The sense of humor in Avatar: The Last Airbender was always amazing, and the series had a deft ability to both make fun of itself and get serious when it really needed to. Over the course of the series, there are plenty of memorable jokes and inspirational moments, but what many fans make skirt over is that some of the series' best writing comes from a fusion of the two in one of the series' most forgettable episodes.
The sixth episode of the first season, "Imprisoned," features an impassioned speech by Katara swiftly undercut by an anticlimactic moment that shows her attempts at motivation failed to land. However, looking back on the speech, it actually is genuinely inspiring, standing out as some of the tightest writing in the series that's deceptively easy to gloss over.
Occurring early on in the series, "Imprisoned" is one of the first introductions that viewers get about the status quo of the Hundred Years War in the Earth Kingdom. With the Fire Nation creating an environment of paranoia and persecution, the Gaang stumble upon a young earthbender named Haru who desperately tries to hide his abilities. When he is outed, Haru is captured and imprisoned on board a prison boat, which strands its captive earthbenders away from any element they can influence. When Katara goes undercover, posing as an earthbender in order to get captured, she is disheartened to see how broken the spirits of the prisoners are and tries to rally them.
Katara stands up in the open, not even trying to hide from the surrounding guards and warden as she gets her fellow captives' attention. She speaks to the reputation of the Earth Kingdom she first heard of as a girl in the Water Tribe and their current feeling of powerlessness while so removed from the element that attends their strength. Katara reminds the earthbenders that what the Fire Nation can't take away is their courage, saying that "it runs deeper than any mine you've been forced to dig, any ocean that keeps you far from home! It is the strength of your hearts that makes you who you are. Hearts that will remain unbroken when all rock and stone has eroded away." When she finishes with a rallying cry, however, she is met only with silence... and a cough.
The moment is actually surprisingly complex, accomplishing a lot in very little space. Most basically, the scene is just funny, contrasting Katara's naivete with the anticlimax of her failure to achieve anything at all with her speech. However, beneath that humor is a genuinely touching speech invoking the element the benders most miss in its imagery -- one that cuts to the core of fundamental earthbender philosophy. On a deeper layer still, the speech is an accomplishment of subtle worldbuilding in which the audience, at this early point in the series, not only learns something about the Earth Kingdom but also about how the rest of the world perceives it.
For Katara, who grew up as the only bender in a small and devastated village, word of the Earth Kingdom warriors steadfastly standing up to the Fire Nation's imperialism must have been inspirational. It makes sense for her to be naïve in her assessment about what Earth Kingdom citizens were actually like, and during the episode, she learns an important lesson not only in how to inspire those she tries to lead but standing by her personal resolve to do the right thing. Immediately after the failure of her speech, Aang and Sokka stealthily offer her an escape from the prison -- and she rejects them. There is still work to be done, and in standing by it, Katara proves that she is willing to live up to the same ethics she was trying to preach. To her, it wasn't just a nothing, throwaway speech.
The episode is often overlooked in reviews of the series, occurring immediately after "The King of Omashu" that so memorably introduces the fan-favorite King Bumi to the series, and right before "The Winter Solstice" two-parter that fleshes out the Spirit World and the grand tradition of the Avatar Cycle that is so core to the series' mythology.
However, in its own way, "Imprisoned" enjoys a subtler accomplishment that's every bit as important to Katara as a character and the series as a whole. If the speech is hard for any longtime fan to remember, it's worth a rewatch just for the sake of connecting sincerely to the inspiration it invokes. And for Avatar fans whose friends have yet to see the series, it may well be worth preparing them for what's to come. Great writing shouldn't go unnoticed, and Katara's speech in "Imprisoned" is a master class in the craft.
