I’ve been waiting for well over a year for Season 3 of Avatar: The Last Airbender to appear on Nickelodeon.  The season premiere date was shrouded in mystery until practically only a week before it actually appeared.

Of course, I missed it — Nick’s web page has been ridiculously out of date and never seems to show proper schedules (until a few days ago, the official Avatar web page didn’t even mention season 3, even though it was already playing).

Enter iTunes!  For $1.99 per episode, I was able to download the first two episodes of season 3 and watch them on my laptop!

For those who have never seen it, Avatar is a magnificent animated show.  It plays like and is clearly inspired by Japanese animation (particularly Miyazaki), but is American made.  It concerns a world, roughly based on ancient Japan, where societies have been built around the four elements: Air, Earth, Fire, Water.  Members of each country have the ability to control their respective element, and all live in harmony until one day the Fire Nation launches attacks the others.  One “bender”, the Avatar, has the ability to control all elements and is the only hope to stop the Fire Nation’s attack, but he vanishes for a hundred years.

Flash forward to the present: the avatar is discovered frozen in an iceberg, and he has been incarnated as a 13-year old boy.  He is the last airbender alive, as all others were slaughtered by the Fire Nation, and the series follows him as he struggles to learn to control the other elements and save the world.

When I explained the storyline to a friend recently, he said, to effect, “Sounds like every other Japanese animation ever made.”   This is true, to some extent, but the characters and the world of Avatar really sell it.  As the seasons progress, the characters are growing, both in maturity and power.  The world is incredibly well thought out and detailed — each bending discipline has its own distinct martial arts fighting style, and each nation has a distinct culture.

Perhaps the best thing: each season is named after one of the four elements, which seems to imply that the series will actually have an ending! (Of course, they could fool me by having ‘Water part II’, so I’d better not get my hopes up.)

And season 3?  If the first two episodes are any indication, it will be amazing!