Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender Only Underscores the Importance of Filler Episodes

Despite what internet comments would have you believe, 1:1 remakes aren't the end-all, be-all of adaptations. Some of the most interesting and successful adaptations are those that take big risks and add some changes that make for new experiences when bringing beloved stories to a new medium, like Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, The Last of Us, and the One Piece live-action show. Netflix's latest live-action remake, Avatar: The Last Airbender, attempts something similar, trying to condense 20 episodes of animation into an eight-episode season.

The series, which premiered February 22, takes a more serialized approach than the source material, which started out as an adventure-of-the-week story that slowly built up to a more serial fantasy epic. The live-action remake skips the original’s initial episodic storytelling to focus on the bigger moments of its tale of Aang (Gordon Cormier), a young kid who has to master all four elements (water, earth, fire, air) and save the world from a warmongering nation hellbent on world domination.

In Netflix’s version, Aang is a kid on a mission, with a clear and immediate threat he needs to take care of ASAP, no time for detours. Thanks to a convenient spirit vision showing the Northern Water Tribe being destroyed, Aang sets out straight away, only stopping when the situation absolutely calls for it — rather than because Aang wants to see a cute animal in every other town.

Speeding things up isn't inherently a bad idea. Take the Netflix adaptation of One Piece. A big part of why that show works is that it all but throws away the individual episode scripts and reworks them from the ground up to fit a new (yet recognizable) narrative. Then again, that show was condensing roughly 60 episodes of animation into an eight-hour season, so expediency is a big net positive. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, however, it means losing something essential to the source material that the live-action show doesn't know how to replace or replicate.

“Filler” is a dirty word for many animation (especially anime) fans, usually referring to original episodes that hit the breaks on the main story just to pad the time — like recap episodes in the middle of an important fight rather than, say, bottle episodes. But when it comes to Avatar: The Last Airbender, that filler is key to the cartoon's success. Some of the best episodes in the original show were standalone ones where the plot slowed down for a bit and the characters took center stage.

Episodes like "The Beach," where the bad guys go on a vacation and end up opening up about their inner problems and conflicts, or "The Tales of Ba Sing Se," an anthology episode focusing on six short stories, and one of the best episodes in the entire show. These all focused on the downtime between the big plot moments and battles, and served as an opportunity to expand the world of the show and deepen the characters through smaller interactions.

Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender doesn't have time for that. By condensing the episodes and skipping the filler, the live-action show also skips a lot of character development and build-up to the bigger developments. Showrunner Albert Kim (who took over after the original creators Bryan Koniertzko and Michael Dante DiMartino left the project) has talked plenty about his reverence for the original, and it ends up being a problem here. The live-action tries to cram as many fan-favorite characters, gags, and moments as possible into these eight episodes while still making big changes that run contrary to the spirit of the original (such as the difference in tone between a kid-friendly cartoon and a Game of Thrones-inspired violent drama).

This results in episodes like the Omashu two-parter, which somehow becomes an amalgamation of five different episodes and storylines from the original. The reasoning is that Omashu is a big city, so of course it would be home to many people, but it ends up feeling convenient rather than like an organic side effect of the setting. There’s a plot about an engineer selling secrets to the enemy, another about a group of freedom fighters with questionable morals, but also haunted tunnels and some funny minstrels, and a king who doesn't realize or doesn't care that his city is overrun with spies. And in the middle of all this, there's also Zuko (Dallas Liu) hunting for Aang. With not enough time devoted to each storyline, the Omashu arc ends up overcrowded and poorly paced.

It's not like it's impossible for a show to fit many storylines and characters into an eight or 10-hour season. Look at Game of Thrones, the fantasy epic the new Avatar so clearly wants to emulate in tone and scale. The first season of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ adaptation found plenty of time to let the Stark kids be kids, to play around and have little side stories that made them grow as individuals, before plunging them into war. Without the time in-between adventures that allows Aang and his friends to become complex and nuanced characters, Avatar: The Last Airbender speeds up their arcs and flattens their characterizations.

Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley) were hugely impacted by the war, but in the first episode of the new show, they seem to have already moved past that. These characters rush through the stages of pain, growth, and acceptance. They arrive having learned their lessons and finished their arcs, which renders them flat archetypes less complex or interesting than the kids' cartoon that inspired the show. Instead of fighting sexism from her brother and her tribe (the former is excised from this version, the latter reduced to a single old man refusing to change), Katara's role is now little more than the parody episode "Ember Island Players" shows her to be, a girl obsessed with sappy speeches about hope. These days it is easy to blame everything wrong with a movie or TV show on studio executives, but much like Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, this latest remake does feel like the product of a specific vision. Sadly, that vision isn't so easily executable.

In addition to condensing storylines, Avatar: The Last Airbender weaves in elements from later seasons of the cartoon, as well as the comics and the sequel series The Legend of Korra, including introducing Zuko's sister Azula (Elizabeth Yu) much earlier. Her storyline is one of deception and manipulation, an attempt by the show to make a potential Season 2 hit the ground faster with an even more active villain who the audience already knows and dislikes.

Toward the end of Season 1, Azula proves her worth to her father, the leader of the Fire Nation, by manipulating her way into causing a huge invasion of the Northern Water Tribe. Granted, it fails, but Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim) meant for the invasion to be a decoy, a distraction from his true objective — Omashu. The season concludes with Azula triumphantly leading an invasion army and declaring that Omashu is now under Fire Nation control, the first step to conquering the rest of the Earth Kingdom on their way to world domination.

The expanded role for Azula and ending the season with the conquest of Omashu suggests Avatar: The Last Airbender will double down on its condensing and streamlining of storylines in a potential second season. Starting with Azula in Omashu would add urgency and a clear goal for early in the season, as Aang would probably want to return as soon as possible to liberate his friend. Given all the other characters we know who also reside in Omashu, it raises the personal stakes for Team Avatar to reclaim that city.

But should it? Again, the original was mostly a picaresque journey, which served two purposes — make each episode stand alone with a new setting each week, and make the show's world feel massive and lived-in. If Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender keeps focusing on big cities and that one forest shown in one episode, it makes its big and unique world feel small and uninspiring. Even when the original did visit big cities, like Ba Sing Se, it created room to breathe and to explore the many moving parts of the city. Hopefully, the live-action show remembers the journey is as important as the destination.

Rafael Motamayor is a freelance writer and critic based in Norway.