Despite its 192 minute runtime, Avatar: The Way of Water barely manages to contain the scope of its story. This is especially true in the prologue, which uses a Jake Sully voice over against a montage to catch the audience up on everything that has happened in the nearly two decades since the events of the original Avatar.

It’s a lot to quickly process, but a lot of the details are to be expected. The Resources Development Administration (RDA) has returned to Pandora just as Parker Selfridge said they would, the Omaticaya have relocated to the Hallelujah Mountains as they wage an ongoing guerilla war against the invaders, and Jake and Neytiri have started their own family. As the prologue runs us through all of these new developments, it also layers in a bunch of retcons - things that either happened or were true in the original Avatar, but were never mentioned. These details are jarring, and in some cases totally bizarre, but each of them serve an important purpose in this story, and the broader story the Avatar series is telling moving forward.

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Some of these retcons are small details that may or may not matter much in the grand scheme of things. One thing that's addressed early on is the fact that the Na’vi, the recombinants, and, presumably, the Avatars, can’t actually breathe oxygen. Spider mentions this when he tells Lo’ak and Kiri that he’s jealous they can breathe in human environments much longer than he can breathe on Pandora. This was apparently never an issue for Jake or any of the other Avatars when inside RDA facilities. You never saw them walking around breathing Pandoran air through masks in the first movie, but Quaritch and the other recoms do.

Even Quartich’s resurrection is a bit of a retcon. During his reintroduction, we’re shown a video log where he and Selfridge explain they made a back-up of his consciousness right before the final showdown with Sully in the event that he doesn’t survive. Avatar technology continues to advance to the point where his consciousness can be imprinted on an Avatar, making him and his squad recombinants. Whether or not Cameron always intended for Quaritch to come back for the sequels, the explanation comes across as a bit of an afterthought.

Those are easy enough to move past, but then we get into some of the bigger retcons. At the end of the first Avatar, Sully asks the Omaticaya to help him save a dying Dr. Augustine by transferring her consciousness into her avatar just as they did for him. When that gambit fails, Augustine dies. In The Way of Water, we learn that Norm and Max brought her and the consciousness-less Avatar back to their lab and discovered that it was pregnant - something that shouldn’t be possible. Jake and Neytiri adopt Kiri, and much of The Way of Water focuses on trying to understand the young girl's strange connection to Eywa.

This isn’t really a retcon, since it's something that happened after the first movie, but it fits the bill of another bizarre detail that comes at us in voice-over during the protracted prologue. This reveal needed a bit more explanation, and the cause for confusion lies in the fact that Grace’s Avatar didn’t die when she did. An obvious detail, but one no one would have considered until we’re also being told not only did it survive, but it also experienced an immaculate conception. It’s definitely a lot to process, but this mystery is going to be a major plotline going forward.

Finally, Spider, the biggest retcon of all. Quaritch had an infant son named Miles that was left behind when the RDA was run off of Pandora and raised by the scientists that remained. Quaritch never once mentions he has a child in the first Avatar, and we don’t see any babies running around Hell’s Gate either. It’s easy enough to explain away this problem, Quaritch isn’t exactly the doting father type after all, but there’s no denying this is a major retcon.

Presentation is the biggest problem with these revisions. The voice over dumb of exposition doesn’t give the audience much time to process any of these major developments before it quickly moves onto the next bombshell, and we’re left feeling like Cameron is just making this up as he goes along. That’s an unavoidable consequence of retconning, but the hope is that the ends will justify the means.

The Way of Water’s prologue was a solution to a problem. Before he wrote The Way of Water, Cameron wrote an entirely different version of Avatar 2 called The High Ground. That version took place just a few years after the events of Avatar and followed the Omaticaya’s ongoing war with the RDA - something that was just briefly touched on in the prologue. It included a more fleshed out backstory for Spider and would have spent more time exploring Kiri’s unlikely origins. That story is being told in graphic novel form now - though the timeline has been shifted to be just before the events of The Way of Water.

The prologue is a weakness of the film, but it serves to build a foundation for the future of the series. So much of the sequel was undecided when Avatar was in development, but after it became the biggest movie of all time, all of the sequels were developed together as one story. These retcons were necessary groundwork, not just for The Way of Water, but for the entire Avatar saga. And while the way they were presented may be off-putting, the hope is that pay-off will be well worth it in the end.

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