[8.1/10] Familial feuds are an easy trope. You show two characters who have a history together, they hash things out, and then they emerge a little closer to reconciliation. It’s easy for it to devolve into a rote form of storytelling. The devil, however, is in the details, and in this case, the history between Lin and Su is deepened by what we know about their mother and the hints we’ve gotten so far about their shared past. “Old Wounds” plays at two levels, like the best Avatar-verse episodes, it works as a surface level tale of two sisters who simply didn’t see eye-to-eye and work through their isuses. But for a more adult audience, there’s nice subtext of Lin struggling to emulate her mom in order to try to please her, Su trying to act out in order to get Toph to notice her, and the notion of “having a life” and later, a family, being something that remains a sore spot between them. The show even melds that nicely (no pun intended) with Opal. The post-fight epiphany is a cliché, but I like that Lin realizes she was trying to chase her mother’s dreams, not her own, and it’s made her less fulfilled than she could be, a mistake she doesn’t want Opal to repeat. And I like that Su realizes that she may have overcompensated for how liberal a hand Toph used when raising them, by putting too many boundaries on her own kids. The acupuncture-induced flashbacks that get us there are a bit convenient, but a young Su causing Lin’s scare after an intra-family arrest works well as a symbol of their breaking point as siblings, and it’s a treat to her Jesse Flowers back voicing someone in the Beifong family. (In another casting note, I just learned that Henry Rollins is the voice of Zahir, which is pretty cool too!) The rest of the episode doesn’t take up as much oxygen given how central the Beifong family drama is, but it’s all still quite good. Korra learning to metal-bend with a meteorite shows is a nice way to show us what metal bending training looks like in the modern day. Bolin wanting to learn to metal-bend (and having Toph as an idol) but being too nervous to try for fear it’ll confirm he’s not a one-in-a-hundred bender who can master it gives him something amusing and sympathetic to do. And Team Anti-Avatar’s car heist has some solid action to keep them rumbling along before the inevitable confrontation with Korra and the gang. Overall, “Old Wounds” takes an old trope and breathes new life in it with quality writing and great performances from the Beifong sisters.