Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2 Fails Its Most Emotional Storyline

The following post contains spoilers for Season 2 of "Avatar: The Last Airbender."

Netflix's "Avatar: The Last Airbender" is a bizarre show. The first season is essentially a greatest-hits collection that isn't sure whether it wants to age up the story to make it gritty and violent or keep it family-friendly and goofy. Season 2, however, is a big improvement over the first, with a more focused narrative — even if the show's insistence on including every single side character and meme from the original cartoon hurts the pacing. The show finally finds a balance of tones by downplaying the silliness and going harder into the darkness and grittiness.

Just like the animated series' "Book Two: Earth," this is a darker season where the stakes feel bigger and more personal. It's a season that actually puts Iroh to the task for his past as a war criminal responsible for countless atrocities. It's a season that explores the Beifong family's war profiteering. And, of course, it's the season that includes the most emotionally devastating storyline in the whole series — Appa's kidnapping. This was a story that helped "Avatar: The Last Airbender" change TV forever, and unfortunately, the Netflix adaptation fails to do it justice.

In the new season of the live-action remake, Appa's kidnapping happens in the last couple of episodes of the season, and it serves as the final straw that pushes Aang to temporarily break up Team Avatar. It's still emotional and affects Aang's emotional stability and character arc, but it comes across as too little, too late. By this point, there are already plenty of other stories and character dynamics that lead to this breaking point, so Appa's disappearance doesn't feel monumental, but an afterthought.

In the original cartoon, Appa is kidnapped halfway through Season 2 (during one of the show's most underrated episodes) while the team is exploring the Earth Kingdom. Without Appa as a means of transportation, the team has to traverse dangerous territory, almost dying in the desert, and then is forced to walk through a pass besieged by a giant serpent. They are at a disadvantage the entire season, and without Appa, Aang is in tremendous emotional distress. This affects his Earthbending training, his relationship with his friends, and his self-confidence. It drives every element of Season 2 of "The Last Airbender."

If Aang losing his best friend wasn't enough, we then get the most soul-crushing episode in the series — "Appa's Lost Days," which shows his side of the story. The episode received widespread praise and was even awarded a Genesis Award by the Humane Society of the United States for its portrayal of animal abuse. This storyline pushed Aang to his limits, forcing him to grow up quicker (as if the responsibilities of the Avatar weren't enough), and is essential to the larger story of both "Book Two: Earth" and the entire "The Last Airbender" narrative.

So, to push this story element near the end of the season robs it of much of its impact. Worse yet, we barely see Appa before he disappears, because even though he makes it to Ba Sing Se this time, he is grounded and forbidden from flying through the city. The live-action show has no reason for Appa to be involved in the story until it's time to take him away at the end, so by the time it happens, even the sight of baby Appa meeting Aang for the first time feels like too little, too late.