Before The Blue Spirit rescued Aang, Zhao had a golden opportunity to kill him. So why didn’t he?

Admiral Zhao is arguably the most underrated villain of the Avatar saga. Once Zuko’s sympathetic backstory was revealed, Zhao became the de facto villain of Book One: Water. His attack on the Northern Water Tribe and killing of the Tui, the Moon Spirit, were some of the most cold-blooded and compelling moments of the entire Avatar: The Last Airbender series. In the end, Zhao paid a supreme price for his acts that not only angered the Water Nation, but the spirits as well. The Ocean Spirit captured and dragged Zhao into the Fog of Lost Souls, a fitting punishment for his hubris and one of the rare death scenes to play out on Nickelodeon.

Azula and Ozai quickly made the audience forget about Zhao, but his actions and mistakes in Book One were very memorable. The biggest mistake of his occured in the episode “The Blue Spirit,” where he finally captured Avatar Aang but did not kill him. This decision by Zhao was not only a mistake because Zuko, disguised as the Blue Spirit, helped Aang escape, but because it’s a practical plot hole in the series. Zhao explained to Aang that if he died, the Avatar would be reborn and the search would have to start all over again. The reason why that logic doesn’t make sense is because, while the Avatar would be reborn, they would be an infant during Sozin’s Comet and thus the Fire Nation would win the war.

Zhao’s plan is seemingly to keep Aang imprisoned for the rest of his life, thus delaying the search for the next Avatar by about 50 years. However, this strategy is completely ignored by Azula and Ozai, whose goals were to kill the Avatar, not imprison him. Why would Zhao, who had arguably the best chance the Fire Nation ever had at killing Aang, decide to keep him alive? Besides the status of Zuko’s mother, it’s arguably the biggest unanswered question of the series.

With the original series now available on Netflix, a lot of fans who grew up with the show have been coming up with new theories. One Reddit theory suggests that Zhao kept Aang alive because the Fire Nation didn’t realize what he was doing for the past century. One thing that isn’t talked about is how exactly did the Fire Nation perceive Avatar Aang when he was finally discovered? Katara and the Sokka found him in the iceberg, but that wasn’t really common knowledge throughout the world at the time. What if Zhao and the Fire Nation thought that Aang was in hiding the whole time and somehow managed to keep himself appearing 12 years old instead of 112? If people believed Aang stayed 12 for a century, they could very easily suspect that Aang is immortal.

There’s also another possible reason Zhao kept Aang alive: or his own personal glory. He needed to prove to the Fire Nation that he captured the Avatar, and the only way he could was by bringing him to the Kingdom alive. If he just killed Aang, all he would have to bring back was his body. The people would have to take Zhao and Fire Lord Ozai at their word that the Avatar was killed, and there aren’t even cameras to film or take pictures of the Avatar whether living or dead.

In that same episode, Colonel Shinu called out Zhao, saying that capturing the Avatar was more of a vanity project than an attempt to win the war. Bringing the oddly young Avatar who’d been missing for a century back to the Fire Nation as their prisoner makes Zhao’s deed a lot harder to dispute than bringing the body of a 12 year old boy with Air Nation tattoos. Thankfully Zhao’s personal desires benefited the Avatar, as The Blue Spirit was given the time to save him.