Avatar’s villain can’t be killed — and has infinite potential in sequels

Empire magazine in 2017 was shocked when James Cameron said that he intended for each of the five Avatar movies to feature one villain. Avatar’s seemingly dead antagonist Colonel Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang) had not only survived for a sequel, he was going to survive at least three more movies as well.

“The interesting conceit of the Avatar sequels is it’s pretty much the same characters,” Cameron said in that Empire interview. “There’s not a new villain every time, which is interesting. The same guy. All four from the same motherfucker [sequels]. He is so good and he just gets better.”

This revelation seems to have limited the potential for Avatar fans to be surprised. Cameron seemed to be revealing a lot about his villain’s long-term fate: Nothing that happens in the upcoming Avatar movies could kill him, at least not until the final chapter. Although it was a strange thing to say upfront, this does give the series a new spin. If handled properly, Quaritch may be just what Avatar needs to stand out from Star Wars and Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The Way of Water: Avatar revives Quaritch in a way Cameron didn’t spoil: His original human body did die, but his employers, Earth’s Resource Development Administration, had already created a synthetic copy of his memories and personality. They downloaded those into a Na’vi body cloned from Quaritch’s DNA. Effectively, the new Na’vi that resulted is still Quaritch, even if he keeps insisting he isn’t, and even if he’s trying — like everyone else in Water is the Way — to separate himself from his past.

Image: 20th Century Studios

But more interesting than Quaritch’s return in Water is the Way is the implications behind the tech that revived him: There’s every reason to believe, given what we know so far, that Quaritch could still die in any given Avatar sequel, and the RDA could just resurrect him again. They hold his DNA and memory records. They can decant Quaritches in case version 2.0 is damaged. He’s every blockbuster hero’s nightmare: a villain who can’t be meaningfully killed.

There are a lot of possible directions for his “effectively immortal” plotline. Quaritch so far is an unremarkable villain. He’s a broad, surface-level Blockbuster Bad Guy, driven mostly by factionalist greed and a gung-ho hunger for dominance in the first movie, and by his desire for revenge in the second. That’s the worst possible scenario. Avatar 3, 4And 5 will just cover the same ground as the first two movies, with the Na’vi moving to different territories, and Quaritch repeatedly tracking them down with the same unbending, simple-minded malice. So far, he’s more a symbol than a character — military adventurism and colonialist exploitation personified, with a smirking, snarling face slapped on top.

But Way of WaterAt the very least, it suggests Quaritch is capable of meaningful development. His fumbling relationship with his narratively questionable son, Spider (or OG Quaritch’s son, if you want to get real technical about it), suggests he has a few cracks in his self-righteous, straight-line thinking — at least as many cracks as Darth Vader had when his own son pushed him to abandon his evil Empire and stand up for family values instead.

Even if he doesn’t evolve, his relationships with the protagonists are likely to. The In Water is the Way, Quaritch learns that turncoat Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) didn’t kill his original body — Jake’s mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) did, which somewhat undermines Quaritch’s grudge against Jake. So does Jake’s close relationship with Spider, who Quaritch does obviously care for. Quaritch bullies Spider, enslaves and abuses him. However, he also attempts to make contact with Spider, which appears to be paying off at the end. Quaritch must confront what he owes Spider and what Spider owes Jake. This will also affect how Quaritch sees each other. Quaritch has the chance to learn and develop from Spider.

That’s certainly necessary, if the Avatar films are going to avoid repetition. Giving Quaritch potentially infinite lives is a promise that he isn’t going to be a disposable character, easily killed off for a quick climactic catharsis, then replaced in the next movie by a fundamentally identical RDA flunky. The MCU’s inability to let the villains develop with its heroes is a problem that has plagued it since its beginning. Star Wars’ expansion beyond the Skywalker Saga has been plagued by the issue of basically interchangeable villains. (Arguably, Andor is the first major Star Wars story to fix the franchise’s villain problem, where creators either keep trying to replicate Darth Vader or set up some diffuse, faceless force as the primary antagonist.) It is essential that any good franchise has villains who are just as engaging and memorable as their heroes. However, it seems like too many connected movies series have failed to achieve this.

Image: 20th Century Studios

And given that the Na’vi are up against something much bigger than Quaritch — effectively the entire weight of human greed, xenophobia, And indifference to their effect on the environment — it seems appropriate to have a villain who can’t just be answered with a bullet or arrow to the face. To solve the Quaritch problem, the Na’vi are either going to have to find a more creative solution than shooting their enemies — like finding a way to make them understand and regret the impact they’re having on Pandora — or they’re going to have to wipe out the entire RDA so it can’t just respawn him. (Maybe with a massive Na’vi space battle.)

If we’re going to be hopeful and There are many ways to be creative with the franchise. One way would be for the RDA to decide Quaritch is the ideal soldier and then just keep making more of him no matter what happens. If new-Quaritch goes soft on the Na’vi after realizing that Spider saved his life, the RDA could always spawn a fresh clone without Quaritch 2.0’s memories of that battle, one who’d be a back-to-basics hardliner, ready to kill Jake and his family without a thought. The storyline must end with a Quaritch – on-Quaritch confrontation, in which the 2.0 version defends Spider’s connection to his family, while the RDA-reinvented model takes the lead.

The RDA could also just begin making Quaritches randomly and create an army ready to fight Jake in masse like Agent Smith’s armies in Matrix sequels. We can certainly hope that doesn’t happen — it’d be sillyAnd impersonal compared to a resolution where Quaritch actually finds his own humanity and forges a meaningful new relationship with his own Na’vi identity. But it’s certainly on the table.

Avatar 3, 4, and 5were already written. 3Rumoredly titled Avatar of the Seed BearerPart of 4They have been already shot. Whatever Quaritch’s future holds, it’s already more or less established. But unless Cameron decides to dump more major spoilers on us about the plan for his arc, we won’t get the full picture until the series wraps, supposedly by 2028. Until then, here’s hoping that Cameron and the Avatar series team take advantage of their unkillable warrior to let him develop into a more nuanced and interesting villain. They’ve promised Quaritch five films’ worth of story. That’s a rare opportunity to give a villain some slow-burn growth, and to give him the complexity and personality he currently lacks.