SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of the live-action “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” now streaming on Netflix.
Netflix’s live-action “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is back for Season 2, following Aang’s (Gordon Cormier) journey to learn earthbending from the young, blind mentor Toph Beifong (Miyako), just as in the second season of the original Nickelodeon show. Like the first series, Aang, Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley) travel to the walled city of Ba Sing Se to find an earthbending teacher. They’re pursued by Azula (Elizabeth Yu), princess of the Fire Nation, and her friends Mai (Thalia Tran) and Ty Lee (Momona Tamada). Meanwhile, exiled Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu) and his uncle Iroh (Paul Sun-Hyung) are on the run and try to blend into the quieter life of the Earth Kingdom.
While there, Aang and his friends discover a massive conspiracy within Ba Sing Se’s government that ignores the war going on outside the city walls. They also learn some critical intel from discovering the desert library of Wan Shi Tong that could defeat the Fire Nation once and for all: The upcoming solar eclipse will prevent all firebending and weaken their heated enemies. As they escape the library, Aang’s sky bison Appa is stolen, which nearly tears the friend group apart.
In the end, Aang’s crew recovers Appa and finds the missing Earth King, who’s unaware of his government’s cover-up of the war. However, Azula intercepts the group and duels Aang and Katara with Zuko, who nearly had a change of heart after opening up to Katara. In the climactic ending, Azula wields lightning and strikes Aang in the chest, which incapacitates him while he’s in the avatar state. Katara, Toph and Sokka escape with Aang and the Earth King, and Katara is able to heal Aang of his nearly fatal wound. They fly away from Ba Sing Se aboard Appa, as Aang faces a long road to recovery and must still learn how to firebend.
Speaking with Variety, showrunner Christine Boylan and executive producer Jabbar Raisani discuss the changes they made from the Nickelodeon show, such as cutting sandbending, adding in Katara’s Painted Lady arc from Season 3 and cutting the action-packed Nickelodeon Season 2 episode, “The Drill.”
Christine Boylan: For the writing decision, I got everybody in the room on the first day, and we knew we wanted to deal with the refugee story on some level. It’s such a huge thematic part of the animated series. Everyone in the writers’ room and on the crew is a huge fan. I tried to remind everybody that we are doing an adaptation of a myth and a legend. That means it’s not exactly the same, and it’s never going to be one-to-one. We started to look at scenes and stories that are maybe not done as in-depth in the animation that we could accomplish here and get more emotional, get into the action in a way that maybe an animator can’t and what are some stories that are better done in animation that we wouldn’t want to touch because they’re perfect as it is.
We started out by talking about real-life refugee stuff, like people’s families and backstories. I said to the writers, “If you feel comfortable, tell me about your parents, grandparents, ancestors, when they went from place to place, why they did, how they did, who helped them, what was the hardship and what was the joy in those situations? We got amazing family stories, and we looked at all three seasons and started putting things on the board. We kept Season 3 in mind, even though we didn’t know if we were going to get to shoot Season 2. We definitely didn’t think we were going to shoot Season 3 yet, but we kept all three in mind, no matter what. Then we looked at the character arcs and their growth. Growth is not a straight line. You go up, down, backwards, forward again, you lurch in fits and starts, especially if you’re young. How can we make these growth arcs as interesting and surprising as possible, even to people who know the show?
Jabbar Raisani: The story that we wanted to tell was pretty clear from the season’s scripts, but at a certain point there’s also a little bit of push and pull with production. Because we wanted to physically build so many of these sets, it’s like, “Hey, you can only build X number of sets before you’re gonna not be able to build anymore.” So part of it comes down to — like, the drill tanks.
Raisani: We really wanted to do it. The plan is still presented in the world, but it’s one of those things where at the end of the day it came down to we just can’t fit this in. It was in until really late stage, and then we finally had to lift it out.
Boylan: That’s an amazing creative exercise. We took a whole episode about the drill and the way that we did it was a little bit different and then boiled it down to this pitch that Azula gives. I said to Elizabeth, “This is a whole episode. You’re pitching a real strategy. Azula never pitches anything that isn’t absolutely executable.” We know because we executed, so that was great for her. She had all of that to draw on.
Raisani: We try to do that anytime that we lose something. We try as much as we can to just put nods to the animated series, so fans know we wanted it in there too. We’re not just taking things out, like, “Oh, we don’t need this.” At a certain point, there’s only so much that we can fit.
Boylan: You want to know the secret about “kill your darlings”? It’s “cannibalize your darlings.” When someone comes up with a cool bit in an episode and you’re not going to do the episode anymore, you take that cool bit and you put it somewhere deep in Season 3. So, there’s a lot of stuff that we put into that episode that starts with Elizabeth’s speech and a whole bunch of stuff with Azula, Mai and Ty Lee. That friendship is very important to all of us. Female friendship on screen is very important, whether you are heroes or villains. A lot of the friendship stuff we pulled out of that episode and put into other episodes. We may have lost that bit, but our episode length got longer, so we managed to kind of cannibalize all the bits we love the most. I think the only thing that’s gone is the actual drill. Everything else is still there, whether it landed in Season 2 or Season 3. We found our favorite bits, jokes, all that stuff and pulled everything we could.
Boylan: One of the first things I pitched was real locations, real sets, let’s get out in the world, I definitely want to do a Fire Nation succession story and “Painted Lady” makes much more sense in Season 2 because Katara is kind of done teaching Aang. So, what’s Katara doing? It was really important to me. One of her major drives is this need for justice. It’s something that I relate to really personally, and a lot of the writers did as well. We thought, “Let’s do this kind of like — a movie that some of them had never seen before — ‘Batman Returns.'” There are people in this city that need her help. We are not going to be traveling as much as the animated series can travel, so let’s show the disparity between the lower, middle and upper rings. She’s going to notice who is not getting taken care of before anybody else notices that. She’s used to doing stuff right out in the open, so for her to even try and hide herself — I’m really into shadow stories.
Shadows are not necessarily a negative part of our ourselves. A shadow is just another part of ourselves that maybe we’re not ready to show other people yet. And shadow integration stories; Zuko has that story with the Blue Spirit. Aang has that story. He is Aang, an air nomad, and he is also the avatar. He has to integrate all of those parts of himself over three seasons, so each of them gets sort of a mini arc. Toph has to integrate being a Beifong with being this rough, tough earthbender who is the blind bandit. Everyone’s got a shadow side. It’s just that Katara is a little more overt because she gets to put on makeup and dress up. So let’s put it here where she can do the most good and she didn’t have a natural arc, so we played that arc and wove it in with everybody else’s.
Raisani: When you have to do two seasons at the same time, one of the benefits is you can see how it can slot into Season 2 and the space that makes for Season 3. Because we knew where Season 3 was going to go, that allowed more space in Season 2.
Boylan: Katara’s got a big arc in Season 3.
Raisani: A part of it comes down to what we can fit in the season, and we just had to make certain choices. When we look at something like sandbending, there are probably some opportunities we could have integrated it into the story, but then we have a whole other kind of bending we have to R&D and execute. It starts to open up the spend down this path. If we’re trying to tell the most distilled version of the story that we can afford, which we wanted to be really, really powerful, we have to concentrate on those stories that are really at the heart and core of the overall story we’re going to tell.
Boylan: It comes back to cannibalizing it, though, because once we figured out we couldn’t do that, we went back to the character of Ba Sing Se. How does this inform the character of the city? These are all earthbenders. They expand the walls of the city as people join. The city and rings need to get bigger. They’ve taken over the land around it. Who’s to say what was there before Ba Sing Se expanded? We look to history a lot on this show. I like to think of it as a historical fantasy. So we looked at history and how cities would expand and make their walls higher. So not being able to do sandbending meant that we could tell more of the story of Ba Sing Se and make it more of a character.
Boylan: Part of the creativity is you write to fit what you’ve got, no matter what. And then the game you play with yourself is how can we be as creative as possible within those boundaries?
Raisani: If you asked, “Would you do one or two more episodes?” Yeah, definitely, to tell a little bit more story. Let’s do some of the things that we couldn’t fit in and had a hard time cutting. We hated cutting stuff, like Bosco [the Earth King’s bear]. There is this painting of Bosco and we had a long series of jokes, and at the end of the day we’re like, “We can’t even put in the jokes.” The painting is great, because fans know that we are fans and we wanted to have that connection and hang on this painting for way too long. It’s a nice nod to the folks that feel passionate about those moments. It’s hard. Unless you can do it all and do it right, it’s weird to do a middle ground. We even did, “Is it a playpus bear, is it this bear?” It was too much to not have the actual bear, and you needed Bosco to do that whole run.
Boylan: Bosco was in there for a long time. There are a lot of creatures that are on the [cutting room] floor, a lot of joke runs, a lot of serious stuff. We try to keep the right balance.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
