Jet is one cool dude.

Book 1: Water

Chapter 10

Jet

WHAT HAPPENED?

Aang, Sokka, and Katara stumble into a Fire Nation camp, but are saved by Jet and the Freedom Fighters. Aang and Katara trust Jet completely, but Sokka doesn’t trust them due to his intuition. He witnesses them attack an old man, but Katara trusts Jet and his story.

However, his plan is revealed when Aang and Katara use their waterbending to unknowingly help Jet fill a dam. He planned to blow the dam and flood a nearby village, killing innocents just to get rid of the Fire Nation. Aang tries to stop it, but Jet fights him as a distraction. The city is flooded anyway, but Sokka warned the villagers beforehand. The team leaves Jet incapacitated as they fly away.

WHAT TO TAKE AWAY

The fact that Katara trusts a stranger the whole episode over her own brother is quite concerning. It’s not like Sokka was trying to be right when he suggested that they walk instead of fly. He was actually being quite strategic about how they travel, but once again, we have a very unnatural turn for Katara. These are two kids that have relied on each other since the death of their mother, but Katara throws that out the window for some smooth-talking rebel. And it also paves the way for some interesting fan fiction.

Aang, on the other hand, is nice to all strangers that are nice to him. He trusted Katara and Sokka completely when he first woke up from being in the iceberg for 100 years. But this is strange for Katara because she’s spent her life around the same people. I can’t imagine that many travelers looked to visit the Southern Water Tribe in their spare time. Wouldn’t Katara be weary of strangers like her brother?

Totally crushing, but on who?

And again, she trusts Jet completely over Sokka and it shows that she’s romantically interested in the newcomer. They bonded over the death of their parents, which is a good parallel for Katara. To meet someone else her age that has been through similar circumstances is probably very reassuring in that she’s not alone in her pain. Actually, she displayed this same behavior a few episodes ago when she connected with Haru. Sure, Haru didn’t know if his father was alive or not, but it’s still an interesting parallel. Katara completely put her life in peril to save someone she’d never met. It builds into an endearing trait that saves the team more than once, but it’s so odd because it happens so quickly.

Jet is an interesting character and his motives clearly draw the line between justice and revenge. It also brings a point to light. Not everything is as black and white as we want it to be, and not everything is as simple as we want it to be. What Jet was doing was wrong, yes, but if he had succeed, he would have rid the valley of the Fire Nation. Killing a village full of people seemed like the best route to accomplish that.

Tell me where the Muffin Man lives!

Jet’s parents were killed by the Fire Nation when they burned down his village. With no one to guide him, Jet fell onto the path of revenge, recruiting other kids who shared a similar past with him.

He and Sokka might have worked well together if Jet wasn’t set on destroying innocent lives to get what he wanted. In fact, I can see a neat parallel between Sokka and Jet. Jet is what Sokka would be if he didn’t have a sister to look after and a father somewhere out in the world. Sure, he lost his mother at a young age, but Sokka knows the difference between justice and revenge. Oh, and he has Gran Gran at home! The family aspect is what held Sokka together, but Jet lost everything. It makes me wonder how he would justify being the same as the men who destroyed his village.

I could even make the parallel between Jet and Zuko. Zuko has never killed anyone in the show, or at least it doesn’t seem that way. Sure, he’s hurt people, but he’s never taken it that far. He doesn’t even want to Avatar dead, but that’s the difference between Jet and Zuko. Where Jet would be willing to wipe out an entire town to accomplish his goal, Zuko would charge head-first into it and fail. One of the things that has cemented my belief that Zuko won’t kill or go too far down that path is Iroh. Like Sokka, Zuko has family to look out for or to look out for him, and it’d be difficult to turn into Jet with family by his side. If Iroh didn’t decide to join Zuko in his exile, he probably would have tortured and killed Katara during the business with the waterbending scroll.

You guys want an autograph?

As an aside, it wasn’t clear if the old man had a knife on him or not. I watched the part in question a few times, but I think it was left open as a way to keep the audience guessing. It worked as a good storytelling tool, and it did make me wonder whether Sokka was being paranoid, or if Jet was actually a cold-hearted thug.

And was Jet going to murder Sokka? When Sokka finds out about his plan, but is caught, Jet tells his crew to take him for a ‘long walk’. In the movies, that means they are going to kill him. However, it’s unclear in this episode. Perhaps Jet literally meant for them to take him for a long walk so he doesn’t warn Katara about the dam. But wouldn’t Katara just hear the story later and distrust Jet anyway?

On a side note, wouldn’t it be cool to see a bigger connection between the team’s interaction with the Fire Nation and the folks who destroyed Jet’s home and killed his parents? It would be interesting, and we could actually meet the folks responsible, but the connection is told in the extended lore, which is frustrating. For starters, I don’t like having to read the book for details that should have been in the show. Now that we’ve saved lives, it’s time to learn some history when we reach the Great Divide!

If you want to discuss this show, stop by our dedicated discussion thread on this show!