Os 15 Episódios Imperdíveis de Avatar: A Lenda de Aang, Avaliados e Classificados

“Avatar: The Last Airbender” is one of the best animated shows of all time. The Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko-created Nickelodeon series aced the macro and the micro of epic fantasy adventure to such an outstanding degree — with such care for the fundamentals of narrative structuring, world-building, visual storytelling, and character development — that it remains a cultural phenomenon two decades later, soon to get a Season 2 of its Netflix live-action adaptation.

Given how bold, propulsive, thoughtfully-written, and just plain fun the show is for the near-entirety of its three seasons, picking out highlights is an exceptionally tough task. This list goes about it by trying to hone in on the strongest front-to-back episodes — to the deeply mourned exclusion of numerous iconic moments. Really, with “Avatar,” even a top 30 would have to leave out deserving stuff.

Even though its lighthearted tone and absence of wild corkscrew turns have put it in the second tier of Book Three popularity, “The Headband” finds “Avatar” at its absolute deepest, most vivid, and most thoughtful. It’s actually all the more impressive that it packs so much insight and complexity into what is essentially a comic interlude: As the team dips their feet into life behind enemy lines, Aang (Zach Tyler Eisen) accidentally gets himself into a Fire Nation school due to a fortuitously-picked disguise.

In between charming, character-grounded bits of cartoon fun (including Sokka’s iconic “Wang Fire” alter ego), the episode makes stunningly mature points about the nature of nationalist indoctrination, the tendency of empires to falsify history, the centrality of emotional repression to fascist projects, the genuinely subversive power of music and community — and, most of all, the fact that even the people of a place like the Fire Nation are still people, its kids still kids, its popular culture ever glowing in red embers under the soot of a hundred-year dictatorship. Book Three couldn’t have been what it was without “The Headband.”

Has there ever been a more effective character-introducing episode than “The Blind Bandit?” For how much the original Team Avatar had come to feel like a perfect cellular unit by the beginning of Book Two, these 24 minutes immediately made Toph Beifong (Jessie Flower) feel indispensable, not only for her sheer earthbending prowess — beautifully displayed in some of the show’s most precisely-choreographed fight scenes ever — but for how perfectly she fit into the ensemble dynamic.

Most shows would struggle to come up with a new protagonist on a satisfying level of exuberance and multidimensionality so far into their run. But all it takes is Toph’s faux-helpless cry of “Guards, guards, help!” and her subtle under-the-table altercation with Aang during dinner to signal that this improbably savage 12-year-old is just as much of a living and breathing human as anyone in the cast — which, in turn, makes the episode’s story of her quiet insurgence against her parents’ tyranny immediately riveting. By the time she’s piling up goons in a WWE-influenced beatdown, you’re ready to follow her anywhere.

Anime and Western cartoons alike have long partaken in the tradition of the “beach episode” — a relaxed, less plot-heavy detour to seaside vacation shenanigans that allows the characters and the viewers to decompress a little. “Avatar” being “Avatar,” of course, it went about its beach episode in a wholly counterintuitive way: First, the beachgoers are the villains. Second, even while fully adhering to no-plot-allowed principle, their holiday ends up being the deepest we ever burrow into their inner lives.

“The Beach” may not put Zuko (Dante Basco), Azula (Grey DeLisle), Mai (Cricket Leigh), and Ty Lee (Olivia Hack) in their most urgent or momentous personal crises, but, with its deceptively low-stakes teen dramedy segues, it is the half-hour that truly completes the puzzle of who they are, and who they are becoming on the way to the show’s denouement. The whole episode is essentially a shining testament to the show’s ability to pepper the screen with three-dimensional humans — and that’s not even getting into the stark gorgeousness of the Gaang’s first brush with the Combustion Man.

“Avatar: The Last Airbender” consistently excelled at season finales, and “The Siege of the North,” the two-part denouement to Book One, was no exception. In a lot of ways, it was the episode that truly brought home the massiveness of “Avatar” following the relatively self-effacing nature of most of the opening season — the moment in which it became clear that, yes, this kids’ show fully intended to be an all-out, no-holds-barred war epic.

Pointing towards that conclusion: The patient, realistically drawn-out nature of the siege; the energy with which the Northern Water Tribe is explored as a setting for action and grand drama; the breathtaking use of color and lighting; the incredible foray into the Spirit World featuring the first, nightmare-inducing appearance of Koh the Face Stealer (Erik Todd Dellums). And, of course, the storytelling — which, between Yue’s (Johanna Braddy) sacrifice, Katara’s (Mae Whitman) hard-earned waterbending mastery, Zuko’s desolate solo quest, and Iroh’s (Mako) emergence as a spiritually sobering force against the fanatical bloodthirst of Admiral Zhao (Jason Isaacs), culminates as perfectly as a Book One finale possibly could.

A lot of the best “Avatar” episodes draw direct parallels between the stories of Aang and Zuko. Book Two’s “Bitter Work” finesses those parallels into the show’s most profound grappling ever with the concept of bending, and the ways in which its practice relates to space, physics, psychology, and historical context. Toph needs to get Aang to understand that earthbending, unlike airbending, is all about facing the object head-on, and can’t be practiced from a place of fluctuation, trickery, or subterfuge — an ingeniously daunting challenge for a protagonist whose story is all about avoidance of conflict.

Zuko, meanwhile, has his eyes opened by Iroh to the fact that all Four Nations have culture, wisdom, and bending artistry worth respecting and learning from — a quietly huge turning point towards his eventual redemption, and one that he initially rejects. That Aang’s conflict resolves through conclusive, satisfying comedy, while Zuko is left atop a mountain begging in tears for lightning to strike him, is a devastating encapsulation of the mastery with which “Avatar” handles its crisscrossing character journeys.

“Appa’s Lost Days” is as much a great narrative idea as it is a flex: Only this show could make Appa’s (Dee Bradley Baker) absence deeply-felt enough to merit that level of weight and curiosity; only this show could have an arch-narrative so airtight and carefully-mapped as to be intelligibly advanced through an animal’s retroactive perspective. And, naturally, only this show could make Appa’s plight so darn affecting.

Drawing as much from Ghibli and Martin Rosen as from Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar,” “Appa’s Lost Days” considers the toll of war — and of the endemic culture of cruelty, selfishness, and sadism that it engenders — on the most innocent of observers, while also honoring and expanding the vibrant personality that Appa has long been imbued with and planting crucial narrative seeds for the rest of the season. At no other point in the series’ run does the Hundred-Year War feel as dizzyingly senseless and overwhelming as during this episode’s dialogue-free stretches of Appa just trying to get by; even remembering his confused, desperate return to the empty Eastern Air Temple is enough to cue the waterworks.

“The Storm” gets all the fame for being the turning point at which “Avatar” went from a pretty charming and consistent kids’ show to a genuine TV force, and rightfully so. But just as important to the series’ graduation from solid Saturday-morning yarn to emotionally arresting adult-friendly epic was the immediate follow-up to “The Storm,” on which “Avatar” loudly broadcast its ambition to stand apart from every other show — family-oriented or otherwise — on American TV.

Shot through with mystery, suspense, and sublime uncanniness, “The Blue Spirit” invites Ghibli comparisons like many a “The Last Airbender” installment; the kooky herbalist and the titular masked figure alone are ripe for atavistic childhood fascination. But, more than anything, it calls to mind the pungent beauty of classic wuxia cinema, in which near-wordless action infused fortresses and forests with a whisper of existential intrigue. The Zuko-saves-Aang plot moves with stringent Hollywood rationality — he’s only doing what he must to advance his own interests. But, by the end, the dreamlike strangeness of it all has seeped in, and you can tell something has shifted.

We don’t always stop to consider that the whole main cast of “Avatar” could have died a futile death in the Si Wong Desert halfway through Book Two. It’s to the credit of “The Desert” that it makes such a harrowingly pointless denouement feel like a tangible possibility for 20 minutes — and that it commits to fully exploring what that threat would entail for the characters.

Simply put, no other episode pushes Aang, Katara, Sokka (Jack DeSena), and Toph to such extreme circumstances; when it comes to unearthing deep-seated psychic depths, the deadliest battle and the most efficient Azula plot have got nothing on the vast, inescapable sand bowl that the episode’s animators bring to life with “Lawrence of Arabia”-esque scary grandeur.

With Sokka and Momo (Dee Bradley Baker) out of their minds on cactus juice, Toph reduced to depressed passivity, and Aang in a state of white-hot rage that we will never see him in again, it’s left for Katara (who, along with Sokka, was designed just before the show’s pitch meeting) to guide us through “The Desert'”s phenomenally raw and gloomy survival drama. And, from holding morale together to calming Aang down in the episode’s gut-wrenching final scene, she proves once again that she’s the heart of this show.

“The Crossroads of Destiny” gets a lot of mileage out of shock value alone — the gutsy, morbid spectacle of Zuko tiptoeing to the edge of redemption and then burning it all down in a heartbreaking moral relapse. But it’s just a splendid piece of television even if you go in knowing full well that Zuko is about to do a heel-heel-turn, or never having trusted him anyway. If the whole of Book Two is carefully-threaded episodic drama at its finest, the finale is the long-implied convergence point; the greatness of the whole season reverberates through its every minute.

In the grand tradition of “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” and other dark-night-of-the-soul middle chapters, it’s an installment that relishes in the power of failure, as both a catalyst for emotional electricity and an opportunity for character revelation. The story of Azula’s takeover of the Earth Kingdom and quasi-assassination of Aang is impeccably-structured, but even more importantly, it’s deeply, deeply felt — the kind of TV episode that stuns you into silence.

Much like its immediate successor “Appa’s Lost Days,” “The Tales of Ba Sing Se” is a luxury that only “Avatar: The Last Airbender” could allow itself — an episode that essentially stops Book Two’s plot cold to take a stroll around, taking unhurried stock of who and where the characters are …. and then still goes ahead and hits you with a startling narrative development in Momo‘s chapter just before rolling credits.

The elegance of it all is to be applauded, to say nothing of how wonderful each of the six minisodes prove to be. Aang gets a delightful slapstick comedy adventure that harkens back to his Book One days of penguin sledding and elephant koi riding, rekindling his innate whimsy in a season of extreme emotional drainage. Katara and Toph finally get some quality time away from plot and survival preoccupations to develop a proper friendship. Sokka treats us to the witty rarity of haiku-based comedy; Zuko gets to be a teenager for once, to heartrending results; Momo delivers a Chaplinesque mélange of silent comedy and pathos. And then there’s Iroh’s story, to which words alone cannot do justice. No description could quite capture the feeling of hearing Mako’s voice crack during that darn song.

“The Storm” is a flashback episode, consisting near-entirely of glimpses into Aang and Zuko’s pasts, with minimal present-day framing stories about Aang and Katara sheltering from a storm and Iroh explaining the reasons behind Zuko’s temper to his crew. The “plot” needle isn’t moved forward by it in any real way. And yet, it permanently transformed “Avatar: The Last Airbender” when it arrived mid-Book One, and still remains as one of the most riveting storytelling feats in the series’ history.

While previous installments like “The Southern Air Temple” and the “Winter Solstice” two-parter had previously hinted at the level of tragic richness and maturity that the “Avatar” writers were cooking up, seeing “The Storm” actually unfold — with its dark, unsparing cuts of repressed memory placed in disarming and clarifying proximity — was just something else. Even when you already know all the information, it plays beautifully, editing for maximum thematic excavation into the twinning stories of its two tortured homesick kids and their vastly distinct but fundamentally similar struggles with shame and trauma.

“The Puppetmaster” works plenty well as a near-perfect horror short film even before you take into account the place it occupies within the show’s broader trajectory. At this point on Book Three, we’ve seen enough of the Hundred-Year War to no longer be fazed by the cruelty of the Fire Nation, and the moral intricacies of resistance have been a recurring theme of “Avatar” going all the way back to “Jet.” But nothing prepares you for bloodbending — in both its shocking brutality and its forlorn inevitability.

The most wicked part of the episode is that there’s something undeniably thrilling about watching Hama (Tress MacNeille) unlock the massive potential of waterbending; when she drains those flowers dry and pulls droplets from the air humidity, it’s like she’s answering questions that viewers didn’t realize they had. And that’s exactly what makes her final nightmarish duel with Katara such a masterwork of horror-as-tragedy, with every creaking contortion of limbs further rubbing our faces in the reality that this, this, this is what war is. Katara doesn’t just cry because violent circumstances have bent her into bloodbending; she cries because she knows that’s how Hama started.

So much happens across “Sozin’s Comet,” the epic four-parter that concludes “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” that it almost feels like cheating to put it up here as a single episode. Yet part of the finale’s greatness is exactly the fact that it flows so well as a 90-minute unit, manifesting the cumulative weight of three seasons’ worth of storytelling with relentless, cinematic intensity.

It’s a de-facto movie with its own inner rhythm and patiently incendiary pacing, culminating on a bombastic four-way action climax that weaves in irreproachable emotional conclusions for every main character, and for the story of the Hundred-Year War at large. Aang’s consultation with the Avatars before Roku, Bumi’s (André Sogliuzzo) story about taking back Omashu, Zuko and Iroh’s (Greg Baldwin) tearful reunion, Azula’s psychological meltdown, Suki’s (Jennie Kwan) surprise last-ditch commandeering of a Fire Nation airship, the monumental animation that is Aang vs. Ozai (Mark Hamill), the even better one that is Azula vs. Zuko and Katara — it’s all so perfectly written, visualized, and timed as to provide a veritable masterclass in the art of series finales.

A lot of the reputation of “Avatar” lies at the feet of Zuko, a character so phenomenally well-written that, by Book Two, a single flinch in his frown could convey headier drama than most shows manage to evoke with their entire ensembles. It stands to reason, then, that one of the absolute high points of the series would be “Zuko Alone,” a chapter wholly occupied with being a Zuko character study.

Present-day scenes visualize Zuko as the perfect Western antihero — hounded by shame and rejection as he traces the vicious circle of his trauma-ridden belief system — while brilliantly positioning a handful of Earth Kingdom petty tyrants as a proxy for the tyranny he’s unable to confront in his own nation. 

Meanwhile, flashbacks poignantly unspool his tender relationship to his mother, and hint at the dark turn of events that sent Ursa (Jen Cohn) away while trusting viewers’ intelligence enough not to spell things out. If Zuko is one of American TV’s all-time great deuteragonists, “Zuko Alone” is largely to thank for it.

What makes “The Southern Raiders” the greatest individual episode of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is the extent to which it fully commits to fleshing out a specific idea — and the way that idea expresses not just the full breadth of the series’ war story, but also the oceanic depth and development of its most underestimated character. Few shows in history have put on a savvier or more satisfying climax than “Avatar” did with “Sozin’s Comet,” but, emotionally and thematically speaking, the show peaks in that three-minute sequence of Katara confronting her mother’s killer.

The entire episode leading up to it is masterful, with a first half that stacks up the whole cast’s twitchy pre-battle emotions, followed by 10 minutes of a terrifying descent into raw, lawless, grey-hued despair. And then, when those raindrops stop mid-air, it’s all there: The tempestuous ugliness of war; the banality and futility of its bureaucracy; the misapprehension of other cultures by imperialist fanaticism; the acknowledgement of hate and violence themselves as a burden; the fact that even the cruelest oppressors are ultimately human; the fact that this doesn’t absolve them. And, above all, the fury, strength, pain, and maturity of Katara, built up over 58 episodes and finally given release — without that release channeling any tidy conclusion or moral lesson. Animated or otherwise, family-friendly or otherwise, this is television at its best.