I like to throw away food and fart at inappropriate moments.
And yet just in a short piece of dialog, Mattila gives Tenzin’s middle child more character than she’s received in every preceding episode combined: “My name’s Meelo. How many Ikki moments do you remember before this? Because I’m blanking. The true secret weapon of “The Calling,” however, is Ikki. The comedy in this franchise is one of it’s strongest assets, and because it’s highly unlikely we’ll get the chance to have another episode this funny for the remainder of the series, it’s all the more important to witness and appreciate this episode on that level right now. Even in cases where the tone drops heavily and someone says something funny (like Toph telling Korra not to freak out this time), it doesn’t subvert what the scene is trying to do. How this level of comedy doesn’t detract from the seriousness of what’s going on is the key part, though, and it’s totally beyond me. He is a walking stand-up routine in “The Calling,” and to try and highlight that would be foolish–you’d be quoting the entire episode. The obvious example in this case is Meelo. It doesn’t matter what she does everything that comes out of her mouth generates laughter. Avatar and Korra find ways of following that kind of person around and distributing her gift to their characters. It’s almost like that one friend you have who is funny in spite of herself. I feel like this whole crew of writers share a similar sense of humor that somehow meshes natural comedy with zingers in a way that doesn’t feel like writing at all. This might not even be on Mattila’s writing, either. And for a piece-moving episode, “The Calling” does several surprising things in the process. It’s usually the end of the sixth episode that makes you feel like the season is truly starting to move. In response to this, I would again point out that each season of The Legend of Korra does this for at least the first few episodes. Even the more weighty material with Korra goes through some of the same motions as last week’s legitimately underwhelming “The Coronation”. For an episode this late in the game to devote half of itself to a romp with Tenzin’s kids without really advancing much could be disappointing. On the surface, “The Calling” might feel unremarkable to some. “The Calling” isn’t quite on that level and has an occasional hiccup, but this episode is still clearly the work of someone who is perhaps Korra‘s (and Avatar‘s) best individual writer. And remember last season’s “Old Wounds”? You know, the one that went head-first into Lin’s background with her sister and deepened her character in a way that made her the most compelling part of an already excellent season? Also a Mattila-penned story. “The Tales of Ba Sing Se” and “The Beach” are both among the select few best episodes of Avatar (Mattila wrote the latter and contributed “The Tale of Zuko” to the former). And if you go back and look at her list of writing credits, that’s very apparent. Katie Mattila’s major contributions to Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra have been sparse but phenomenal in the purest sense of that word’s otherworldly connotations. In the case of the Avatar franchise, there is someone who simply cannot go under-recognized and -appreciated, because to do so would be a travesty. The showrunners and voice actors are somewhere out there floating on the periphery not-so-secretly pulling the strings, but acknowledging them is a secondary task to appreciating and analyzing the show they’ve created. More often than not, though, the show is so engrossing that it exists in its own world. Maybe in special cases like this one, the animation or scoring is just so superb that you wind up buying official art books or OSTs.
#Watch avatar the legend of korra season 4 episode 4 tv
When watching The Legend of Korra–or any TV series, for that matter–it’s hard to view the product from outside the context of the story itself.
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