This review contains full spoilers for Avatar: Seven Havens Season 1, Episodes 1-3, which debut October 9 on Paramount+.
The experience of watching the first new Avatar series in 12 years — Avatar Aang movie and Netflix’s live-action adaptation aside — is an overwhelming one. While there have been numerous (pretty excellent) comic book tie-ins and extensions released in the intervening decade plus, insuring that the world created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko has never fully gone away, they’ve all felt like mere footsteps from the stellar runs of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra — reinterpretations of information we already had on hand instead of something really truly new.
Avatar: Seven Havens, on the other hand, is really truly new. Set 225 years after the events of Legend of Korra in a post-apocalyptic landscape where all that remains of humanity is based in the Seven Havens of the title, the show evolves the animation style and setting in a way that’s closer to Miyazaki or recent surreal hits like Scavengers Reign or Common Side Effects rather than what we might expect from an Avatar series.
But even with the different animation, there’s something both alien and familiar about watching Seven Havens. On one hand, you’ve got a kid Avatar in Pavi (Saheli Khan) — more on that in a second — just like Aang in the original series. But unlike Aang, who had a very clear path forward (stop the Fire Lord, save the world), Pavi has been living on the outskirts with only bugs, rocks, and her cat-monkey (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, the voice of Appa and Momo in the original series) as friends, with no clear path to saving a world that maybe doesn’t want to be saved.
The sly humor that DiMartino and Konietzko have woven into previous series is back, and an early sequence in the premiere, “On The Horizon,” with Jae (Major Curda) surfing his way through the Haven of Ellora is an utter delight. But if Korra took the franchise in darker, more adult directions, Seven Havens is both a reflection of the world we live in today and of the anger some fans felt toward the character of Korra. The plot involves something Korra did two centuries earlier that broke the world, leading to the survivors hating and fearing the Avatar; it’s also clear in the first three episodes that this story isn’t done, and it also isn’t what the world thinks. It’s just speculation, but it very much feels like DiMartino and Konietzko are saying, “Oh, you hate Korra so much? Well, here’s why you’re wrong, and we’ll lay it out for you over the course of 26 episodes.”
That aspect could be a little (well, a lot) navel-gazing, but there’s the outward focus the creators are bringing to the story as well, diving harshly into both the divided nature of our own real world and the coming climate apocalypse. Animation is never going to have the pace necessary to really reflect the world outside our window — it usually takes at least two years for an animated season to make it from script to screen, unless you’re South Park — but thanks to an Avatar classic (a play at a festival performed by children), we discover why the world hates the monster Korra and how the Seven Havens were formed together but now stand far apart. In the third episode, “The Order,” the airbender Karthik (Akshay Khanna) — now promoted to Commander of the Bending Brigade in Ellora — suggests they reach out to the other Havens as fewer and fewer benders are being born every year. He’s flatly turned down: Ellora can stand for itself.
This isolationist stance has been bubbling over in our real world for a long time now, and it’s hard not to watch scenes like that without thinking about Brexit or America’s increasing push to close its borders. Similarly, the threats in the first few episodes — other than a menacing red diamond; more on that in a second — are all climate based. A tornado is the “villain” of the premiere, and a massive green storm nearly destroys Ellora in Episode 2, “Into The Storm.” Again, it’s not one to one, but with our own climate disasters increasing year by year, it’s clear that DiMartino and Konietzko are setting up Seven Havens as both a commentary and a warning, while also delivering a fun mythology-building Avatar series.
Speaking of mythology-building, the first two episodes essentially function like one pilot, and are surprisingly sparse on action and plot… laudably so, as the series in those initial 40ish minutes sits in the silences and lets us feel what the characters are feeling instead of thrill at Cool Bending Fights, though there are plenty of those too. The two plot tracks follow Pavi as she rides her cat-monkey, trying to hide while a festival celebrating the rise of the Seven Havens takes over Ellora; and Jae as he works with his bending team from the town’s Bending Brigade to help fix a crumbling bridge.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/avatar-seven-havens-episodes-1-3-recap-and-review
