Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender has not been given the all clear for a second season just yet. (…)

That said, there were certain logistical factors of making an epic fantasy drama of this scale that forced [showrunner Albert] Kim to account for the possibility of more seasons: one, his core four actors are aging up on screen before his eyes, and two, it takes time to both film and produce a single season of Avatar.

“All three seasons of the animated series essentially take place in the course of one calendar year,” Kim says of the original Nickelodeon animated show. “There was no way we could do that. So we had to design this first season, especially, to accommodate the possibility of some time elapsing between the first and the second season.”

Part of that strategy involves Sozin’s Comet, which fans of the original series are already familiar with and newbies can spot cutting across the night sky in the trailers. “The comet was their ticking clock,” Kim explains. “We removed that particular ticking clock from our show for now because we couldn’t know exactly how old our actors would be for the subsequent seasons. We definitely thought about that going into season 1 so that we can accommodate for puberty, adolescence, time passing — all of those fun things that happen to real-life human beings that don’t happen to animated characters."