Avatar 2 is arriving in cinemas this year, and one compelling fan theory offers an answer for how Stephen Lang’s seemingly dead Avatar villain Miles Quaritch will be putting in an appearance. Released in 2009, Avatar was a sci-fi adventure blockbuster from Terminator creator James Cameron. The tale of Jake Sully, a marine tasked with infiltrating the indigenous Na’Vi population of an alien planet, Pandora, to help a mining company strip the world of its resources, Avatar treaded a narrative path familiar to many viewers.
Some critics argued Avatar’s story was too familiar, with the movie being accused of borrowing from Dances With Wolves in its tale of a colonizer warming to the natives and eventually siding with them, and some reviewers even accused Avatar of pushing a "white savior narrative". However, defenders of the original Avatar noted that Cameron’s movie offered an unapologetic condemnation of military/industrial collaboration and imperial powers using force to steal and hoard resources.
This theme was perfectly encapsulated by the original Avatar’s primary antagonist, Stephen Lang’s Miles Quaritch. A military colonel tasked with destroying sites of Na’Vi cultural significance, Quaritch delighted in killing the native population and taking their land. The character provided a perfect foil for Jake, dismissing the lives of the Na’Vi and growing more aggressive in his conduct while the conflicted marine grew closer to the locals and began to see them as his equals. Eventually, like fellow classic Cameron villain the T-1000, Quaritch got his just desserts, dying in battle with Jake. However, Lang’s character is set to appear in all four of the upcoming Avatar sequels, and one fan theory posits that this return will come about not through reincarnation, but cloning.
According to one fan theory found on Reddit, the original Avatar features a brief foreshadowing of this development when Jake is half-listening to a report about Bengal tigers being cloned to keep their species viable. Since Quaritch is in the pocket of both the military and RDA, a massive shadowy multinational corporation, there’s no reason to think that the Avatar franchise’s big-picture baddies don’t have the technology to replicate the lethal general. Not a lot is known about the story of Avatar 2 and its subsequent sequels, but the fact that Lang’s character will return for not only one, but all of them, implies his arc is far from over, and a stockpile of clones may explain how he miraculously survived what seemed like certain death in the first film.
However, while this theory makes a lot of sense, the fact that Lang has assured fans that his character has a full-fledged arc across the sequels makes it harder to guess whether he will be cloned, as it can be harder for audiences to connect with a character’s emotional journey when there are multiple identical copies of him running around. That said, Cameron’s earlier franchise The Terminator managed to turn the first film’s stoic, terrifying android assassin into Schwarzenegger’s good-humored hero in the second movie, and eventually into Dark Fate’s mild-mannered drape salesman/suburban dad Carl despite the character not even being human. Humanising the cloned villain of Avatar should be a breeze in comparison to that feat of character growth.
