For the fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: The Legend of Korra
Rewatch Mondays: Legend of Korra, Episode 1.09 - "Out of the Past"
Due to popular demand, it's time for a rewatch!
- Every Monday, one of these posts will go up, alternating weeks between ATLA and LOK.
- Go forth and watch the episode! You don't have to watch it on Monday. You have a whole two weeks before the next episode's post goes live.
- Come back here and discuss!
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What's your favorite scene or storyline in this episode? Did you like it? Any fannish or fanwork ideas come to you while watching?
What do you want to discuss?




OK so I have a lot of questions and thoughts about this episode.
Yay seeing more of the original team avatar!! I just finished LOK season 2 in my total first watching if everything, and I have to admit I just love TLA way more than LOK. So it was super exciting to connect with them and see them all grown up and how they've progressed.
Where is Katara?? Why is she the only one missing from these flashbacks? It makes it feel like they're implying she became less important and stopped accomplishing great things after they saved the world, that she's not a part of things with everyone else when there's no reason she shouldn't be. Are they saying she just quit and became a stay-at-home mom and never did anything else again? We know Toph had at least one kid and she's still there, so there's no reason for that... since she's my favorite, this really bothers me.
(Question that goes beyond this episode:) Are they ever going you explain how some random family just magically became able to bloodbend entire rooms of people at any time? And are they ever going to do more with that? This seems like a HUGE deal that this power exists (and however it managed to be extended to take away people's bending), and it seems like a pretty big cop-out to introduce such giant issues and then erase them so simply just because the two people who we happen to know of who have that power both die (we're not bothering with spoilers here, right? This is a rewatch thread?). This power exists, it could still exist, or it could come to exist again. The story shouldn't be as simple as they're making it seem.
I do love ATLA better. I've become more fannish about LOK (season 4 in particular) because of its flaws. There's more stuff I want to see done better and gaps filled. Such huge gaps.
She was still active between ATLA/LOK, judging from comics and Toph's later in the series commentary on why she didn't get involved as heavily in earlier LOK stuff, but I think after Aang died and Korra was found, it's heavily implied in both comics and LOK that she focused on training/protecting the next Avatar before enjoying some retirement. Which in itself is a big position for all teachers don't get half enough credit. Nevertheless, Katara did fall a lot between the cracks in LOK precisely because she was established as alive, I think, and in the Water Tribe rather than Republic City, which limits her influence on Korra and the storyline once it moves out of the poles. And no need for flashbacks because she shows up in timeline, right? :grumble, grumble:
No. They're not. Tbh, I'm content with the bit about bloodbending. You get one outlying level of an established in-universe ability and it runs in the family, which we never really got to see yes/no about combustion benders, etc. The problem I have is the ability to suppress bending altogether. How? How is that waterbending? Unless he blocked all the chakras, but those can be unblocked without spiritbending. Waterbending does not inherently a spiritbender make. So unless the guy took off into the spirit realm and met up with a lion turtle, I've never been okay with the lack of explanation there. :sigh:
Yeah, I assumed that they were basically using her being alive as an excuse to say she's already represented in the series and doesn't need to be included in the flashbacks, but it still hugely bothers me. Like the reason she's still alive is because she just decided to settle down and relax rather than living the life of adventure and danger the others continued.
I assumed basically blocking the chakras, like you said. You can physically hit someone in the right place to block their chakras, but that's just a temporary physical block similar to if someone gives you a dead arm, basically. I imagined this being something more important internally, like causing the blood flow to the chakras to be permanently cut off so that they die, or something like that.