Episode by episode | Avatar: The Last Airbender s1 e5

The fifth episode of A:TLA revolves around change and perspective, coming to the Earth kingdom city of Omashu to ride the package delivery system (a great piece of world building; establishing how bending plays a role in everyday life) Aang tells his friends that the people in Omashu are the friendliest in the world; a fact seemingly changed since Aang spent 100 years cooling off in an iceberg, because now the gates to Omashu are tightly policed and they are met by a cold reception from the guards.

From this point the recurring theme is appearance and reality or possibility: the Omashu delivery system is also the world’s greatest superslide; King Bumi seems crazy and frail but turns out to be wise and powerful (although certainly eccentric) and while he appears to be the villain of the episode he is ultimately a great ally and friend.

This episode isn’t up to the standard of the rest of the series unfortunately; the art direction is frequently lazy compared to the high standards of most episodes with somewhat awkwardly utilised green filters and weaker than usual writing. The humour is pretty hit and miss; for every well timed visual gag and pleasantly cheesy pun there’s two that miss the mark. That said though when I was a lot younger this episode seemed really fun; evidently it just doesn’t hold up quite as well with an older audience.

The episode does introduce two elements to the series that ultimately serve a nice purpose; one being the major integration of bending abilities in non-combat situations; a nice elaboration on earlier scenes featuring Katara fishing with her bending, as well as indications of how bending ties in with the cultural practices of the four nations. The other is one I’m not such a big fan of: the series’ most famous ongoing joke: the cabbage man and his misfortunes. Although I’m not a fan of this running gag I know most of my friends loved it and it does play a large part in the formula of the show as a whole and as such I am thankful for it's presence, many others enjoyed it and it is certainly worth mentioning regardless of my personal opinion on the gag. 

Another element that properly introduces itself is the freeze-frame joke; the occurrence of which is arguably the high-point of the episode and certainly the moment at which the balance between their younger and older audiences was best met.

Perhaps this episode had a tighter deadline than others or more effort was spent on the first four to try to hook the audience; but almost every element was a little worse than it usually is; the humour, pacing, animation and writing were just a touch worse than normal and only the background art seemed to be on the usual form. I don't have much else to say; this was an episode that gets a little worse the older you are and the more times you've seen it, but despite that it's still much better than any other children's cartoon I can remember and it's only because of the quality of the rest of the series that I come down kind of hard on this one.