At the end of Northern Air Temple, we see a Fire Nation guy saying “This defeat is the gateway to many victories,” then we see them re-inflating the blimp Sokka and Teo’s dad (I don’t believe we ever get his name) used to drop bombs on them. I just want to clear one thing up here: In this episode, and in The Drill, we see three Fire Nation officials, all with beards, all in the same outfit. They are NOT the same person, they are all seperate. The first person we see is the man who rises out of a trapdoor in the Northern Air Temple, Aang confronts him, he leaves, and we don’t see him again. He has a gray beard. End of the episode, we see the another guy in the same outfit with the blimp, only this guy has a brown beard, so he definitely isn’t the same person. Finally, the last Fire Nation official, War Minister Ching, has a different shape of beard, and a different voice, then the person who came out of the trapdoor, so they are different people too. Ok, moving past that, and back to when the guy said the quote about the gateway to many victories, given what we’ve seen as of the end of The Drill, it’s unclear what gateway that blimp opened, so to speak. Possiblies-
A) We’re actually going to see the blimp sometime, used in a way that gets the Fire Nation a victory, or helps them out somehow.
B) The gateway the Fire Nation official was referring to was not one opened by the blimp itself, but by the idea that powered the blimp: heat energy. The drill the Fire Nation used to try to get into Ba Sing Se was clearly powered by steam, and although that isn’t directly what powered the blimp (a fire that let off heat and kept the blimp up), maybe they got the idea of using heat energy to power their secret weapon from the blimp. Imagine you’re the Fire Nation for one second:
Priorty number one has got to be destroying Ba Sing Se. Good news Mr. Fire Nation! You have a handy-dandy drill that can tunnel through an unbelievably thick wall. Bad news? You’ve got no way to poewr it. By the way, we found out that a blimp that was used against us in a battle was powered by heat.
Ok, you’re not the Fire Nation anymore. But the logical path of thought after that would be “Hmm, how can I take this idea for a power source and use it to assert my will upon the rest of the world?”. Using fire to power something as large as the drill would be pretty impractical, unless you had a small army of firebenders constantly shooting flames into some kind of engine (doubtful, they’d get tired, there’d be no room for all of them, etc, etc), you’d need something for the fire to burn. And lugging that around along with the weight of the drill itself? It probably wouldn’t even move, you’d need so much wood and coal. But if you took another way to generate heat, heated liquid perhaps, you could just have several large tanks of water, set up a system involving a few firebenders taking shifts, and then viola, you have steam. Which, in enough quantity, would power the drill, without that much extra weight. Then, after the steam powers the drill, it goes through a pipe system into an extremely cold envrionment, condenses, becomes liquid again, is piped off back to the tank where it started, and you have a moving drill. All from the concept of using heat. Wow, possibility B was LONG.Now, looking at all of this after the finale of Book 2, its implications are still unclear, but perhaps even greater. The plotline of Avatar must have been, at least to a certain degree, worked out in advance, and the creators had to know what they were going to do with the Book 2 Finale while approaching the end of Book 1. You just don’t put that kind of thing in there (”This defeat is the gateway to many victories”) unless it means something. At this point, it’s hard to imagine how the Fire Nation could use something like the blimp, now that they control pretty much the whole Earth Kingdom, why would they need it? I have no idea. So, in summary, anything could happen, I haven’t come to a single conclusion (as usual), and we’ll all just have to wait and find out what really happens. Please leave ideas about the Fire Nations possible use of the blimp in the comments.