Recap / Avatar: The Last Airbender "The Deserter"

Aang attempts to convince a reluctant Jeong Jeong to teach him firebending.

"Only a fool seeks his own destruction."

— Jeong-Jeong

A visit to a local Fire Nation village festival ends in disaster when Aang displays his airbending. They manage to escape with a sympathetic former Fire Nation soldier named Chey, who says that he's a follower of the fearsome Jeong-Jeong, the very first person to ever desert the Fire Nation Army (and live). Realizing that this might be his only chance to ever master firebending, Aang seeks out Jeong-Jeong to learn from him. However, the deserter's jaded outlook and Aang's own impetuous nature work against this plan, and Zhao is still out to capture him.

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Tropes in this episode include:

• Answer Cut:
  • When Sokka wonders where they are going to get masks for disguise, the camera pans to the right to reveal a mask vendor pitching his festival masks.
  • While Jeong-Jeong lectures Aang about "a pupil once who had no interest in learning discipline," the camera cuts to Admiral Zhao. Aang realizes this when he fights Zhao later.
• Back from the Dead: Avatar Roku briefly appears before Jeong-Jeong to strong-arm him into teaching Aang firebending.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: Played with. Although Jeong-Jeong subscribes to this belief, claiming that firebending is an exclusively destructive ability, he and some of his disciples actively show this to be untrue. It is later reinforced in the show that firebending does not make you evil and that firebending itself is not just about destruction.
• Badass Boast: Avatar Roku gives an impressive one to Jeong-Jeong. Aang is not just a new youth, but the newest reincarnation of the ancient Avatar spirit — very literally, he is Roku come again. And who is Jeong-Jeong, a mortal practitioner with a single lifetime of knowledge, to say that Roku cannot learn anew what he has learned a thousand times already?
  Roku: I have mastered the elements a thousand times, in a thousand lifetimes! And now I must do it again.
• Badass Normal: It's implied that Chey isn't a firebender like Jeong-Jeong. Based on what is seen of him and what he tells, it's likely that he was an explosives expert when he served in the Fire Nation army.
• Berserk Button: Aang telling Zhao that Zuko is a more formidable opponent enrages Zhao into attacking with his largest fire blast yet.
• Big Brother Instinct: When Aang accidentally burns Katara, Sokka tackles him to the ground, demanding that he never hurt her again. He then looks at Jeong-Jeong, a firebending master, and furiously tells him that the whole situation was his fault.
• Big Damn Heroes: Appa coming to the rescue when the Gaang is chased through the streets by a group of Fire Army guards.
• Broken Aesop: The overall lesson that Aang had to learn was to be more patient and show more restraint when learning firebending, so as to not lose control of his fire. While Aang does understand the dangers of firebending by the end of the episode, he also vows to never firebend again, despite the fact that he would have to eventually. This would technically eliminate any need to be careful since he was not planning to try it again. There's also Jeong Jeong repeatedly describing firebending in a purely negative light throughout the episode, referring to it as a burning curse. This, combined with Aang's refusal to firebend again, only seems to enforce the idea that firebending is evil in nature, or that it's simply not worth learning due to the inherent dangers as opposed to simply exercising more caution when learning it. This is explained in the later seasons: most firebenders incorrectly think that the power of firebending is fueled by anger and hate. It's eventually revealed that that's a style of firebending, but not the original style.
• Continuity Nod: The Blue Spirit is now on Wanted Posters, alongside Jeong Jeong and Aang himself.
• Deadly Dodging: In order to get Zhao to destroy his own boats, Aang riles him up with taunts and insults and then simply dodges the ensuing fire blasts until Zhao's ships are all on fire.
• Easily Forgiven: Aang's accident with firebending is fairly quickly forgotten when Katara heals herself, and Zhao suddenly attacks, though it's justified in that Aang was genuinely repentant and the accident resulted in Katara learning about her Healing Hands and healing herself. Aang doesn't forget his terrible mistake, and he resolves to never firebend again, even though his duty as the Avatar demands mastering it.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: When Katara heals herself for the first time, Jeong-Jeong tells her that it's a rare ability for Waterbending. However, only two episodes later, it's established that Waterbending healing is commonly taught in the Northern Water Tribe for the women (However, Jeong-Jeong may simply be unaware of this, as his experience in the military likely means he has mostly faced warrior waterbenders, and since the Northern Tribe does not teach fighting techniques to women, Jeong-Jeong likely only has seen healers in action when raiding camps or the Northern Tribe city at most, giving him the false impression that the skill was rare).
• Flaw Exploitation: After learning about Zhao's Hair-Trigger Temper, Aang goads and provokes him into accidentally blowing up his own fleet.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Chey idly posits that Jeong-Jeong is a former admiral. The Fire Nation's present-day admiral turns out to have some history with him, and shows up later as the villain of the episode.
  • Aang vows never to firebend again after burning Katara. However, he would need to learn all four elements to become a full-fledged Avatar, and he would eventually achieve a proper way of firebending from an unexpected ally two seasons from now.
  • Jeong-Jeong notes that Aang lacks patience and discipline, and that he clearly hasn't mastered Waterbending or Earthbending yet. Next season we learn that patience and discipline are required for Earthbending, explaining why Jeong-Jeong initially insisted that Aang follow the cycle (until Roku browbeat him into doing it).
• Good Is Not Nice: Jeong-Jeong is a good man who made mistakes in the past. However, he's not afraid to scold Aang for trying to rush his firebending training and for not following his instructions.
• Healing Hands: Katara discovers that some waterbenders have this power, and that Jeong-Jeong is jealous of their ability to heal.
• Heroic BSoD: Aang goes into one after hurting Katara; he vows to never use firebending again, even though as Katara reminds him, he has to master all the bending disciplines eventually.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Aang is pretty easily able to use Zhao's lack of self-control to get him to set his own boats on fire.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Aang's shenanigans with the magician at the Festival. He knows very well that he is a wanted figure by the Fire Nation, and that he is well-known to be the last living airbender — so why, after walking into a town full of Fire Nation citizens and soldiers, did he think that it was a good idea to jump onto a stage in front of a large crowd to dramatically airbend?
  • A non-comedic example: Aang's cocky stunts at firebending, trying to stick it to Jeong Jeong for making him wait to learn how to use it. Aang learns just what happens when you have no self-control — you burn the hands of the girl you love, sending her off crying in horrible pain, and her brother knocks you to the ground. Aang takes the lesson very deeply to heart, swearing to never firebend again.
  • And Zhao, of course, failing to notice that he was burning down his own ships, as a result of his issues with his bad temper and careless arrogance. To top it all off, while his ships are burning and sinking while he's standing atop one, he explodes with fury and incinerates said ship altogether.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: When the Fire Army officer assures Zhao that the festival went off without a hitch, a burning beam crashes down behind him.
• I Shall Taunt You: Aang's tactic against Zhao is to annoy him until his sloppy firebending catches his own ships on fire.
• I Will Show You X!:
  Aang: Woah, wild shot!
  Zhao: I'll show you wild!
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Jeong-Jeong is initially a jerk to Aang, but he's not wrong about Aang's lack of self-control. Aang just wants to shoot fire because he thinks it's cool and has no desire to learn restraint or to learn the necessary but tedious or non-dramatic parts of the practice. Even when Jeong-Jeong does lighten up, Aang proves as impatient as ever.
  • Aang also delves into this when losing his patience with Jeong-Jeong's overly cautious style of teaching, raging at Jeong-Jeong for wasting his time. The thing is, time was not something they could afford to waste, given the impending catastrophe looming in the next year. This may have been why Roku manifested to Jeong-Jeong to kick him into gear.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: It turns out that Jeong-Jeong trained Zhao before Aang.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Aang's terrified and grief-stricken reaction to burning Katara, driven in deeper with Sokka's aggressive retaliatory tackle.
  • To some extent, Zhao, for brazenly torching his own boats in the heat of battle... and after realizing that the Avatar duped him like a dung-flinging ape, he blows his stack.
• Noodle Incident: Sokka somehow once got a fishhook stuck in his thumb (well, technically, two — he tried to get the first fishhook out with another fishhook).
• Not So Similar: Both Aang and Zhao wanted to learn firebending with no interest in self-control. The difference was that while Zhao desired power, Aang only wanted to do cool firebending tricks, he didn't want to hurt anyone. Once Aang accidentally burns Katara, he learns from his mistake and realizes how important self-control in firebending is.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Invoked by Chey when comparing himself to Jeong-Jeong, although in a good-natured way. Despite being only the second person in history to desert the Fire Nation army and survive, he remarks that "you don't get to be a legend" by being second.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Downplayed. As usual, the Gaang gets away with wearing their usual clothes... with hoods. No one seems to notice that their clothes are out of place — the thing that finally gives them away is Aang's airbending in public. Sokka even lampshades it. However, they do get full-face masks early in the festival, which helps them blend in due to everyone else there also wearing similar disguises as part of the celebration... until Aang decides to airbend, anyway.
  Sokka: (Sarcastically) It's like you're a whole different person!
• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Downplayed with Zhao; Jeong-Jeong describes him as always having possessed the wrong temperament for firebending, but their relationship only ended because Zhao became bored. When they're reunited, Jeong-Jeong even encourages his old student not to throw his life away fighting the Avatar.
• Refusal of the Call: Jeong-Jeong wants nothing to do with the Gaang — until Avatar Roku shows up.
• Shout-Out: The entire episode comes across as one to Apocalypse Now — the reclusive deserter hiding in the wild, his small but loyal band of followers, his talkative and worshipful tagalong... not to mention riverboats, a tribe attacking said riverboats with spears, a public show that goes sideways, a lot of fire, and monologues about the horror that man is capable of.
• Smoke Bomb: Chey uses them for distraction, although rather than using them to hide himself he prefers to throw them at the feet of his pursuers, and then escape while they're disoriented by the bang, flash, and cloud of smoke.
• Stumbling Upon the Lost Wizard: Aang and friends happen to bump into the servant of the legendary firbending master Jeong-Jeong. He has a hidden encampment where fellow deserters learn from his example and fight any intruders who disturb his solitude. He isn't as sinister as other examples of this trope, but he is cynical and only reluctantly agrees to help the heroes learn his magical arts.
• Training from Hell: At least that's how Aang feels about his firebending training — Jeong-Jeong's emphasis on restraint and self-control means that the majority of it is spent practicing repetitive, mind-numbing stances, breathing exercises, and other small tasks.
• Trash Talk:
  • When Aang is trying to goad Zhao into overusing his firebending, he repeatedly insults his talent, power, and combat skills, and compares him unflatteringly to Zuko.
    Aang: Is that all you got? Man, they'll make anyone an admiral these days!
    
    
    Aang: I don't know why, but I thought you'd be better than Zuko!
  • After tricking Zhao into setting his boats on fire, he leaves with a final wish to "Have a nice walk home!"
• To Win Without Fighting : During their fight, Aang sees that Zhao has even less restraint than he does when it comes to firebending. With this knowledge, especially with what Jeong-Jeong said earlier, Aang stops fighting back and instead provokes him throughout the field until the admiral accidentally destroys his ships, leaving him temporarily stranded.
  Aang: You've lost this battle.
  Zhao: Are you crazy!? You haven't thrown a single blow!
  Aang: No. But you have. Jeong-Jeong said you had no restraint.
• Underestimating Badassery: Zhao dismisses Jeong-Jeong's warning that he is not ready to face the Avatar, saying that he can handle a child. Cue Aang inflicting a very humiliating defeat without actually fighting back.
• "Wanted!" Poster: Aang, the Blue Spirit, Jeong-Jeong and Chey. Aang keeps his as a souvenir. They don't have the stereotypical layout, but an image on the left, with text on the right. Notably, the Blue Spirit's poster shows him wearing his full disguise, since the Fire Nation officials wouldn't have any way to know what he looks like underneath it, which rather defeats the purpose of getting citizens to keep an eye out for him in public.
• What the Hell, Hero?: After Aang accidentally burns Katara, her brother Sokka gets understandably angry at him and Jeong-Jeong, who taught Aang firebending in the first place.
• You Are Not Ready: Jeong-Jeong makes it clear that Aang is not ready for firebending — firstly because waterbending and earthbending come first in the cycle, and secondly because fire is the most dangerous and uncontrollable of the elements if not handled with expertise and care.
  Jeong-Jeong: Are you deaf? How can I teach you if you refuse to listen? Before learning Firebending, you must learn Water and Earth. Water is cool and soothing, Earth is steady and stable. But Fire... Fire is alive. It breathes, it grows. Without the Bender, a rock will not throw itself! But Fire will spread and destroy everything in its path if one does not have the will to control it! That is its destiny! You are not ready! You are too weak!

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