4x08 Remembrances

[3.5/10] Well eff me, I have no idea how to rate this one. I try to use the Ebert rubric when grading anything: 1. What is it trying to do? 2. How well does it do it? 3. Is it worth doing?

The answer to Question 3 for “Remembrances” is decidedly “no.” It’s ironic that in my write-up for the previous episode, I talked about how the differences between Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra can, at least in part, be chalked up to the way that television itself changed in light of the rise of streaming and serialization that shifted how most people consumed television, because the existence of a clip show is an absolute throwback that, if I’m frank, left me scratching my head.

That’s because “Remembrances” feels like an anachronism, especially in 2014. Clip shows existed to fill out massive episode orders cheaply for shows at a time when home video sales of television shows were limited and reruns were a random affair, so it made sense to both save budget on an episode pieced together from older eps, but also to give viewers a quick sampling of the show’s best moments when they might not be able to go back and easily watch them otherwise.

But in the present, with DVRs and streaming services and DVD boxsets, it seems absurd to indulge in this sort of exercise, particularly in the dead center of a serialized story. That said, my limited understanding of the behind the scenes goings on with the show is that Nickelodeon had lost faith in the series and was burning it off anyway, so perhaps the existence of a strange, cobbled-together episode like “Remembrances” is simply the product of slashed budgets and a sacrifice here so as not to skimp on quality where it counts.

But then we go back to Question #2 -- how well did the show accomplish what it set out to achieve -- and it’s hard to give the episode high marks there either. If the point was just to save money by reusing old footage, then mission accomplished, but otherwise it’s a resounding failure.

Look, it’s hard to make clip shows interesting, but “Remembrances” fails at it anyway. Mako’s romantic life has never been my favorite part of the show, and so choosing that as a focus already loses me from the getgo. But having wooden, expository narration over it doesn’t help, and the little mini-heads popping up over it were just weird. (Though I’ll admit, I do appreciate how Grandma Mako is still a royalist and dotes on Wu.)

By the same token, just retracing Korra’s emotional journey in more infodump fashion is pretty underwhelming. We already did this in a much better way with Toph in the swamp, and just playing the “remember when” game with Korra, and the “no, you’re great” game with Tenzin feels really forced. I don’t blame the writers for not putting much effort into what’s basically a commercial enterprise, but it’s still just bad.

But what’s striking, and the only thing that keeps me from rating this one any lower, is that the third act with Varrick is a ton of fun. Having him recontextualize the prior three seasons into an epic, crowd-pleasing tall tale starring Bolin was a hoot, and even repurposing the four villains of the series into a gang of bros calling each other on the phone was hilarious. If anything, the Varrick/Bolin segments make the whole thing seem even worse, because it means the TLoK team could have made the whole episode as interesting as the Varrick segment was and just didn’t try. Heck, I might even take the Varrick segment as a standalone thing to give a random person a primer on the show and its sense of humor.

Overall, this is a weird one that surprised me with its very existence. The best I can say for it is that the Varrick segments shows they know how to have fun with this, and if it made the rest of the season possible, or at least more financially viable, then it served its purpose.