Author: Dan

I love Korra. It’s seriously good and if you haven’t watched it you should (you should also watch The Last Airbender though I don’t think it matters too much which you start with, I watched Korra S1 & 2 then all of TLA then Korra 3 and now 4).

As a bit of a latecomer I’ve been able to binge watch almost all of Korra/TLA with the exception of the current (last) series of Korra so I’m finding this season a little frustrating but mostly because I can’t just watch more there and then. On the flipside it means bedtime on a Friday is the best because I get to watch the latest episode and see how the story progresses. Until this week when we got a clips episode.

At first I was pretty disappointed but actually it was pretty good, the last third especially, and while there were a lot of people bitching about it online (either that the episode itself happened or that we didn’t get a *real* episode on the same day to make up for it) the creators were pretty decent in laying out the situation in advance of the episode:

In a couple hours the eighth chapter of Korra Book 4 will be released online, and I suppose, if you are none the wiser, a few minutes into it you will feel duped and yell at your screen, “Hey! This is a crummy clips episode!” And that is (almost) exactly what it is––except we all worked really hard to make sure at the very least it isn’t crummy. I’m here to explain why we ended up having to do one. Sometime around a year and a half ago we were similarly duped on a large scale. We got the news from the higher-ups that our Book 4 budget was getting slashed, almost to the tune of an entire episode’s budget. We had two options: 1) let go a significant number of crew members several weeks early, or 2) make a clips episode. We never considered the first option. We weren’t going to do that to our crew, and even if we were callous enough to do so, we never would have been able to finish the season without them. But having grown up on TV in the ’80s and ’90s, we all dread clips episodes, where characters sit around saying, “Remember that time when…” and leftover footage is reheated for no one’s enjoyment. Anyone who suffered through TNG’s “Shades of Gray” knows what I’m talking about.

I honestly can’t get over how much Nickelodeon want to screw over and undermine such a great show. I watched Korra S1&2 on Amazon Prime and The Last Airbender on Netflix but finding a way to legitimately watch Korra 3&4 was near impossible. I couldn’t give anyone my money to watch those. Why would you make it so difficult for people to watch this? Especially something so good.

Anyway, we’ve got five episodes to go in the last series of Korra then who knows what we’ll get. I’m super excited about the rest of this series but would also love to revisit this world whether past (some of my favourite Korra episodes were those following Avatar Wan, 10,000 years before the events of Korra, and I would happily watch anything with more Toph) or future (will we see the next Earth Avatar?), it doesn’t look like Nickelodeon give two shits about this world anymore but hopefully someone will.

If you haven’t watched any yet and you have Netflix or Amazon Prime give them a go, they’re soooo good. And as clips episodes go this was pretty good, when you think they only had five minutes of new footage to work with they did a cracking job, Varrick (of course) stole the show.