Legend of Korra book 2 Spirits premiere: First Impressions

Let me just start by saying that this has been one of the longest waits I've had for a tv show to return, so long in fact that at some points I even forgot that it was supposed to come back this year. My friends, the time has finally come for the return of Korra. Here is my general impression of it. I'm going to do the best that I can with this review while avoiding as many spoilers as I can.

We open with a recap of the last episode of season one then we learn that it has been roughly six months since the defeat of Amon. When then learn what has become of the heroes since the last season: Korra has been continuing her airbending training, Mako has quit pro-bending and become a member of the Republic City Police for some unexplained reason (complete with cheesy one-liners), Bolin has continued being a pro-bender and made a new team of fire ferrets and apparently they suck without Mako and Korra, and Asami has taken over her fathers' company. We also get a look at Aang's daughter Kaya. We also learn more about Korra's family and a certain Water Tribe tradition: The Glacier Spirits Festival. We also learn that the Southern Tribe is spiritually out of balance and that neither the Northern Tribe's chief nor the spirits are too happy with them. If I said anything else I'd be risking accidentally going into spoiler territory and thats not how I roll.

The Glacier Spirits Festival

Overall, it was a nice premiere episode for the season and will hopefully help expand on the spiritual side of being the Avatar, something that was only lightly touched upon in Avatar The Last Airbender. The Northern Chief seems like he'll be an interesting character. He leads me to believe the theme for this season will be religious oppression or something like that since he mostly just went on and on about how the Southern Water Tribe and the world itself had lost its way and turned its back on the old ways (the end of the premiere almost confirms that for me). It helps reinforce how much the world has changed since Aang's time as the avatar. Bolin is as funny as ever. We got to see a few funny moments with Tenzin and his family (including his brother Bumi, his sister Kaya, and his mother Katara). Though something seems slightly off about Mako to me but that may be due to a change in writers and I can't help but wonder if we'll see Chief Beifong again. The animation was great and the action was very well done which is to be expected for a franchise like Avatar. Despite some hiccups with Korra's character (I won't get into them here because it falls under spoilers) it was a nice start to a very promising season.