Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko created one of the greatest fantasy series of all time with Avatar: The Last Airbender, imagining a rich world filled with wondrous magic, clashing cultures, and bizarre hybrid animals. Their sequel, The Legend of Korra, moved the world forward a generation and invented a new steampunk urban setting, while also featuring plenty of cameos and flashbacks with established characters like Aang, Katara, and Toph. For their third series, DiMartino and Konietzko, along with executive producers Ethan Spaulding and Sehaj Sethi, have taken a radical step: destroying everything they built.
Avatar: Seven Havens joins a rich legacy of post-apocalyptic fantasy, where heroes of a fallen age must band together to face a rising threat. In The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, and The Stormlight Archive, the glorious past and the circumstances that led to ruin have been largely relegated to myth. Seven Havens takes a similar tack, but with a clever twist: Avatar fans already know what this world used to be like, but not how things got so bad.
Seven Havens is set 300 years after the events of Avatar: The Last Airbender — or 225 years after The Legend of Korra. The four nations that once lived in harmony have all been wiped out by a mysterious cataclysm, supposedly unleashed by the last Avatar, Korra. The survivors live in seven isolated Havens, which are constantly besieged by devastating storms and ravagers. In Ellora, the Haven of Wind and Sand, all benders are conscripted into a brigade to protect its people from the elements, bandits, and crumbling infrastructure. But fewer benders are born every year, and the brigade’s numbers are shrinking. The situation is already unstable, but when a mysterious threat from the spirit world emerges, Ellora’s very survival is put in jeopardy.
Every part of Seven Havens‘ setup oozes with potential. Korra’s role in the cataclysm teases fans, who can’t imagine her recklessly destroying the world. It also makes things extremely difficult for our new Avatar, Pavi (Saheli Khan), an awkward child who spends most of her time dumpster-diving and talking to rocks and bugs. Pavi has to deal not only with the awesome responsibility of her power, but the fact that almost everyone in Ellora views the Avatar as the ultimate evil.
It’s been 21 years since Avatar: The Last Airbender premiered on Nickelodeon, and DiMartino and Konietzko have the tricky task of appealing to fans that grew up on the series while bringing in a new generation of kids. Older viewers might not relate to Pavi’s antics — she blows her cover in the first episode by getting into a fight with another child and unleashing biting insects on a crowd — but it’s the kind of goofy stuff that made Aang so endearing in the original. Pavi’s more disciplined twin sister Nisha (Aishu Devan) is a strong foil, and the warmth behind even their fights gives the show a powerful emotional core.
Older viewers have their own characters to connect with, whether it’s the eager-to-please teenage brigade squad leader Jae (Major Curda) or the gentle and patient Captain Karthik (Akshay Khanna). The show works well as all-ages entertainment in that all the protagonists are struggling with the exact same thing: feeling like they’re in over their head in an extremely high-stakes situation where others are looking to them for answers. The show’s overt climate crisis themes and the general tension in Ellora make Seven Havens quite dark at times, but this is a franchise that taught kids about genocide and industrial warfare. DiMartino and Konietzko know how to combine the serious and the silly, like having a crazed armadillo camel serve as an early harbinger that something is very wrong in Ellora.
New world, new look
Avatar Studios changed the animation style for Avatar: Seven Havens, with more rounded character designs and less naturalistic environments. Where Avatar: The Last Airbender was defined by breaking up the action with gorgeous, gentle scenes of Appa coasting over the sea, Seven Havens never lets the outdoor world feel like a place you could relax. The overly vivid colors, jagged crystals, and fierce lightning storms give the scenery an ominous quality that reinforces Ellora’s status as a refuge.
One of the Avatar franchise’s greatest strengths has always been creatively imagining all the ways benders could use their powers, and Seven Havens constantly delivers dazzling new showcases. Brigades have benders of each type use their abilities in harmony to tackle any problem, including powering the complex technology that protects Ellora from the elements. Of course, there are also dramatic battles between benders, which more impact because of the claustrophobic setting and the fact that Pavi typically has to hide the full extent of her abilities. Every 22-minute episode delivers eye-popping action, keeping the show’s momentum strong even if answers about what’s going on are doled out sparingly.
Seven Havens is far more mystery-driven than the previous Avatar shows, invoking the feel of Lost with its use of flashbacks to slowly unveil Nisha and Pavi’s backstory. Each piece of information about the world outside of Ellora leads to more questions and is laced with the promise of still more threats. The world feels dangerously fragile as characters are so caught up in dealing with their immediate problems that larger issues fester until they boil over into crisis.
Paramount greenlit Seven Havens for two 13-episode seasons, but it feels like this series could run for far longer as Pavi and her allies tour more of the Havens and try to repair the world. (Seven havens → seven seasons?) Mystery shows can falter if they move too slowly or don’t deliver satisfying answers, but the fundamentals of Seven Havens are so strong that I have faith in DiMartino, Konietzko, and company to avoid those pitfalls. They built a fascinating world and then destroyed it. I just hope they have plenty of time to put all the pieces back together.
The first three episodes of Avatar: Seven Havens are available to stream now on Paramount Plus.