
Legend of Korra Book 3 – Change Premiere Review
June 30, 2014We get spirits, evil benders, and Zuko with a dragon. (Spoilers inside)
Last Friday The Legend of Korra book 3 premiered on Nickelodeon with 3 back to back episodes to set up the new season. The story starts off only a couple weeks after the end of Harmonic Convergence and Korra is dealing with the aftermath of merging the Spirit and Human worlds together.
As a result the Republic City is overtaken by spirit vines that are evicting the residents of the city and causing great civil unrest and anger towards the Avatar herself for causing this. No matter what Korra seems to try she fails, and has no one to turn to except her friends and mentor Tenzin. This begins a small spiral of doubt for Korra as she struggles being one of the only Avatars that cannot look to her past lives for help, and has to deal with it almost primarily on her own.
During this whole situation of spirits and vines, multiple people across the Earth Nation also discover they now have the ability to airbend, something that had been previously lost with the annihilation of the Air Nomads hundreds of years prior. Most notable of this happening (and one of my favorite characters to have something like this happen to) to is Bumi. This sets off the primary story arc after Korra gets ordered out of Republic City by the mayor, and team Avatar goes on a mission to find other airbenders and rebuild the Air Nation.

“Look alive Uncle Bumi!”
The first 3 episodes set up the two sets of main antagonists that Korra and crew will be dealing with for (probably) most of the season. The first is a band of renegade benders led by a new air bender Zaheer (voiced by the one and only Henry Rollins). The renegade benders escape their specialty designed prisons that were made to suppress or eliminate the chance they could bend their element, and begin their path to destroy the Avatar. Not all of them escape though as we see the now elderly Zuko ensuring the last of the group does not escape. We do get a very big throwback to who she may or may not be. Zuko hints that she has the ability to make explosions with her mind, and had hired someone just like that to kill Avatar Aang. (but… like… it didn’t work). With this hint we know that she could be either a protege or relative of the infamous Sparky Sparky Boom Man that almost took out Aang years ago.
The second antagonist is the greedy Earth Queen Hou-Ting who is currently ruling the city of Ba Sing Se. Hou-Ting is shown as a greedy and powerful ruler who will take whatever she wants from her subjects, and causes fear throughout the city. She also has a dark secret that we find out at the end of the 3rd episode, that she is abducting all of the new airbenders in the city and turning them into a secret army. We discover this when the Queen’s men abduct the newest addition to Team Avatar Kai, the thief turned airbender.
Overall the new season is giving the fans what they want. We get a bunch of new villains to hate, some new additions to Team Avatar and throwbacks to the previous series. My only gripe is that we got little to no notice that the premiere was happening, and the only hype train we saw coming was from the fans of the series as soon as the trailer hit YouTube.

Zuko: “Ironically, I hired a guy with a similar ability to kill the avatar myself once… Didn’t work.” Eska: “Don’t feel bad. I tried to kill Korra after she ruined my wedding. It happens.”
Personally I am a very big fan of the series and I cannot wait for the 4th episode.