After the relative playfulness of last week, it's back to the dark stuff with Amon moving forward with his plans.
We start with the Fire Ferrets training for the finals, and it seems all romantic shenanigans have been put behind them. Amon ruins the good time by announcing that he is going to attack the finals if the city does not cancel it. This sends Korra, Mako, and Bolin to the Council to find out what their decision is. When the brothers start pleading the council about why the finals should continue, I really wish they had included that this is their livelihood. Cancelling the finals means they can't win the prize, which means they are out of work until they can find something else. The descriptions of bender and non-benders watching people beat each other up was funny, but it would have had more weight behind it if they had mentioned their poverty.
Good old shady Tarrlock manages to come out on top again in a nice win-win for him. If the games go on and the Metalbending police stop Amon, it looks good for him for not cancelling. If Amon manages to attack the stadium, then Lin Bei Fong takes all the responsibility. And what exactly does Tarrlok have on the other council members? It seems that they always vote with him. There's a lot of speculation that he may be working with Amon, but I hope that's not true. It seems too obvious, and I think it makes his character more interesting if he's just a conniving politician instead of one of the bad guys. Fits in better with the moral gray areas that this show sometimes portrays.
Before heading to the match, we get a wonderful scene of Korra and Tenzin where she figures out that him and Lin used to be an item. That was a wonderful character building moment and shows the nice evolution that these two have gone through. From a contentious teacher-student relationship, they've really developed a father-daughter type bond.
Then we get a clash of the ages in our heroes, the Fire Ferrets, versus Tahno and the Wolfbats. Great fight choreography, as always. The best part was the tiebreaker that Korra just demolished Tahno in, complete with instant replay. The Wolfbats spent the whole time cheating, though, and the refs turned a blind eye to all of it. I liked that even the announcer seemed ashamed of what was going on. I wonder who paid off the refs. The Wolfbats themselves would be the obvious answer, but Amon's speech dealt a lot with how they had bullied their way to the winner's circle. I think that Amon was behind the cheating to make his removal of their bending seem more just. In our eyes, it was still a horrible act, but to some crazy sports fans it may have seemed a just punishment.
In this weeks installment of "man this animation is good," I submit to you the entire fight with Korra and Lin versus the Lieutenant and Amon's forces. From Lin swinging around the arena to the fights in the air and on the roof, great stuff all around. If only Tenzin was able to get in on the action, I guess their saving that for later. To be fair, though, not everything looks amazing. The CG shot of the arena before the match started did not look good in the slightest. We're so used to seeing the arena hand drawn, it just didn't look right to see it in CG. A small shot, and a small complaint, but no show's perfect.
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