The Boy in the Iceberg


 * This article is about the episode. For the play, see The Boy in the Iceberg (play). For the titular character, see Aang.

"The Boy in the Iceberg" is the first episode of season one of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the first of the overall series. It debuted on February 21, 2005.

Overview
''While fishing, siblings Katara and Sokka discover Aang, a young boy frozen in an iceberg. After freeing him and his flying bison named Appa, they learn his identity as an airbender, long thought extinct, and bring him back to their village in the Southern Water Tribe. After witnessing the beam of light that shot through the sky after the two broke through the ice, Zuko, exiled prince of the Fire Nation tasked with finding the long lost Avatar to restore his honor, becomes intent on capturing him. While playing, Aang and Katara mistakenly trigger a booby trap in an ancient Fire Nation ship, revealing Aang's whereabouts to the nearby Zuko.''

Introduction
Long ago, the legendary Avatar kept the world and its four nations at peace with each other. However, the Avatar disappeared one hundred years ago and hasn't been seen since. During that time, the tyrannical Fire Nation used the opportunity to wage war with the other three nations, seeking to conquer them. One hundred years passed and people began to lose hope that the Avatar would ever return and bring peace back to the world. Even the Southern Water Tribe, located in the distant South Pole sea, has been affected by the Fire Nation's war. The men of the tribe all sailed abroad to fight, leaving behind the women and children. Sokka and his younger sister Katara are the oldest of the tribe's children in the South Pole.

Synopsis
Two siblings, Katara and Sokka, are out fishing in a small canoe. Katara, a waterbender, practices waterbending as Sokka prepares to spear a fish. Katara bends the water around a fish to lift it above the canoe; Sokka penetrates the water bubble with the back of his spear, causing the fish to fall back into the water and soak him. He grows angry and scolds Katara, saying that if he had "weird powers" he would keep his "weirdness" to himself. When the sea currents suddenly pick up speed, Sokka tries to steer the boat to avoid colliding with the small chunks of floating ice, while Katara gives directions. However, the boat is crushed between two ice floes, leaving Sokka and Katara stranded in the middle of the sea on a floating chunk of ice. Sokka blames Katara for the mess, which causes her to lose her temper and start yelling at him.



As Katara rages, she ends up violently waterbending without realizing it; soon, she cracks and shatters an ice formation, revealing a giant glowing orb of iceberg which rises to the surface of the ocean. Seeing the form of a human inside the ice, Katara thinks the person needs help and begins chopping away at the iceberg with Sokka's club, against his warning not to, as they don't know who the "thing" is. The ice breaks and releases a bright column of light into the sky.

Prince Zuko, a Fire Nation teenager who has been hunting the Avatar for two years, sees the bright light from his ship. His uncle, Iroh, who has accompanied the young prince on his journey, dismisses the event as completely natural. Zuko orders his crew to head towards the light, insisting that the light was emitted due to the Avatar.

After Katara breaks through the ice, she finds the person is a young boy with strange arrow-like marks on his head, hands, and feet. Sokka is skeptical and points his spear at the boy, but the boy simply falls down and into Katara's arms. She lays him down and tries to help him. Sokka pokes the boy in the head with the blunt side of his spear, still skeptical, but Katara shoos him away.

The mysterious boy drowsily opens his eyes to see Katara staring at him with deep blue eyes. He quickly becomes fully dazzled, cheerfully asking Katara if she wants to go penguin sledding with him. The boy introduces himself as Aang and sneezes, sending himself high into the air, but he slowly drifts back down again unharmed. Katara realizes that he must be an airbender.



Aang climbs back into the ice to find Appa, a very large flying bison. It takes a moment for Aang to wake him up. Appa sneezes on Sokka and covers him with bison snot, to which Sokka reacts with disgust. The warrior does not believe that the bison can actually fly and walks away, only to realize that he is stranded in the middle of the sea and can't go back home. Aang offers to fly them back to the Southern Water Tribe where they live, to which Katara happily agrees while Sokka refuses at first, but agrees later as he has no choice. Then the group gets on Appa's saddle. Sokka still refused to believe that Appa could fly. Aang cries, "Yip-Yip!", causing Appa to leap into the air, but he comes crashing right back down into the water and starts swimming. Aang figures Appa's still too tired to fly just yet. Aang turns around and stares at Katara with a huge smile on his face, causing her to ask, "Why are you smiling at me like that?" to which he replies, "Oh, I was smiling?" Sokka lifts his head back, groaning while Katara, at first smiling at Aang's response, frowns back at Sokka. After sometime, Katara tells Aang that the last Avatar was supposed to be an Air Nomad and asks if Aang knew him. Aang awkwardly states that he knew people that knew the Avatar, but did not know the actual Avatar himself.

Later, Aang has a dream about a storm that he and Appa had encountered while they were near the South Pole. He re-lives in the dream how he and Appa were brought under the waves by the intense wind and rain, and how Aang started glowing and created the orb of ice that surrounded him. He is jolted awake, finding himself in a tent in the Southern Water Tribe and being awakened by Katara. He quickly gets dressed with Katara watching. She notices the arrow markings running along his body and then when he's completely dressed, pulls him into the village to introduce him to the entire village which was quite small.

Everyone expresses surprise at seeing an airbender as no one has seen an Air Nomad in a hundred years, thinking they must have become extinct. Sokka wonders why Aang always carries a staff around, realizing it's not sharp enough to stab anybody, and Aang shows them how he uses airbending to fly with it. Aang ends up accidentally crashing into Sokka's poorly-constructed watch tower.



Kanna, also known as Gran Gran, the grandmother of Katara and Sokka, is wondering if Aang may be a threat to the tribe. Katara wants him to stay, believing he could teach the village so many good things, and teach her waterbending. They happen to glance over at Aang who is showing off to the village toddlers how he can stick his tongue to his staff.

On the Fire Nation ship, Prince Zuko is practicing his firebending techniques, with Uncle Iroh as his mentor. Zuko becomes impatient and asks for his uncle to teach him advanced moves, but Iroh demands that he first master the basics. However, after Zuko's angry persistence, he finally consents.

Sokka begins to teach the young boys of the tribe, lecturing them about how they are the "warriors" of this tribe until one of them says innocently they need to pee. Sokka gets mad at Aang for distracting his "warriors" with fun and games and throws a fit. When Aang sees a penguin, he gets excited and tries to capture it, but it's too fast and slippery. Katara approaches and agrees to teach him the "fine art" of catching penguins, in exchange for lessons in waterbending. However, Aang points out that he knows nothing about waterbending, being an airbender, and tells her that she could learn from the other people in the tribe, but Katara tells him that she is the only waterbender in the whole South Pole. Aang says that the Northern Water Tribe should have waterbenders to teach Katara, and offers to fly her to the North Pole. Katara is not sure whether leaving her tribe is a good idea. Aang suggests to her that she could think about it later, and in the meantime she could teach him to catch penguins. Thus, Katara begins her "lessons" to Aang.



Aang and Katara go penguin sledding, having fun until they accidentally slide near an old abandoned shipwreck. Aang wants to go in and explore it, but Katara is wary. She has been told never to go onto the Fire Navy ship, but Aang convinces her. As they explore the ship, Aang wonders why a Fire Nation ship was so far from its home. Katara realizes Aang has no knowledge of the War at all, as she learns that he was trapped in the iceberg for one hundred years. They accidentally set off a booby trap in the ship, sending off a flare into the sky. Aang saves Katara by carrying her and airbending out of the ship. However, Prince Zuko has seen the flare and Aang escaping from the ship, and Zuko believes he has found the long lost Avatar - at last.

Credits

 * Written by:
 * Michael Dante DiMartino
 * Bryan Konietzko
 * Aaron Ehasz (additional writing)
 * Peter Goldfinger (additional writing)
 * Josh Stolberg (additional writing)


 * Directed by:
 * Dave Filoni


 * Starring:
 * Zach Tyler Eisen - Aang
 * Mae Whitman - Katara
 * Jack DeSena - Sokka
 * Dante Basco - Prince Zuko
 * Dee Bradley Baker - Appa


 * Also starring:
 * Mako - Uncle
 * Melendy Britt - Gran Gran


 * Additional voices:
 * Dee Bradley Baker
 * Dante Basco
 * Madeline Lovejoy
 * Luke Zampas

Series continuity

 * The abandoned Fire Navy ship Aang and Katara explore is the same one Hama and the other waterbenders were shown uprooting decades before in a flashback from the episode "The Puppetmaster".
 * The subtitle of the last episode in the series, "Avatar Aang", and this episode's title both refer to Aang himself. They also highlight how he has changed. In the beginning, he is a young Avatar who has not mastered the elements and is found in an iceberg. By the end he is a fully-realized Avatar.
 * This episode takes place in and around the Southern Water Tribe, location number 42 on the map of the World of Avatar.
 * In the close ups of Aang at the start of this episode Aang's eyebrows are a light golden brown color but at the start of Book 3 until The Day of Black Sun Aang's hair and eyebrows are a dark brown color.
 * When Sokka says "You can't fight firebenders with fun", Aang responds with "You should try it". This foreshadows the events in "The Headband", when Aang uses fun to weaken the Fire Nation's control over their youth.

Character revelations

 * In this episode, Katara reveals that she is the only waterbender in the South Pole.
 * During Aang's dream, we find out how Aang was frozen in the iceberg.

Goofs

 * During the scene where Zuko is trying to get Iroh to teach him an advanced set of firebending moves, Zuko's belt is momentarily silver instead of the usual gold.
 * When Sokka and Katara first see Aang in the iceberg, there is nothing in the water between them, but in the next frame there are many floating icebergs in the water.
 * After Appa sneezes on Sokka, the latter's entire right side is shown covered in bison snot. A few seconds later he is clean again, as if the incident never occurred.
 * When Aang is letting the kids use Appa's tail as a slide, the first scene shows his tail propped up on Sokka's spear. The next scene shows Appa a few feet away, with his tail on the ground. In the scene after that, Appa's tail returns to its original position atop the spear.
 * When Aang and Katara stand next to the abandoned ship, they look up at the tattered flag still waving atop the mast. In that shot, they are about five feet away from the shadow of the boat. In the next shot, however, they are standing right next to the shadow.
 * When Aang crashes into the watch tower at the Southern Water Tribe he is covered in snow but when Katara pulls him up, he is lying on top of the snow.
 * In the beginning of the episode, when Katara and Sokka are fishing, before Katara waterbends the fish out of the water she takes her glove off, but in the next scene and for the rest of that day, the glove is back on her hand. Katara was never shown putting the glove back on.

Trivia

 * This is the only episode to feature a different and extended opening sequence.
 * Though this is the first official episode of the series, the Avatar Series Pilot was created beforehand, but never aired on television.
 * Sokka said he might have "Midnight Sun Madness" because during summertime in the South Pole, which is the wintertime in the Northern Hemisphere, there are more hours of sunlight in the day, due to the southern hemisphere facing the sun.
 * This is one of only two episodes that shows "To be continued" before the ending credits. The other one is "The Boiling Rock, Part 1".
 * According to Avatar: The Last Airbender; The Art of the Animated Series, the creators of the show like to think that Aang and Appa were "floating in a ball of energy" instead of being frozen solid.

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