Is [SPOILER] Really Dead After Avatar: Fire And Ash? An Investigation

The way of water has no beginning and no end — just like spoilers. This article discusses major plot details from "Avatar: Fire & Ash."

Director James Cameron's long-awaited "Avatar" threequel has finally arrived, putting a bow on this first phase of his grand Pandora-set plan while leaving all sorts of room for more — depending on how well "Fire & Ash" performs at the box office, of course. Old rivalries were renewed, new ones were forged, and war was waged all over again over the course of this latest epic. But, surprisingly, it wasn't quite the bloodbath we might've anticipated beforehand. 

We've known for some time that Cameron had been planning on introducing a significant time jump in his fourth "Avatar" film, allowing him to pivot away from our more established heroes and focus even more on the next generation of the Sully clan. That would've seemed to suggest that Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) was living on borrowed time ... but that wasn't the case, as he and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) lived to see another day along with their kids.

No, the more pressing concern actually involves one of the villains of "Fire & Ash." For three full movies now, Stephen Lang's Colonel Miles Quaritch has defied death and come back to haunt Jake's every step. In this newest blockbuster, that ongoing conflict took on a bit more of an exhausted feel to it. After fighting to a draw in the climax of "The Way of Water," the two do so once again here while caught amid an electromagnetic vortex, tumbling from one floating rock to another high up in the air. But once Jake's allies arrive, Quaritch leaps into a fiery void to his apparent death.

But is he really dead? We have our doubts. Here's why.

To play devil's advocate, let's say the ending of "Avatar: Fire & Ash" is meant to definitively put an end to Colonel Miles Quaritch when he leaps off the rock and plunges into the depths of the unknown. The music swells, Jake gives him one last look filled with complicated emotions as he watches helplessly, and our baddie even gets a killer final line to go out in a blaze of self-satisfied glory. ("Well, ain't that a b***h.")

Here's the thing, though: The world-building of "Avatar" has already given us a way for James Cameron to bring Quaritch back for more, if he so chose. After all, this wouldn't be the first time the character came back from the dead to restart his one-man mission against Jake Sully. In "The Way of Water," the memories of the (very much dead) human Miles Quaritch are uploaded to his Avatar, turning him into a "recombinant" or "recom." Granted, it takes well over a decade for his Avatar body to be shipped from Earth and brought up to date, but theoretically, there's nothing stopping the vast resources of the RDA (which literally stands for the Resources Development Administration) from simply doing so again. 

Over the course of the last two movies, Jake and Neytiri repeatedly exclaim to Quaritch that they'd already seen him killed, only to be proven wrong. What better way to emphasize the extreme underdog stakes of their plight than by turning the main villain into a death-defying killing machine unlike any we've ever seen before?

Still, something tells us that might not be the most narratively satisfying approach. Cameron has shown us this trick already. What if he had a more radical idea in mind?

James Cameron has always been one to keep audiences on their toes, whether it be taking the "Alien" franchise into a shoot-em-up direction for "Aliens" or turning the Terminator into a good guy in "Judgment Day," so why should "Avatar" be any different? To this point, the series has predominantly focused on Jake Sully and Miles Quaritch coming to blows again and again, unwilling to set aside their grudge against one another but equally unable to actually finish the other off for good. Even Quaritch calls attention to this on a few occasions in "Fire & Ash," landing a perfectly-timed, "Well, this is awkward," after the two briefly join forces to save the life of young Spider (Sam Champion). It's almost begun to feel like a Batman/Joker dynamic, one where they're destined to do this forever. So are we really meant to take Quaritch's implied death at face value?

The biggest clue suggesting that Quaritch has a bigger role to play, however, comes much earlier in the film. On the first occasion where they begrudgingly team up, Jake takes a quiet moment to appeal to Miles' newfound perspective from living as a Na'vi and begs him to open his eyes to the wonders of Pandora. (He promptly falls asleep after this exchange, an amusingly literal way to depict the villain's refusal to take Jake's words to heart.) Later on, when Jake is captured and scheduled for public execution, he once again makes a plea for Quaritch's possible redemption. He rejects this, too, but there's a subtle sense that the seed has at least been planted for the fourth and fifth movies to explore further.

"Avatar: Fire & Ash" is now playing in theaters.