Zuko and Iroh are out begging on the streets. The episode even starts off with a great laugh. Of course, these plot elements are good and dandy for later episodes, but can’t I enjoy this episode on its own? The answer is, for most part, yes. The girl is, of course, Toph, who we’ll meet in about two episodes. How could this be a source of emotional turmoil, or conflict of any sort? If we’re to take what we’re told in the episode seriously (“Time is an illusion, and so is death.”), then this girl will play an important part in Aang’s life. He sees a girl he’s never met or seen before in his life. Of course, Aang gets the strangest vision, being the Avatar and all. These are sources of emotional turmoil for the characters which will only later be granted some sort of catharsis. For instance, Katara sees a vision of her mother, who we know is dead.
What this precisely means for the characters won’t be explained or explored until later, but the seed is planted in this episode. The latter point may be the more important of the two, because they setup certain plot elements that will be paid off much later in clever ways, sometimes emotionally.įor example, we’re told near the end that the swamp has a weird habit of giving people visions of those dear to them in their past. I think DiMartino and Konietzko knew this, so they were smart enough to make episodes like “The Swamp”: 1) funny and entertaining as Hell and 2) filled with numerous plot points and foreshadowing that make it indispensable from the overall story arc. Heh, heh.) Not every episode has to be extraordinary, but it does have to be serviceable to the story, the characters, and the world they live in. For the sake of this review, we’ll just replace “scene” with “episode.” (I’ll also pretend that Avatar has no bad episodes, which most people do anyway. It’s like Howard Hawks’ definition of a good movie: “Three good scenes no bad scenes.” You can apply that same principle to Avatar: the Last Airbender, especially since, unlike most television shows, it has a single overall story. It’s just very basic and functional, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. And yet, it’s nowhere near being a bad episode.
Not in a way that detracts from the overall quality-which is pretty high-but in a way that, after you’re done watching it, you realize that “The Swamp” just doesn’t have that much going on for it to be outstanding and particularly memorable. “The Swamp” is one of those episodes that, like “The Waterbending Scroll,” simply feels inconsequential.
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