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KORRA - Season 4, Episode 1

Recap: Three years after the assassination of the Earth Queen, the Earth Kingdom prepares to coronate the late Queen's sheltered and privileged great-nephew, Wu. However, Kuveera has been taming the bandit hordes around the Earth Kingdom and exacting feudalistic oaths of fealty from the states. Meanwhile, the Avatar is a nameless, underground cage fighter.

The thing about Korra is that season openers always do this.

This is one of the most exhilarating episodes of the show's run, top to bottom. It begins from as early as the narrator's opening: THREE YEARS HAVE PASSED (love the narrator!), like WHAAAAAAAAT? Within the first minute, Asami's looking different, Mako's looking different, Team Avatar has been split up for we-don't-know-how-long, and we're told to expect Korra at the coronation. And the episode squeezes us with that tension - the longer we go without Korra showing up, the more intense it is when she does - and it all leads up to Tonraq telling us she's MIA. Oh yes.

The hits are constant throughout the episode. Prince Wu is magnificently characterized, with Mako helpless trapped in his bodyguard role. He's spoiled beyond belief and loves the finer things in life (he loves massages, he lives in an incredibly gaudy 1920s-style hotel/palace building) - with virtually no demonstrated eye for why he's being given these privileges. The crowd to receive him is mixed; you can see why he gravitates toward the mindless fangirls - we see what we want to see - and doesn't realize that there are dissidents until Mako throws him into the car... at which point, he freaks out about the strawberry on him. Mako reminds him that it's bee stings to which he's allergic, not strawberries. 'Oh, right, always get those two mixed up.'

This dude promises to be amazing.

But more than that, I did not expect this to be the direction Kuveera took. She's f***ing fantastic so far. She's being characterized as almost overtly evil, complete with handsome androgyny and a suspiciously German efficiency with steel. Her words are never evil, but you can see from how the Governor of Yai reacts to her that he knows what her 'protection' really means. (I'd like this to be shown before told, but I can forgive the point.) She doesn't get a lot of subtle quirks, but her personal armies, her attempts to unite a fragmented a nation, the fear she's inspiring, her absolutely brutal competence and charisma - it's f***ing phenomenal.

Her being painted this black probably tips the hand of future events a little too much, but she didn't exactly extort anyone: as far as we know, she's not the one inciting the bandits. She's just frighteningly authoritarian and ambitious as a solution - and while Yai is certain to lose its sovereignity... its citizens will be fed. (It's when we see what exactly she's contracting those bandits to do that I'm gonna start rooting against her!) Everything about her - and Bolin, who's going to get to see it all unravel - so promising.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness