Avatardy

I caught the last four episodes of season two of "The Legend of Korra" over the weekend. The finale to Book Two: Spirit was pretty indicative of the series to date: crazed, disjointed, rushed, yet flavored with ridiculous amounts of awesome.

Book Two has covered Korra's journey to discover the spiritual side of the Avatar and the Avatar's role as the bridge between the human (material) world and the spirit world. It's also been an insane branching of side plots, some of which are ridiculous and all tie together only under the most contrived of circumstances.

This season's writing has been reflective of "Book One: Air" in weird jumps in story, a lack of narrative flow, and contrived as well as random character personality shifts to accommodate plot elements that are largely unnecessary to the main story.

It's also explored the world of Avatar (The Last Airbender, not the ridiculous James Cameron world) in unexpected and awesome ways. We've seen the origins of the Avatar and how the Avatar came into being. We've had a chance to see the pre-Avatar world in all its delightful weirdness, making me wonder what it was like before events took place allowing spirits to spill into the world.

We've also gotten to see Korra follow her own unique take on being the Avatar. In the first "Book", I admit I was a fan of the character of Korra. She was headstrong and took no shit from anyone. She was willing to throw down and face threats. She lacked any real sense of spirituality, but that was okay. By the end of "Book One", she was a full-realized Avatar and had her shit together.

Book Two seemed to erase all of that and take us to an immature, ridiculous Korra who seemed almost a cardboard cutout for half of the season and never really seemed to command the narrative at any point. She was always overshadowed by the villain as well as Tenzin and his kids. Hell, even the side characters of Mako and Bolin seemed to have more of their crap together and overshadow her narrative with their own ridiculous subplots.

The only character who seemed more sidelined in this "Book" was the character of Asami, who never really seemed to accomplish anything in the story.

Hell, Tenzin's kids got some of the more interesting stories and those just came from absolutely nowhere.

It remains an interesting series, but I really wish they'd take the crack pipes away from the writing team for a while. Of course, given the last finale, I have no idea if there will be more of the series. I guess time will tell.