• ROCK CANDY. Seriously, Bumi is the MASTER TROLL.
• “Appa is a ten-ton flying bison. I’m sure he would figure something out.”
• Aang is a vegetarian? omg my ~soul mate~
• “They have buildings here that don’t melt!”
• “But for now, the guards will show you to your chamber.” “My liege, do you mean the good chamber or the bad chamber?” “The newly refurbished chamber.” “Wait, um…which one are we talking about?” “The one that used to be the bad chamber, until the recent refurbishing, that is. Of course, we’ve been calling it the new chamber, but we really should number them. Uhhh, take them to the refurbished chamber that was once bad!” BRILLIANCE.
• “You can’t keep us here, let us leave!” “Lettuce leaf???!!!!” Seriously, MORE PUNS ARE NEEDED AT ALL TIMES.