AWKWARD ZOMBIE

To be fair, everyone knows that ONE guy, maybe two, who you wouldn't trust with a task of just standing there doing nothing, because they'd fuck even that up. Those two gave both Mako, and Lin every reason to think that they wouldn't do jack shit with any information pertaining to the case. They'd continue to think it was the triads until the other guy was caught red handed, and then do that "Der, we had no idea!" thing.

And seriously, even if she was caught in meetings, suddenly she's not? Suddenly she has an interest? She's telling Mako to trust the wonder twins with all of the evidence/leads, but then the first chance she gets, she micromanages the hell out of the two guys anyway. Why wasn't her first thought after getting done with the political shenanigans to bring all three of them in and ask "Alright ladies, what do you have?"

For the record, Mako is a known criminal. Lin isn't doing the right thing anymore than Korra was doing the right thing, but they don't have the luxury of seeing everything from our point of view. They did the best they could with the information they had.

What pisses me off about Tenzin was how he contributed to the temporary split in their mentor relationship. If he believed, like Korra's dad believed, that she needed a normal childhood sheltered from the outside world, they should have told her. Instead they lied for some decade and a half and were surprised when it destroyed her trust in them.

Mako is an ex-known criminal who joined the police force after saving Republic City from the Equalists with the Avatar.

Whichever thug gave Lin the lead to look at Mako is still a known criminal with no such track record.

There is no reason why she'd logically want to trust any sort thug over Mako.

Mako hired that thug and then admitted to it. She investigated the accusation and found evidence supporting it. He's also been arrested, not executed. Lin has also made it clear that past deeds don't make up for current screwups. She didn't cut Korra any slack when she first came to town because of Aang's deeds and she didn't cut her any slack for stopping the Equalists when she brought back a war.

Mako hired those thugs because he brought whatever leads and evidence he had to Lin already, and she told him to go shove it up his pooper.

Then she got rustled when he had the audacity to continue investigating the crime he had every reason to believe was going on. And she would have had every reason to believe it as well, had she adopted the mentality of "following every lead" earlier, when it was her employees feeding them to her, and not a known criminal.

And it's not a matter of the Avatar getting cut slack because she's the avatar, it's a matter of Mako having already proven himself a more than competent protector/crime fighter, yet she keeps putting him down as "just a beat cop." I'm not saying give him special treatment, I'm saying she needs to be consistent with her decisions. Either remove yourself from the investigation during all stages of the investigation, or be involved in it from the start.

And if she's going to choose to be inconsistent, she at least needs to do so in a way that makes sense. Believing someone who's still a known criminal in a matter over one of her own employees, who's more than proven himself competent, is just ridiculous.

She didn't trust the criminal, she investigated his claim. That's what you do. You don't cut extra slack to a fellow cop. What will really answer the question of her competency is if she's followed up on Mako's claims in the background. This isn't Lin's incompetence, it's Mako's. He's being outsmarted by Varrick at every turn. He went home and took a load off after challenging a viciously wily criminal to a staring match. Did Mako think it would end after that?

Except that it wouldn't be cutting him any slack, it would bodaciously be giving him the exact same amount of slack she gave the criminal. And had Lin given him that level of slack from the beginning, she would have been involved to prevent the events from taking place that are leading her to believe Mako is a criminal.

That criminal is also in custody.

But Mako wouldn't be, because Lin would have been working with him from the beginning and know who the real criminal is by now.

Things would have worked out better, but that's only with hindsight. Mako tried to get her attention by himself and his testimony. That criminal had more backing him up. His testimony, the testimony of anybody else he was associated with, a massively loud event involving an off duty cop and other crooks fighting in the bay, etc. The bad guys are doing a better job of covering their tracks than the good guys are.

I'm not entirely confident how much historian fallacy would apply since I was pretty irked that she wouldn't listen to Mako the first time he started badgering her with leads. I mean, yeah, he badgered her in her meeting with the big cheese of the city, but then after she should've been like "Now what the fuck you want?!"

The point is that the only reason he broke the law in the first place is his boss wasn't giving him any sort of options to worth with within the realms of the law.

He talked about upholding his oath to the law when it supported his views and reported Korra's attempt to get Iroh to intervene in the war. He ditched the oath and hired criminals, aided criminals, and made promises to criminals, when it supported his own view. His intents were good, but his execution swept his own feet out from under him.

That's the thing though, all of that happened AFTER Lin told him that he was an idiot when he tried to enlist her support the legal way. Had she given a daisies the first time he came to her with support, then chances are he wouldn't have felt forced to circumvent the law to uphold the law. Now had she gave a daisies, told him that he's on the case and to handle it himself, and then he started breaking the law to investigate, I would have less sympathy for him. That wasn't the case, though, he brought the leads and evidence to her, and she said "You're an idiot, stop investigating, I already have these two guys who have the wrong idea about the case and won't listen to you if you bring them anymore proof working on it."

Had he done nothing after that point, those two idiots would have probably never had any idea what was happening as far as the business guy (can't remember his name for the life of me) running some Moriarty level profiteering scheme. Mako had the case running with a lead, good evidence, and was beelining to stop the conspiracy from happening. He tried to do it through the legal system, and the legal system failed. The legal thing to do after that would be to do nothing, but the moral thing is to do what he did, solve the case at all costs. I'm not saying that what he did was legal, I'm saying that his actions were forced for reasons that should not have occurred.

He can shoot lightning from his hands. He has options other than crooks. Why didn't he reach out to old Probending contacts if he wanted a security team? What he did was stupid, what Lin is doing is reasonable considering her position.

Because he figured the Triads would know more about what he was doing than a couple of probenders. It's like if you're going to plan a sting operation on a bunch of hoodlums, you hire a bunch of hoodlums to help you, not the Philadelphia Eagles. Plus, they were technically his old contacts, so he thought he could still trust them, which was really his only mistake. That and he was going for subtlety, which was why he didn't just go the route of shooting lightning at everything.