How Avatar: The Way of Water ending sets up Avatar 3

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water.

Director James Cameron spoke a lot about parenting during the lead-up to Avatar: The Way of Water, the new sequel to his history-making blockbuster of 2009. He imbued his own experience as a father into the fabric of the narrative premise: Years after the events of the prior film, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) must fight to safeguard their family — including the young Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), Tuk (Trinity Bliss), and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) — from the threat of the invading RDA and the genetically resurrected Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

"What we saw in the first film were people who were fearless," Cameron had previously said. "Jake would throw himself off his ikran onto a leonopteryx, but is a father of four going do that? I'm thinking probably not, because they have a duty to survive. It doesn't mean he's a coward, but it means his priorities change."

The result of that pivot is a surprisingly emotional and personal story, one that plays out with the Na'vi, the blue-skinned inhabitants of the moon of Pandora, brought to life by performance-capture movie magic. If the goal, as Cameron noted, is to "get you on the side of the characters, so you actually care about what happens next in their journey," the ending of Avatar: The Way of Water delivers the gut punch needed to firm up that emotional connection between audience and subject.

Love and loss

The first of the Sully children we meet in Avatar: The Way of Water is Neteyam, the eldest. A prologue gives us a glimpse of his birth and the celebration that ensued among the Omaticaya clan, for which Jake has been serving as chieftain. A one-year time jump shows Neteyam as a teenager in a scene involving an Omaticaya insurgency derailing an RDA weapons shipment. Against their father's wishes, Lo'ak rides down on banshee-back into the heat of the action. Neteyam follows to keep him from harm's way, leaving the Na'vi without an aerial lookout to detect the RDA craft coming around the bend with missiles.

Jake frantically searches for his sons in the obscured wreckage from an explosion, and it seems at first that Neteyam has died. Though they all walk away with a few cuts, it's a scene that foreshadows the final moments of the film.

Quaritch, among the Marines brought back to life when the RDA imprinted their personalities and consciousness onto Avatar hybrid bodies, is tasked with assassinating Jake and ending the Na'vi insurgency. He tracks them down to the reefs that are home to the Metkayina, the clan of ocean-dwelling Na'vi that give the Sullys sanctuary.

A final battle ensues when Quaritch leads a tulkun-poaching vessel — tulkun being the highly intelligent whale-like creatures who maintain a close relationship with the Metkayina. The RDA are attempting to kill Payakan, a lonely tulkun who bonds with Lo'ak. Quaritch takes most of the Sully kids hostage (for the umteenth time), Jake and the Metkayina ride into battle on their skimwings, and the RDA ship gets sunk Titanic-style, forcing the family to race to save each other from drowning.

One member doesn't make it through to the end: Neteyam. Jake's eldest suffers a fatal wound from Quaritch's forces, and is too far offshore for anyone to heal him in time. Jake is forced to watch as Neteyam's eyes droop with his last breath.

"I really was looking at parallel fathers, father-son storylines between Jake and Neteyam, but Neteyam is really there, relative to Lo'ak, as the golden-boy older brother that everybody sees and recognizes, and who's much more like Jake," says Cameron. "Lo'ak, who's much more of a black sheep, misunderstood, rebellious, acting out, needing attention, gets in trouble. He doesn't mean to. He obviously has a good heart, and Jake realizes the stakes that they're playing for. 'This is not a game, guys. We are at war. People will get killed. You could get killed and you can get other people killed.'"

Producer Jon Landau told EW, "You can assume that the majority of the cast is returning for the third film and the subsequent films. It was important for us to write all of the scripts, get them ready before we started so that [the actors] would know their complete character arc. They could know where they were going."

Jake and Neytiri later bury Neteyam by offering his body back to Eywa in a sacred space beneath the water, surrounded by Metkayina leaders Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and their Na'vi brethren. The chieftains declare the Sullys a part of their clan as their son's body now lies within their home.

The ceremony also introduces the idea that Na'vi can commune with their deceased loved ones by connecting to Eywa. Jake is able to speak with Neteyam in a vision, as the boy appears as his young self hunting fish for the first time with his dad.

Neteyam's death forces a realization upon Jake. He spent the entirety of the movie attempting to recede from battle. He thought it best to remain hidden with the Metkayina, but Quaritch and the RDA found him anyway. As he faces camera in the final shot, Jake seems determined to actively fight back.

Worthington mentions to EW something he wants to tackle in the future sequels: "Jake's been living with the Navi for 10 years now," he says. "The idea is to lean into that primal aspect a bit more, and that's just something that I'm going keep developing over the saga."

Tell it to the Marines

The first Avatar couldn't get rid of Quaritch. Neither can the sequel.

The Marine faces Jake for a second time in close combat during the finale of Avatar: The Way of Water as flames lick the surface of the water around the sinking vessel. And once again, Quaritch fails. The colonel is lying unconscious underwater, seemingly dead, until Spider (Jack Champion) makes the decision to save his life.

Spider is a human born on Pandora as Miles, but he was left behind by the RDA after the events of first movie because infants can't survive the cryogenic stasis required of a lengthy deep-space voyage. "Spider doesn't have a family," Cameron says. "Spider yearns to be Na'vi and to be accepted by the Na'vi and seen as Na'vi, but that can't happen because he's a human being. He paints himself blue and they make fun of him. He yearns to be part of the Sully family, if he could, but they can't adopt him and Neytiri wouldn't allow it."

It's revealed over the course of Avatar: The Way of Water that Spider is the son of Quaritch, who, in his Na'vi form, kidnaps the boy for leverage. After watching him get tortured for information, Quaritch tries to take Spider under his wing and use his knowledge to traverse Pandora in search of Jake.

Says Cameron, "He gets smashed together with the bad father, so to speak, but they recognize each other in a weird way and start to chum around, at least a little bit, until he really sees Quaritch at his worst, interrogating the people in the village, threatening to kill them and so on. Then he recoils from that tentative relationship formation."

Spider ultimately chooses to go with Jake and the Na'vi after the latest RDA defeat, but he chooses to save Quaritch from death. Quaritch asks his son to come with him, but Spider snarls and takes off, setting up a more complicated arc for these characters moving forward. Neytiri already saw Spider as other. She even held him at knife point in front of Quaritch, declaring "a son for a son" after the death of Neteyam. What does she think of Spider now that he's been traveling with the man she calls a "demon"?

"I wouldn't say he's even in the middle of his journey [in The Way of Water]," Lang says of Quaritch. "There's a long, long way to go."

Na'vi Jesus?

One of the lingering questions left open at the end of Avatar: The Way of Water concerns Kiri. Audiences learn much about this adopted child of Jake and Neytiri, and she proves to have unique skills, even for Na'vi.

Kiri was born from the Avatar body used by Dr. Grace Augustine, Weaver's original Avatar character who died during the events of the first film. It's unclear how Grace's Avatar got pregnant. Lo'ak and Spider tease Kiri that maybe Grace had sex with Norm (Joel David Moore), one of the human scientists left on Pandora, while both were linked to their Na'vi forms. As Kiri says, she would "drink acid" if that were true.

Perhaps there's another explanation. Could this be an immaculate conception? In which case, that would make Kiri essentially the Na'vi version of Jesus. Cameron told EW in advance, "She's a character who's a true sensitive. She's a person who's very connected to the world around them, far beyond a normal Na'vi — to the animals, to the plants, and to the rhythm and balance of life."

But it's more than that, as we learn over the course of the film.

Through her interactions with the animals of marine life among the reefs of the Metkayina clan, Kiri learns she can commune with the natural world and even manipulate it. Linking herself to Eywa, she's able to command the underwater plant life to ensnare a crab-like RDA submarine while under attack. She's also able to use the florescent creatures of the deep to light paths to Jake and Neytiri when they are about to drown in the sinking ship at the end of the film.

All Weaver would tell EW is that "Kiri's origins are a bit complicated and mysterious." For now, we're going to call her Na'vi Jesus.

The RDA's secret mission

Edie Falco's General Ardmore is leading the charge for the RDA on Pandora, and her mission is clear: Earth is dying. They need to colonize and terraform the Na'vi home world so that it can become a new livable home for humanity. The problem, of course, are the natives.

However, there seems to be another mission forming within the context of Avatar: The Way of Water.

It's a small moment in the grand scheme of the three-hour movie: Captain Scoresby (Brendan Cowell) is the main tulkun poacher, who's been tasked by the RDA to neutralize these creatures. Quaritch and his team, with Spider in tow, rides along their boat as they hunt them down.

Once captured, Scoresby's team, which includes Jemaine Clement's Dr. Garvin, drills into the tulkun skull to extract a fluid from their brain, while the rest of the corpse is discarded. This substance, they say, stops human aging. We never hear about this elixir again over the course of the film, but it shouldn't be taken as a throwaway scene. In what cinematic universe did anyone just forget about the secret to immortality?

More of Pandora with each new adventure

At present, there are three more sequels on Disney's calendar. Avatar 3, which Cameron confirms is already "in the can" after filming it simultaneously with Avatar: The Way of Water, is scheduled to open in theaters on Dec. 20, 2024. Avatar 4, of which Cameron already filmed the first act, is scheduled for Dec. 18, 2026. Avatar 5 is on the docket for Dec. 22, 2028. The Way of Water, as a whole, is a prominent indicator for what audiences can expect.

"Each movie will introduce audiences to new biomes," Landau confirms, after Avatar: The Way of Water brought us to the Pandoran reefs and the Metkayina. "Each movie is going to introduce audiences to new clans, new cultures on Pandora. Once we introduce a character, they stay a part of the ongoing evolution. We just add to it. So you can expect to see the Metkayina that you meet in this movie in subsequent movies. There are other clans that we'll introduce in movie 3 that you'll see in movie 4 and so on and so forth."

Avatar 3 will take place close in time to Avatar: The Way of Water. Cameron filmed both movies back-to-back, sometimes simultaneously. The actors mentioned in various interviews with EW about starting certain mornings shooting scenes for the second movie before switching to scenes for the third.

Bailey Bass, who plays the daughter of Ronal and Tonowari, is already confirmed to return for Avatar 3 as Tsireya. Michelle Yeoh has been cast for the franchise, as well, and Cameron has said she'll make her debut in Avatar 3. Yeoh told EW of working with Cameron, "We shot for a few weeks, and I was so impressed with the work that he's done, the work that he's doing, the energy. He's a genius, a walking genius. And I really enjoyed the experience and I can't wait to go back soon, I hope."

Cameron notes there's "a couple of years of post-production" ahead of them before Avatar 3 is ready. The silver lining is that it won't be as long as the 13-year lapse between the first Avatar and the first sequel, now in theaters.

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