The episode proper starts with Korra visiting Bolin and Mako's apartment over what's left of the Pro-Bending arena. They're packing up, for obvious reasons. Korra came by to say that they could stay on Air Temple island with her. But it turns out Asami invited them to live in her mansion, so they'll be doing that instead. Bolin is particularly excited to spend his time on the estate.
Oh, and Asami's here, much to Korra's annoyance. Asami invites Korra to visit the mansion. Korra's hesitant, but Bolin's Komedy routine convinces her.
Cut to a police raid of a warehouse. Inside, they find Amon fliers and some of those shock gauntlets. Lin and her second are there; he lets us know that this warehouse is owned by "Cabbage Corp."
Cut to a large building with a statue of the thrice-damned Cabbage merchant. The police drag an old guy off, while Lin tells the assembled press that Cabbage Corp is closed down. Thus prompting, "No, not my Cabbage Corp!"
Yes, the ridiculously stupid name "Cabbage Corp" and everything built around it for several episodes now, all existed for this Godawful excuse for comedy! No joke is funny enough for this level of contrivance, let alone a running gag that never funny to begin with.
Cut to police Hq. Tahno, the emo waterbender from last episode is there waiting his turn, looking dejected. Korra strikes up a conversation and says she's sorry for what Amon did. Tahno sells the idea that Amon's technique is permanent by saying that he visited the best healers in the city. But he didn't visit Master Katara, so obviously that option is still in play. Tahno asks Korra to take out Amon for him, and she silently agrees.
Cut to the Sato estate. Mako, Bolin, and Asami are in the pool when Korra arrives, announced by a butler. From the page quote, we learn that Asami never actually asked her father for permission for them to stay. Wow, who'd have thought that between Korra and Asami, it'd have been Korra who was the more considerate one?
We get a bit of Komedy from Bolin, where he shows Korra his newfound power by asking the butler to dry him off, including his Ferret, then just jumps right back into the pool. You know Bolin, that butler also brings you your food; you should be nicer to people who can do all kinds of unpleasantness to the things you eat.
Korra asks Asami what the plans are for the day, guessing stereotypically girly things like makeovers. It's interesting how Korra makes this assumption informed by her in-depth knowledge of Asami from... looking at her and Mako make out. Of course, Asami has other ideas for the days' activities. Because obviously it would be wrong for any woman to want to do things like shop and get makeovers. No, women in this show must show how unstereotypical they are by not enjoying those things*.
Cut to the Sato's private race-track, naturally used to test their Satomobiles. Korra's excited to watch the races... for some reason. Asami asks about her driving skills, but Korra says that they're zilch, unless Naga counts. So Asami offers to take her onto the track. Korra and Asami get into one car, while one of the other drivers uses another. He flashes Asami a smirk, while Asami keeps her game face on. And the race starts.
The guy quickly cuts Asami off, almost sending them into the wall until she regains control. You are so fired once the race is over. He keeps preventing them from passing for a while, but Asami is able to take him on the inside of a curve. He tries to bump her off the road, but only causes his own car to spin out before the finish line.
Having discovered that Asami is as reckless as she is, Korra is much warmer towards Asami. Korra even says that she thought Asami was "prissy," which Korra assumes is a priori offensive by tacking on "no offense." Asami naturally backs her opinion up by saying that people assume she's "daddy's helpless little girl." Um, ladies, that's not what "prissy" means; the choices aren't "headstrong" or "helpless". Asami exposits that her father had her take self-defense classes since she was little. And what exactly does fighting have to do with your interest in racing? Anyway, Korra considers this smart.
Let that be a lesson to you girls: if you can't fight, you're not worth anything. So says our Avatar.*
Cut to Korra in the bathroom. After washing her hands, she looks at what I can only assume is Asami's powder puffer. She considers it, picks it up, and rams it onto her face, creating a cloud of smoke that forces her out of the bathroom.
In the hall, Korra hears Hiroshi talking about something going according to plan. Naturally this couldn't possibly be anything innocent, so she creeps to the door to listen in. Hiroshi talks about the Cabbage Corp investigation buying them time, and they'll "strike" at the end of the week. This causes Korra to rush out of the mansion, delivering lame excuses on her way out the door.
Cut to Korra meeting with Tenzin and Lin on a random rooftop. Korra clearly thinks that Hiroshi planted the evidence to hurt Cabbage Corp and is working with the Equalists. Lin wants to know what her evidence is, but Korra failed law at bending school; she only has what she heard. Even so, Lin considers that Hiroshi has a motive. Tenzin explains that Sato's wife was killed during a break-in of his mansion by the Agni Kais, so he may have been harboring anti-bending sentiment. Thus, Asami uses her vast fortune to become Batman, avenger of the nights in Republic City, dealing justice to benders who abuse their power!
Come on, writers, it's the twenties; somebody has to be Batman!
Wait a second. You clearly see that the Equalists are getting tech like shock gauntlets and airships from somewhere. But you don't immediately look at one of the wealthiest, most powerful industrialists in the city, who has the perfect Equalist motive? Worst Police Chief Ever. Yes, I know they were interviewing Sato earlier, but that was just because he was in the building. And sure, the Cabbage Corp thing made for a nice distraction, but they still should have been looking into it.
Cut to the next day, where Tenzin, Lin, and Korra enter the Sato mansion. Mako intercepts Korra to ask what's going on, so Korra presents her "evidence" and says that Hiroshi might be an Equalist. Asami storms out, followed quickly by Mako.
Before Lin and Tenzin can ask questions, Asami storms in to say that them being non-benders doesn't make them not Equalists. Korra presents her "evidence," for which Hiroshi has an explanation. He's planning to "strike" the market now that Cabbage Corp is no longer a competitor. Tenzin asks to search their factories and warehouses; Asami is about to say something unkind, but Hiroshi stops her and allows the search. Which naturally means they won't find anything.
And they don't; the radio piles on some more anti-Beifong rhetoric while the police search in vein. Asami shows up to let them know that, since they didn't find anything, they can bugger off. Lin is annoyed by this, and she certainly has every right to be. I mean, it's not like Lin falsely accused Asami's father of supplying arms to terrorists or something.
Yeah, I can see why Lin is the chief of police in this city...
Mako asks Korra to talk, where he asks if she's satisfied. Korra is not, because... she overheard half of a conversation. Mako then asks if she's really that jealous of his relationship with Asami. Congratulations, Mako; it took you all of one sentence to completely surrender the moral high ground. I'm impressed. After Korra gets pissed, Mako delivers an ultimatum: drop it or their friendship ends. Well, she's not going to drop it, so he goes off with his hot, rich, prissy girl.
As the police are wrapping things up, someone surreptitiously slips them a note. Korra doesn't see who it is, but reads it to Tenzin and Lin; it's an invitation to a meeting at midnight. Well that's not suspicious, but instead of them getting caught in a trap, the three of them find a dockworker. He tells them that Hiroshi's working with the Equalists, that he made the gloves, and he's even working on something better. Also, he has a hidden factory under his mansion.
Cut to the trio on a police airship headed for the Sato mansion. Tenzin reminds Lin that Tarrlok wants her gone, and if she's wrong about this, she will be. Lin understands but considers her duty to the city to be greater than the threat of losing her job.
Cut to Mako, Bolin, and Asumi eating and talking. Police burst in, and Lin explains that they're here to find the secret factory. Asami is naturally annoyed by this, but she does tell them that her father is in his workshop outside. They go there to find it empty. And since the police secured the area, nobody can explain him not being there. So Lin dramatically exposes her feet and whips out Toph Vision.
Wait. First, how the hell are these people metalbenders if they don't have Toph Vision? Didn't we have an episode that established that this was a prerequisite for metalbending? You know, seeing the earth within the metal?* Second and more importantly... why do you have shoes at all, if they block your Toph Vision? I mean, Lin wouldn't have been taken by surprise at the arena just last episode if she were always using her Toph Vision. That's the whole point of having omnidirectional vision, isn't it?
Anyway, Lin says that there's a tunnel underneath the workshop. Asami denies it, so Lin just metalbends away a sheet of metal. Bolin actually asks Asami if her father knows the tunnel exists. Korra is sympathetic to Asami, who wonders how this is happening. Everyone but Bolin, Asami, and Mako go in. And one officer stays behind to watch them.
They all ride a cart down to a location, then creep in cautiously. They enter a large room where posters of Amon's masked face are hanging from the ceiling. Lining the walls are several large robotic things that look like a cross between Big Daddy and a Fire Nation tank. Tenzin springs the trap by asking where Hiroshi is.
A metal wall rises to cover the exit. The sound of this slamming shut reaches Asami and the rest. Bolin wants to go down there, but the officer doesn't let him. Mako then, very obviously up to something, acts like he's about to sneeze, and firebreathes at him. Then Bolin earthbends him to the ground and pins him down, tying him up with is own metal cable. Mako wants Asami to stay behind, so that he can discover the truth for her. Chances of Asami staying behind are... 0.
Back with Lin and the others, Lin tries to metalbend the wall, but Hiroshi says that won't work. Because it's platinum, as are their mecha. And platinum is too pure to metalblend. So Lin just bends it anyway for no adequately explained reason, then proclaims herself the "GREATEST EARTHBENDER IN THE WORLD!" Sorry that didn't happen; unlike her mother, Lin is a supporting character. She doesn't get authorial fiat, and thus has to work within actual rules.
OK, I'm just going to ignore how that doesn't make sense and ask the more practical question: where in the hell did he get that much platinum? The door alone probably represents a substantial percentage of all platinum mined annually today. And we have far more uses for the stuff than the Avatar-verse does. Sato would have had to spend his entire fortune just to build these few mecha and that door. Unless we're supposed to believe that platinum is commonly available in the Avatar-verse.
Hey writers, if you wanted to allow technology to work against benders, maybe you shouldn't have invented anti-modern-technology bending in the first place. That way, you wouldn't have to come up with something this stupid.
Anyway, Korra is pissed and asks Hiroshi to come out of his mecha, which Hiroshi points out is really stupid. So he'll stay where he has his "equal" advantage. Lin deduces quickly that the convenient source they found was Hiroshi's plant. No, really? So this was all a trap to capture/kill these people and... then what? Do you think the police would just forget that they found a secret tunnel in your mansion? Or that their chief and one of the council members went missing in your mansion? What exactly was the endgame here? If you had done nothing, they wouldn't have been on to you at all.
So a fight starts. Metalbenders deploy cables to try to tie some of the mecha up. Lin jumps onto one, and users her cables like knives to cut through the glass into the cockpit. One of them comes for Korra, who's firebending is ineffective. Luckily Tenzin is on hand to airbend the multi-ton machine across the room. Interesting how in this series, where the Avatar can't airbend, airbending is always presented as near God-level powers. While last series, Aang's airbending, which he always had, was powerful in some cases, but nothing particularly stood out (except maybe the volcano thing).
The metalbenders quickly find that their backpack cable mechanisms can't pull down multi-ton mecha. Yet a quick blast of air can; go figure. The mecha shocks the metalbenders through the cables, bringing them down. Lin is slammed across the room, leaving Tenzin and Korra to duke it out. Korra is quickly taken out, but Tenzin saves her from an ostensibly fatal fall. Then he goes down. Hiroshi has his men start loading people into their trucks as a present for Amon.
Cut to the Equalists loading bodies as Bolin and Mako find their way there. The pair run in to try to save Korra, Tenzin, and Lin. You know, the named characters. But they're spotted by Hiroshi. After Bolin brings good the Komedy, Mako says that sponsoring them was all just a cover, which Hiroshi says is true. Though for him, the hard part was letting his daughter hang out with a firebender.
Said daughter now interrupts him. Wow, what a surprise. Hiroshi explains that benders were the reason her mother was killed, but now they have the chance to rid the world of all benders. Then he takes off a shock glove and offers it to her. She slowly walks forward, cautiously takes it, puts it on, then professes her love for him.
And shocks the shit out of him. Yeah, she's not Zuko, and you're damn sure not Azula.
Asami then makes short work of Amon's lieutenant. The mecha apparently noticed this and move to attack, so they run for it.
Cut to the police airship. While Asami stares wistfully at her home as they fly away, Lin laments that her men are off to Amon. I guess you should have given them names. Lin says that she's quitting the force, but she's not giving up. Once she heals up, she's going to find her men, without the dictates of the law. So... you're going to take the law into your own hands.
Meanwhile Mako apologizes for not believing Korra. Why are you apologizing for that? Her claim was completely baseless, and she believed in it beyond any rational thought. Korra says that it was hard for her to believe too, which is total BS. All it took for her to believe it was a half-heared conversation. Anyway, Korra tells them that they'll all be welcome on Air Temple island. Even Asami. And she sweetly tells Mako that Asami will need him. So he goes over to her and she glomps onto him, crying.
Acts of Asami
This is our first episode that isn't really focused on Korra. She's still very clearly the viewpoint character, but the focus of the episode is on Asami.
And really, it's about time.
By this point in the series, Asami has been little more than a background figure. She gave Korra&Ko money, and she's Korra's competition. But in terms of personality, all you can say is that she's nice and cultured. She's been nothing as a character, less even than Bolin.
Now, we get to learn more about her. Granted, not a whole lot; we learn that she likes racing cars and can fight. We never learn anything more than that, like why she like cars. We can speculate why she appreciates being able to fight, considering what happened to her mother, but it never goes much deeper than what she does. We do also learn that she's willing to ignore her father's desires if they are in conflict with her morality. Hence, her turning against him at the end.
I think the biggest weakness with this episode is just how rushed it feels. It's like the writers went, "oh crap, we forgot to give Asami character before her big decision!" So they spewed some quick character out there, and then gave her this choice. We never get to let her character sink in before she is confronted by this choice. And that's unfortunate.
This is probably less due to the writer's failures and more to the format. Which is also the fault of the writers, but I'll explain that in a bit. With only 12 episodes in the series, they had tight constraints to work within. And this Asami moment was really just squeezed down too much. We never got the chance to really climb into her head, so we don't really feel the weight of the choice she has to make at the end. It's there, but it's not nearly as strong as it could have been.
What this needed to work was, well, what The Crossroads of Destiny had: characters we knew and understood very well. There, we knew Zuko; he'd been with us for 40 episodes (give or take). We've seen the highest of the highs and lowest of the lows. We were in Zuko's head by that point. We've watched him suffer and struggle, and then he came to the crossroads of his destiny. And two people who cared about him (OK, one person) try to convince him of what to do.
Now, setting that all that up would have taken a lot longer. But just having an episode or two earlier that would have given us greater insight into who Asami was would have helped. That worthless shipping episode was focused entirely on Korra; maybe if we had more of Asami in that episode, things could have worked better here. Like maybe we drop the worthless Bolin/Korra shipping angle in favor of Asami asking Korra for advice with Mako. Maybe she's concerned that telling him about some of her wilder hobbies like racing would turn him away. She could even invite Korra to her private track, then use that to bring up the idea.
That would have been a chance for Korra to gain some respect for Asami, to still be jealous, and thus she would have to deal with feeling jealous of someone she's now starting to respect. And at the same time, we see Asami being a bit insecure, which is very different from how she's been shown up until now.
And that's why it's the writer's fault in the end. They wasted an entire episode on worthless crap when they knew that they were tight on time.
Giving Asami character in that episode would have allowed the writers to give Hiroshi more seduction time. His talk was angry and very impersonal. He should have talked about how much he saw her hurting after their mother was killed. How much it hurt him to see her that way, how powerless he felt. How he had to get her trained to defend herself just to survive. And maybe something about how the Triad was never brought to justice; that would be a bit more compelling motivation for joining the Equalists. He should also have talked about how families like theirs were being impacted every day. His speech needed to really walk her towards that conclusion, then have her pull back and say no.
That's not to say that what we got was bad. It was functional and even good in some places. But it didn't "ring the bell," so to speak. It's no The Crossroads of Destiny certainly.
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