Why Book Three is the Best Season of Korra Yet
As I've mentioned in a previous post, (click for link) I grew weary of The Legend of Korra during Book Two. I was mostly watching the show because I wanted to learn the origin story of the Avatar; the writing that season (and many of the new characters) began to enter that gray area between boredom and irritation. The jokes, as I mentioned in said previous post, were either weak and juvenile (Varrick) or just plain creepy (Desna and Eska).
Speaking of my hatred for the Ice Twins, as I was pre-planning this post I realized that part of the reason for my dislike hatred of them was that they were totally unimportant from the main plot, particularly Desna. Eska was only there to provide Bolin with one of his two love interests in that season and to creep us the hell out. Desna's only purpose was to get slightly injured trying to open the spirit portal, prompting a slight change of heart at the end of the season that led to them letting Mako and Bolin go, which Mako could have gotten them out of anyway if he'd used some of Zuko's firebending moves from the first season of The Last Airbender.
But sadly I'm not here to rant some more about Book Two. Instead I'm going to offer my own opinions on why Book Three has made me more excited about Korra than ever before. WARNING: Spoilers ahead!
Book Three is not only better than Book Two, but for me it's even better than Book One, in part because as I'll discuss in-depth shortly, it borrows a lot of attention-grabbing, Lost-style mystery elements from Book One while providing more of a continuity between its preceding season than Book Two did (although, admittedly, Nickelodeon suddenly asking the creators for more episodes created that problem, not DiMartino and Konietzko themselves). It's also gotten several degrees darker and more mature, something I'll also talk about in a few paragraphs.
Book One got a lot of viewers because we were immediately presented with a puzzle to solve: Amon. The creepy mask, the creepy voice-acting, (good creepy, not Desna and Eska creepy.) (Sorry) and his terrifying power all grabbed our attention, making us giddy with anticipation for each new episode. In much of the same way, Book Three has done this by presenting us with a couple mysteries: Who are Zaheer and his crew, what are their goals, and how does Korra fit into their plans? The first two have been at least mostly answered, although the last question won't be completely answered until the finale next weekend. (hmm, wonder if that's intentional?)
Book Two did basically none of that. Unalaaq's motives were revealed before the season finale. They were a little more mysterious during the first two episodes, but right at the end of the premiere we saw he was evil when he occupied the Southern Water Tribe (although admittedly we didn't yet foresee that it was just a means to an end). And we found out he was working with Vaatu by the 9th episode out of the 14-episode season. The only new information about his plans after that was in the episode directly before the finale when he revealed he was going to become a Dark Avatar. The Book Two finale served not as a big reveal as Book One's was or Book Three's will be, but an hour-long battle. (Not that that didn't work well for the second half of the Last Airbender finale.)
Book Three is also much darker than any season of either series has been so far. Whether this is due to Nickelodeon's influence or that of DiMartino and Konietzko, the show seems to have realized that a lot of the fans of Korra are mostly old fans of The Last Airbender, meaning most of them are now around my age (eighteen). We don't need the reserved violence of kiddie kung fu movies were the bad guys and good guys just beat each other up until the other wimps out, at which point they're mercifully spared. This season has already had a surprising amount of dark, more realistic depictions of violence.
--Spoilers begin now--
One of my friends from high school suggested that this is also a possible reason why Korra was pulled from the TV schedule. It would certainly explain why they chose not to air the second planned episode for the last day they did TV releases, which was "The Stakeout," in which Zaheer remorselessly tosses Aiwei into the Fog of Lost Souls, dooming him to an eternity reliving his own worst memories.
The next episode after that, "Long Live the Queen," featured the first time a death was depicted on-screen (unless you count Combustion Man, although he just vanished in an explosion and the only reason we knew he died was because we saw his metal arm falling, detached from his body, without any blood on it, either). It was a pretty violent killing, too. We even saw the Earth Queen's eyes go bloodshot from suffocation in the most creepy extreme close-up shot in the whole franchise.
And in the most recent episode, "The Ultimatum," we not only saw Ming Hua threaten to cut Opal's neck with an ice blade, but Kai get shot out of the sky by P'Li (my question being who was flying the Red Lotus' airship?), Kya and Bumi nearly fall to their deaths twice, and towards the end, we saw a bruised, battered, and weakened Tenzin getting ruthlessly beat up by Zaheer, Ghazan, and Ming Hua, his fate kinda up in the air, although I doubt the writers will actually kill off Tenzin.
There were dark moments in The Last Airbender, don't get me wrong. Sokka and Toph nearly died in the same fashion as Kya and Bumi, Zuko threatened to kill Aang with his swords in "The Blue Spirit," (although whether he would have gone through with it is up to your interpretation) the aforementioned death of Combustion Man, the Air Nomad Genocide and Monk Gyatso's skeleton in the third freaking episode of the whole series, Katara nearly killing her mother's killer, Zuko's maiming by Ozai, and of course who can forget Jet, who nearly wiped out an entire village (and almost led us to believe he had) and then died rather violently towards the end of Book Two: Earth, even though he was still alive the last time he was shown onscreen and his death was only implied indirectly by Toph? And in The Legend of Korra, as my same friend pointed out, Tarrlock committed fratricide-suicide during the finale, and Unalaaq was killed at the end of Book Two...kinda.
But none of those deaths or violence (Ozai aside) was as vicious, cruel, and for the most part, shown directly onscreen, as what's happened in Book Three so far, which backs up my friend's theory that it's an unstated reason why Nickelodeon decided not to put it on their TV network anymore. The Legend of Korra and the whole Avatar franchise, for better or for worse, has outgrown a kid's television network. It's grown up just as we did, in a way that's somewhat reminiscent of how the Harry Potter books got more and more adult in nature as the series progressed. And that, in the end, is why I'm more excited than ever for new episodes of Korra. Because I seriously cannot figure out what comes next. It's surpassed all my expectations of a "children's television program," which were frankly lowered during Book Two. I could talk more about how the humor is notably better now that it's back to being more Bolin-centered or how the writers have truly mastered the art of cliffhanger-bending, as I'm going to start calling it, but it honestly comes down to the fact that much as the world of Avatar has entered a new age, the franchise has as well. And I think it's clearly for the better.