User Reviews

Perfect episode to give you a quick refresher before the big finale. Also the writers are on top of their game with the comedy they twist into it. It's a definitely a better retelling then the live action movie.

Lets talk writing for a moment. Shakespeare (who, historians of the future will find, may not have actually written his plays) used the "play within a play" concept. The ancient Greeks used it. And if Plato is to be believed, there was a far more ancient version of Greece which, for the sake of argument, may have used the device too. So it is old. And it is tricky, to do it right. And yet here we are in one of the closing episodes of -- if you take this series at face value -- a children's cartoon show, and, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the head writer gives himself a "time out" to have his characters discover that a local playwright has done a play on them, and they trot off to see it. In what quickly became my favourite episode of what may be the best narrative of the last 100 years (better than Matrix, better than Star Wars, better than Citizen Kane) the characters become entranced with the way each of them is presented on stage, and start to argue among themselves about whether the characterization is fair or not. For example TOF discovers her character is played by a buff male body builder and she loves it. Ang discovers that his character is played by a girl (remember that Mary Martin played Peter Pan on Broadway!) and is devastated. However the fact that the viewer can relate to this massively entertaining episode is a tribute to the writing team behind this astonishing show. A show based on metaphysics of an order of magnitude seldom seen or understood in the mundane world. A show where the writers had some 50 or so opportunities to prove that they could not sustain the quality of the early scripts, and not only sustained them, but surpassed them. Astonishing. Just astonishing.

Boy, I did NOT appreciate this episode at all as a kid.

I did a review in the past on this site for this episode that wasn't well received, and a lot of people weren't happy (around 46-48 people found it unhelpful), and they were right for doing so. I'm honestly glad they did looking back, and if you are reading this re-review, I thank you very much.

After this rewatch, its quite a funny episode, and seeing the characters reacting to it was funny, especially Sokka, Suki & Toph. Don't have much else to say about the episode, and I do love the meta esque jokes in this episode too. It is a pretty fun parody too.

Also, I forgot about Toph talking about Iroh to Zuko was in this episode, and I do love that moment too.

My final rating will be 9/10, and the main reason for it not been 10/10 is due to the Katara actress's crying been too annoying, I get why its like that, but still.

This episode is pretty funny, but also kinda boring and confusing. Was Aang and Katara's relationship completely one-sided before?

Either way, the only points that really save this episode is that there was a nice interaction between Toph and Zuko, and some development of Aang's pressure to succeed, as well as the humor. Slightly above average.

I love "Avatar: The Last Airbender series," however, this one episode just felt like fluff. Most of it could be just cut off and the show would continue uninterrupted. Not to mention, it had created a big plot hole; how did the actors know so much about the Avatar team? They seemed to know a lot about what had happened behind closed doors, in private, and even though they didn't get everything right it was almost scary to see how much they knew. So, who was behind the play and how did he/she get all of that information? Big plot hole.

How does the writer behind the play know all of those small details? Yeah they werent right about everything, but alot of those events happened only with the gang (like them finding aang in the iceberg). Is the writer all knowing, has he been spying on them this entire time? No, its just lazy writing.

This also opens up the question of how this play would even get made in the fire nation. They show the gang to the audience, humanise them, show their exact objective and why that is. And still the audience claps when they get beat in the end, like what? The fire nation arent the good guys, and here is a play being made in the fire nation, shown to a fire nation audience who have all been taught through propaganda that they are the good guys, but still feel no different when seeing its effects being shown through a play. Do they all lack any media literacy?

I know this is meant to be a recap episode for the finale, but this is just lazy writing.