The Puppetmaster

A Halloween episode a little too late for Halloween, but still genuinely spooky. Spoilers and what not after the jump.

The episode begins with the Gaang camped out in a Fire Nation forest telling ghost stories. Suprisingly, Katara manages to tell the scariest tale, and they are properly spooked when an old lady shows up and invites them to stay at her house.

I, of course, screamed at my television, “Don’t do it, motherfuckers, lady gonna be evil or some shit, this episode’s called ‘The Puppetmaster,’ bitch gonna make you her puppet,” but, as so often happens with two dimensional characters on the screen, they completely ignored my advice.

The old lady is properly mysterious — she has weird dolls in a closet, and delivers cryptic messages just like strange old ladies should. In her attic, Sokka the suspicious finds an odd box, and, despite my hoping against hope, it does not contain another, smaller box. Instead, it has an old comb made from a fishbone, and the lady reveals herself as a member of the Southern Water Tribe. She had been captured and held prisoner by the Fire Nation and had managed to make her escape, and now is hiding in a similar fashion to the Gaang.

Katara agrees to train with her, and the old woman shows her how to draw water out of plants to bend, as well as from the air itself, skills fans have long theorized possible now made reality. The old lady, of course, does all this very sinisterly, and it doesn’t hurt that many villagers have gone missing during every full moon, which just happens to be the time of month Waterbenders are at their strongest.  Avatar isn’t really big on red herrings, so it’s obvious the old woman is behind it all along.

The dramatic reveal occurs when the old woman relates her tale of escape — kept in a dry room by the Fire Nation, chained up before being given water, she trained herself to find water where she could, and practiced the fucking scary art of Bloodbending on rats before trying it on the guard, manipulating his body through his blood so he freed her from her cage.

A beautifully choreographed fight takes place under the full moon, with the old woman controlling Katara for a few minutes before Katara uses her new skills to suck the water from the grass to combat the old woman. Aang and Sokka show up after trying to free the kidnapped villagers, and the old woman Bloodbends them to attack Katara, cornering Katara until she finally Bloodbends the old woman herself, allowing Katara to gain an incredibly useful and incredibly creepy new talent.

Bloodbending is kind of fucking awesome. It’s one of the darkest elements ever written into the show, and it’s handled to really amp up the scary factor. For an episode that could have been nothing but fluff, it manages to be one of the most memorable and just plain awesome of the season so far.