Pavi (Saheli Khan) lives outside the walls of Ellora, a nine-year-old with a wooden prosthetic leg and a cat-monkey for company. On festival day she slips into the city, and before the first episode is over she has earthbent in front of the Brigade that polices every bender inside those walls. That is where “Avatar: Seven Havens” starts. The long-awaited sequel series from Avatar Studios and Nickelodeon Animation premiered on Paramount+ on Friday, October 9th, with its first three episodes. It spends its first half hour arguing that a kid who earthbends by accident is a stranger, more interesting hero than the destroyer everyone in this world has been raised to fear.
Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the pair who built “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “The Legend of Korra,” created the new series. Sehaj Sethi serves as co-executive producer and head writer, and TheWrap noted that the show has “a predominantly Asian voice acting cast” and “an Asian writing team as well.” Episodes are rolling out three at a time on Fridays, with episodes four through six landing October 16th, seven through nine on October 23rd, and the final four, episodes ten through thirteen, closing out Book One on October 30th. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Avatar: Seven Havens” episodes one through three.
It spends its first half hour arguing that a kid who earthbends by accident is a stranger, more interesting hero than the destroyer everyone in this world has been raised to fear.”
The world here is 225 years past the end of “The Legend of Korra,” and it has not aged well. A cataclysm the survivors blame on Korra herself tore the Four Nations apart. What is left of humanity now lives packed into seven fortified havens, Ellora among them, and every bender in Ellora is registered into the Element Bending Brigade that guards its walls. Episode one, “On the Horizon,” has Pavi’s earthbending catch the eye of Jae (Major Curda), a Brigade squad leader who wants to recruit her on the spot. Then a tornado hits, and she ends up showing Jae that she can airbend too, which should not be possible for one person. By the end of the episode, the Brigade’s secret is out: it already has an Avatar. That Avatar is Nisha (Aishu Devan), Pavi’s estranged twin sister, and when the two meet, hints of a childhood they shared start coming back.
The first episode leans hard on how much this world has turned against its own hero. Ellora’s annual festival includes an informal stage play that, in Processed Media’s words, “shows us just how much the people of this time have come to hate the concept of the Avatar, thanks to Korra’s destroyed legacy.” FandomWire’s recap puts it more bluntly: in Ellora, “Korra is an enemy.” Pavi’s own way into the plot is smaller and stranger. In FandomWire’s telling, she is trying to help a beetle find its family, which an opportunistic girl has been turning into jewelry to sell at the festival, and it is freeing those beetles that sets off the chaos Jae watches her earthbend through. Kenji Ono directed the premiere from Sethi’s script, and Processed Media compared it to “The Boy in the Iceberg,” the episode that opened the original series by introducing a world as much as a hero.
“Into the Storm” is where the premiere stops being a character introduction and starts being a mystery box. It is also the episode where Captain Karthik (Akshay Khanna), the Brigade officer who has been training Nisha, steps forward. A storm rolls over Ellora carrying something unnatural at its center, a pulsing red force that different recaps describe in slightly different terms but that functions the same way wherever it shows up. It finds the twins while they are helping defend the city. Contact with it floods both girls, at once, with fragmented pieces of a shared childhood neither of them can fully place. It might be the cleanest way yet to dramatize amnesia without a clunky flashback structure, and it gives the back half of the premiere block somewhere to go that is not just “two kids discover powers.”
By “The Order,” the show commits to its structure for the season. The Order of the White Lotus, the old secret society that oversaw Korra’s training, resurfaces to take over training both Avatars at once. Karthik turns out to be a member, which recasts everything he has done up to that point. Jae signs on alongside him, and the episode closes on a group of masked, demon-faced warriors gathering with Ellora in their sights. It is a stinger that suggests episode four has somewhere dangerous to aim both girls almost immediately. It is a tidy three-episode shape: introduction, complication, commitment. It also looks like a signal that this creative team learned something from how slowly “Korra” revealed its own hand.
The cast around Pavi and Nisha does a lot of the work, too. Geet and Ruhi (Dee Bradley Baker), a pair of cat-monkey companions voiced by the franchise’s reliable creature specialist, give the show its comic relief without leaning on a single mascot the way “Avatar” leaned on Momo. Daemin (Darren Barnet), a waterbender, is part of the main cast from the start. Agam (Sakina Jaffrey), an Ellora restaurateur, rounds it out, and her presence alone suggests the show is building out a whole town, not just a Brigade headquarters. Feature First called the twins “definitely the highlight,” and the reviews that like this show tend to like it for the same two girls.
The score deserves its own mention, because Jeremy Zuckerman returns to the franchise, and TheWrap called it “Zuckerman’s best work yet.” That tracks with how much heavier lifting the music does in a show that is, by design, withholding plot information. The animation is a different conversation. Feature First noticed a moment “where a character’s outline is momentarily thicker than the other characters.” TheWrap, more gently, said there is “simply less detail here than ‘Korra'”: “fewer shadows and facial details, and some fairly simplistic movement.” Whether that is a style choice or a budget line is hard to tell from the outside, and it might be some of both.
The reviews landing on premiere day split hard, and that split is worth sitting with rather than smoothing over. CBR argued that “almost all the Asian and Indigenous influences feel muted.” It went as far as to say “it’s as if this show doesn’t belong to the Avatar universe to begin with,” a sharp complaint for a franchise that built its reputation on specificity. But Why Tho landed at the opposite end, calling the first three episodes “a magnificent start to what promises to be an exciting and bold chapter in the Avatar Universe” at a 9.5 out of 10. Processed Media’s B+ review put it more plainly, saying the mix of “tragedy, mystery, and resilience is already quite addicting, even only after its first half hour.” Inverse, somewhere in the middle, liked the twin Avatars but found the show “a little underbaked,” with pacing that keeps viewers waiting on answers. A show this divisive after three episodes is usually one that is actually trying something, and “Seven Havens” probably earns that benefit of the doubt more than it earns a settled verdict.
What the premiere gets right, unambiguously, is its hook. Two Avatars should not exist in this world at the same time, and the franchise has never had to answer for that before. The show spends exactly three episodes setting up the question. Then it hands both girls over to an institution, the Order of the White Lotus, that clearly has its own agenda for them. That is a more confident opening than “Korra” allowed itself. It buys “Seven Havens” real goodwill heading into episode four, even from the critics who think the show still owes its audience some real answers.
What Do You Think? Is Pavi or Nisha the “true” Avatar, or does the show mean for both of them to share the title? Who are the masked warriors closing out “The Order,” and what do they want with Ellora? And does Korra deserve the blame this world has put on her, or is that mystery the whole season is building toward?
Catch up properly: every Avatar movie and series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Avatar Cycle timeline.
See you on the next binge!
