“Avatar: Seven Havens” Struggles to Make the Most of a Compelling Premise

Long ago, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko created one of the most beloved and successful children’s television shows of all time. Then, everything changed when M. Night Shyamalan adapted it.

Okay, that’s overstating things a little. The disastrous 2010 live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender had little influence on what followed; everyone, Shyamalan included, has seemed to quietly (or loudly) pretend it never existed. However, it marked the beginning of an unfortunate trend. Of the many efforts to adapt and develop the series in the two decades since its debut, none have managed to recapture that same magic—with one exception.

Pavi (Saheli Khan) and Geet (Dee Bradley Baker) in Avatar: Seven Havens. Paramount+

No, I’m not talking about Avatar: Seven Havens, the subject of this review. At least, not so far. Having seen the first six episodes, I can offer, at best, mixed praise for the latest addition to the Avatar mythos. The bright hand-drawn animation is intoxicating. The worldbuilding is predictably immaculate. Thematically and conceptually, it’s every bit as meticulously ambitious as its predecessors—which are among the most meticulously ambitious children’s media ever produced. I just hope it will eventually find ways to be a little more fun.

Note: This is a spoiler-free review.

A Compelling Start

Seven Havens is set more than 200 years after The Legend of Korra, the 2012–2014 follow-up to the original series, and a lot has changed in that time. The world has been remade by a massive cataclysm, an event most people in the show blame on Avatar Korra. Gone are the Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, Water Tribe, and Air Nomads. Humanity has retreated to seven havens (hey!) separated by storm-ravaged wastelands. The score and imagery evoke comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. (The franchise has always been good at citing its primary sources.)

We meet this world first through the eyes of Pavi (Saheli Khan), a nomadic young bender who rides a cat monkey named Geet (Dee Bradley Baker) and lives in a cave. Pavi, we discover in the first few scenes, is the new Avatar. The position no longer carries the prestige and power enjoyed in the past—because everyone blames the cataclysm on Korra, they view the Avatar as a harbinger of destruction, a public enemy whose demise is celebrated by an annual festival. Thus, Pavi lives in hiding, stealing food and making friends with insects and rocks.

It’s such a promising start that I’m disappointed not to be more emphatically on board yet. But the episodes I’ve seen so far fail to translate that promise into much compelling drama. The problems are pretty familiar, too.

So often in the Avatar media that has followed the original series, characters state their goals and desires out loud rather than behaving. You know what a moment means, but you don’t always feel it. So much of the first six episodes are filled with exposition or incidental conflicts that don’t build much momentum. The plot does manage to ratchet up near the end of that run, in evocative ways, but only after a lot of repetitive, uninspiring conflict. I’m hopeful but uncertain about the future beyond that point.

Asking Big Questions

There’s so much depth and potential to the world of Avatar, and DiMartino and Konietzko love to use their stories to ask big questions with difficult answers. In the haven of Ellora, where these episodes are set, the world seems split apart by the divide between humanity and duty. The first season’s overarching title is “Survival,” and it’s pretty accurate: These characters must work every day in order to survive the harrowing storms and raiders that threaten their lives. How much of a life are they able to carve out for themselves? How much of themselves are they required to sacrifice to the greater good? It also leads to questions of authority. How much are leaders entitled to demand of their citizens for what they believe to be the greater good?

Another character introduced in the early scenes of the first episode is Jae (Major Curdae), a teenage airbender who believes wholeheartedly in the militant structure of Ellora. Like most Ellorans, Jae believes the Avatar to be an enemy of the people. But his early interactions with Pavi call that worldview into question and lead him to explore a more nuanced view of what it means to be a good person and citizen. Jae’s mentor, Captain Karthik (Akshay Khanna), struggles with similar conflicts, but from his position as one of the city’s highest-ranking leaders. He struggles to hold Ellora together even as it appears haunted by mysterious red boxes that seem to project fear into the eyes of everyone they touch.

Glowing boxes that intensify fear and threaten to tear apart the fabric of society? Obviously this is a fantasy, referencing nothing in the real world.

The Avatar shows have always tried to offer sharp social commentary to their young audience. As mythology, metaphor, and worldbuilding, the franchise often feels more lived-in and thought-provoking to me than epic fantasy produced for older kids like Star Wars and Hunger Games. There’s a reason people are still talking about it 20 years later. There’s a reason my siblings and I repeatedly rewatch it together as a kind of ritual. The appeal of the original series was that it could be watched by Aangs, Kataras, Zukos, and Irohs of all ages, who could all get something interesting from it. There are Iroh moments from the original series that hit harder for me the older I get.

But there’s just been something … off about the many Avatar comics, novels, sequels, and adaptations that have followed over the last two decades. That raises some big questions, especially this: Is it even possible to recapture the original series’ lightning in a bottle? To that, I would answer yes, of course, because they did it one other time before. The exception I referred to at the beginning of this article is the third season of The Legend of Korra.

Paramount+

The Legacy of Korra

I’m not here to relitigate the Korra discourse from 10 years ago. I already did that at Twin Cities Con a couple years ago, not realizing that Janet Varney, the voice of Korra, was secretly listening to me behind a curtain a few feet away. (True story.) I just want to sing the praises of the show’s third season, which took a wide swath of conflicting ideas and combined them into emotionally compelling, dramatically brilliant storytelling, some of the best television I’ve seen in my entire life. It’s evidence these creators can still deliver brilliance in this format under the right conditions. Even if it takes them a while to find their footing.

Obviously, Korra looms large in the mythology of Seven Havens, the same way that Aang loomed large for Korra 14 (or 200) years ago. For The Legend of Korra’s many flaws, I couldn’t help but admire its immense ambition. It followed three generations of history, society, and technology, to explore how a society is shaped across multiple generations; how the actions of individuals responding to crises, expectations, and trauma collectively transform into history. It might be the most ambitious children’s TV show ever made. I’ll always love it for that.

Seven Havens feels similarly ambitious. Like Korra in its early days, it hasn’t quite found its footing, but I know the creators are capable of getting there. I remain optimistic and plan to keep watching.

The first three episodes of Avatar: Seven Havens are streaming on Paramount+ now, with more releasing weekly through October 30, 2026.