An Argument for the Worst Episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender

Credits: Nickelodeon

If you ask any fan of the Nickelodeon series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, what their least favorite episode is, most will have the same answer: episode 11, “The Great Divide.” While yes, it’s certainly one of the series’s weaker episodes, it has a clever subversion that is often overlooked.

Now, this is not to say that people argue it’s terrible, necessarily. In any other series, this would likely be considered pretty decent. It has strong themes of prejudice and mob mentality. However, Avatar as a whole has such a high standard across the board that the Great Divide falls a little flat compared with other episodes.

Quick summary: in this episode, the Gaang (Aang and his friends) come across two tribes while crossing a vast, treacherous canyon. The tribes have a long-standing feud that the Gaang has to help resolve to safely get out of the canyon.

So, why don’t fans care for this episode? There are a few reasons.

One is that while it provides a bit of foreshadowing for the refugees pouring into Ba Sing Se (a major plot point of season 2), it doesn’t have much else to do with the overarching plot. But unlike other “filler” episodes like “The Ember Island Players” and “The Beach,” it doesn’t have any strong character development and isn’t particularly funny or entertaining.

Another is that many find the tribes themselves annoying. Each is very one-note: one is messy and rough, while the other is very prim and organized. There isn’t much depth to either.

A third reason is more meta. “The Great Divide” was the episode that the network replayed most often, so many fans got sick of it.

Finally, and possibly the biggest reason, the conclusion falls flat for a lot of people. Aang resolves the conflict between the two tribes in a way that many felt cheapened the whole thing.

However, that same conclusion is exactly why I like this episode. Not necessarily because of how the conflict is resolved, but because of how it plays on the audience’s expectations.

The tribes’ conflict revolves around a historical incident that happened a century ago. Each tribe has its own version of what happened, one side accusing the other of stealing a sacred relic, while the other claims their ancestor had been falsely imprisoned. For anyone who watched a lot of cartoons in the 90s and early 2000s, almost every series had at least one episode dealing with this idea of “two sides to every story,” and the resolution in every single case was that the truth was somewhere in the middle.

Near the end of the episode, Aang, a 12-year-old boy who had been trapped in an iceburg for 100 years (long story), says that he knew the ancestors in question and was there on the day that the incident occurred. He claims that, in actuality, the two ancestors were brothers playing a children’s game that had simply been blown out of proportion in the retelling. The tribes decide to put their differences behind them and walk off into the sunset together, and for a brief moment.

Then, as soon as the tribes have left, Aang reveals that he made the whole thing up. He’d never met the tribes’ ancestors and had no clue what actually happened.

I absolutely LOVED this resolution. It completely subverted the traditional formula that other cartoon series of the time had been using over and over. It wasn’t even a formula I hated; to this day, I believe it teaches a valuable lesson. Whenever you hear a news story or listen to gossip, you’re only getting one side of the story, and it may not be the whole truth. But it was still so refreshing to see a new twist on a very overdone theme.

I can’t even be made that the whole mess between these tribes was fixed with such a simple, cheap trick. Why shouldn’t the conflict be resolved with a lie? Stupid conflicts require stupid solutions.

This was also the first episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender that I ever watched. I hadn’t even seen the whole thing; I tuned in just a few minutes before the episode ended because I was anticipating a show that was set to come right after. Because of this, I was spared any potential annoyance that might have arisen from the one-note tribes or the built-up conflict, which I’m sure helped me to appreciate the subversion even more. And it’s what made me decide to watch the rest of the show.

So, I must admit to some bias. “The Great Divide” will always have a soft spot for me, and I will happily defend its humorous way of subverting expectations. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just an example of how even the weakest episode of this series still has something fun and creative to offer.