Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Storm

The Storm
Season 1, Episode 12
Airdate	June 3, 2005
Production Number	1x12
Written by	Aaron Ehasz
Directed by	Lauren MacMullan
← 1x11 The Great Divide	1x13 → The Blue Spirit
Avatar: The Last Airbender — Season One

The Storm is the twelfth episode of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the twelfth episode overall.

Guest Stars: Mark Hamill (Fire Lord Ozai), Sab Shimono (Monk Gyatso), Robert Pine (Fisherman), Susan Silo (Fisherman's Wife), James Hong, (Dour Monk), Clyde Kusatsu (Senior Monk)

Plot Overview

Aang is having nightmares of being separated from his friends. Sokka takes a job as a fisherman's assistant to earn some money; a fisherman who turns out to be quite angry at the Avatar for, as he sees it, abandoning the world a century ago. Hurt by his tirade, Aang flies off, and Katara later discovers him, upset and near tears, in a cave. Meanwhile, Zuko's obsession with finding the Avatar at all costs is causing friction with the crew of his ship, and Iroh decides to intervene.

Aang tells Katara of the events that led up to his being frozen in the iceberg where she discovered him. The revelation that he was the Avatar changed his life and distanced him from his friends; his only companion from then on was his guardian, a monk named Gyatso. The monk's fatherly affection for Aang is seen by the other elders as interfering with his training, and Aang eavesdrops on a meeting where it is decided that the two must be separated. Rather than be sent off to a different air temple, Aang runs away, but is caught by a storm and forced to put himself and Appa into stasis, where he remained until he was woken up by Katara one hundred years later.

Iroh tells the crew the story of how Zuko became a driven outcast. Three years ago, Zuko was sitting in on a military council, where he spoke out of turn against an unnecessarily cruel and wasteful plan by a respected general. Violating the rules of court was taken as an affront to the entire nation's honor, so Zuko was compelled to duel Fire Lord Ozai, his own father, in Agni Kai. Zuko begged for forgiveness and refused to fight, but Ozai would have none of it and, in the traditional finishing move of Agni Kai, gave the unresisting prince his scar. This display of weakness, compounded with his earlier disrespect, led to Zuko's banishment and assignment to the presumably pointless task of capturing the vanished Avatar.

In the present, both Sokka's fishing boat and Zuko's warship are caught in a storm. Aang and Katara fly Appa into the storm and rescue the former; Zuko spots them but orders the ship to find safety rather than pursue them into danger, and Aang's rescue changes the fisherman's attitude towards the Avatar. Zuko and Aang both resolve to move beyond the tortures of the past as the storm breaks.

Arc Advancement

Characters

• In the audience at Zuko's duel, seated next to Iroh, is a teenage girl. While Iroh looks away from the infliction of Zuko's disfigurement, she watches intently, with a disturbingly pleased expression. She is not identified in the scene, but this is Zuko's sister Azula.
• Iroh can be seen deflecting a lightning strike on the ship, another glimpse of the fact that underneath his "silly old geezer" behavior is a man who was once a great leader in the Fire Nation military and who is still a very strong firebender.
• Zuko's gradual release of the idea that capturing the Avatar is the sole purpose of his life and the only goal worth aiming for may have begun in this episode.

Referbacks

• Aang discovered Gyatsu's skeleton while visiting the ruins of his home in The Southern Air Temple.
• This is not the first time we've seen Aang's freezing depicted; the tail end of Aang's nightmare and retelling (when he loses Appa underwater and forms the ice sphere that protected him) was shown during his introduction to Katara in The Boy in the Iceberg.

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