Who is Kiri’s dad in Avatar: Way of Water? There’s evidence for Eywa

James Cameron’s elastic world-building creates endless possibilities for how his sequel The Way of Water: AvatarThe film takes the viewers back into Pandora, an alien planet. It prepares them to embark on a trip that will last a lifetime. Avatar 3, 4And maybe 5. Part of the drive for Cameron was working with actors he loved; even though the characters played by Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang both “died” (we’ll get to that) in the 2009 AvatarBoth of them return in the sequel, but in different forms.

Weaver’s new character, Kiri — Jake Sully’s teen Na’vi daughter — becomes the central mystery to the past, present, and future of Pandora. Parentage questions tend to be fun preoccupations for franchise storytelling — consider Star Wars’ obsession with Luke Skywalker’s or Rey’s parents, or Game of Thrones’ endless teasing about Jon Snow’s mother. The Avatar series does not disappoint. Avatar 2 raising the burning question: Who is Kiri’s father? The film’s context clues and Weaver’s own commentary shed light on what will likely be a key question in Avatar 3And beyond.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water.]

Many years later, the events of Avatar, Water’s Way Jake Sully, Neytiri and their children are happy bonded. They also care for a blended family. Along with their three biological children (two sons, Neteyam and Lo’ak, and a young girl, Tuk), they now care for a surrogate human son, Spider, and Kiri, born from the avatar of Dr. Grace Augustine (Weaver) while she’s in suspended animation. The notion that Grace’s comatose Na’vi body conceived and birthed a child while floating in an avatar holding chamber is, uh, a tough world-building nut to crack. And Cameron doesn’t really crack it! Instead, Kiri’s conception and roots blossom into Water’s Way’s weirdest plotline.

For those who don’t remember, this is the thirteen-year-old ending. AvatarGrace (a human invader) is killed during the last battle against Col. Quaritch(Lang), and the human military. Jake and Neytiri try to rescue her by transferring her consciousness into her avatar body with the help of the Tree of Souls. Except it doesn’t actually work. But before Grace crosses over, she tells Jake, “I’m with her” — referring to Eywa, Pandora’s deity, whom the Na’vi believe connects all living things. The ultimate bummer: While Quaritch’s persona was preserved for later cloning, either no one on the human side cared enough about the scientists to give them a full consciousness download or the scrappy human faction on Pandora wasn’t equipped to help her, so there’s no Grace Brain filling an Avatar clone in Water’s Way. Well.

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Based on the observations of Kiri and the audience Water’s Way, it’s reasonable to conclude that Grace’s spirit missed the avatar boat and instead zipped through the neural network of Pandora. Partway through the movie, Kiri — who is not only a huge nerd who loves nature, but seems to possess a supernatural connection to the ecological systems of Pandora — bonds with the underwater equivalent of the Tree of Souls and “meets” her mother (Weaver again, sans CGI) for the first time. The face-to-face connection ends in one of the film’s more shocking moments: When Kiri is zapped back to her corporeal body, she suffers a near-death seizure.

But how did Grace’s avatar become pregnant? The end of Avatar, now shaded by Weaver’s human-self cameo, suggests that asking who Kiri’s father is — as the Na’vi kids do in the film! — might be the wrong question. Unlike the Christian notion of Jesus’ immaculate conception, Kiri seems less like the embodied child of the god and closer to the Greek god Gaea, a walking incarnation of the world itself. If Grace’s “soul” was funneled into the synapses of Pandora, then Eywa, more of a ghost inside the machine than the machine itself, could easily have been sent back into Grace’s avatar form.

Kiri’s untapped power comes into focus late in the film, when Clone Quaritch and the tulkun hunters chase the Sully kids through Pandora’s oceans. Up until this point, Cameron has illustrated Kiri’s connection to Eywa with a delicate touch — she just loves plants, and sometimes she steers animals around a little bit! You could just stare at the sand for hours! It’s a very relatable story for Beach Kids, who can spend hours in the water. But Cameron raises the stakes by making Kiri use the plants and other ocean creatures as weapons. Kiri is an X-Man (X’vi?), and we can only imagine what that means for Jake Sully’s never-ending war against the Sky People.

This is all to say that one of the movie’s burning questions may never yield a secret-character answer like in Star Wars or Game of Thrones. Kiri is a Sully bro, and they can give it all to Kiri over Grace/Dr. Norm Spellman mysterious parentage, but Eywa’s power goes beyond the typical birds and bees. (Or tulkun and ikran, in Pandora’s case.) The mystery speaks to Cameron’s real vision for Avatar: Spirituality, biology, and technology are all intertwined, and blurred by the living moon of Pandora. Kiri lives; Eywa is a walker. Avatar 3 Through 5They promise to make your life even more bizarre and wild than before Water’s Way.