Why Quantumania Never Says Its Own Title: Kang's Secret Sickness and the Six Phases of Scott Lang

Across its two hour and five minute run time, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania never once says the word quantumania. I believe the meaning of the title is still there, hidden in the secret connection between Lang and Kang. To decode it, I trace six phases Scott Lang passes through on his journey to truly earn his Avenger status.

Directed by Peyton Reed and written by Jeff Loveness, the film was Marvel's first foray into Phase Five. Jonathan Majors packs an electrifying punch as the MCU's new big bad, Kang the Conqueror, but the rest of this delightfully bizarre movie leaves us wondering what the title means. Yes, quantumania contains the words ant and man, and I guess it's a joke about putting quantum in front of everything, but that is not enough for me. The post credits scenes drop us into the Kang Dynasty. The movie itself is the story of the Lang Dynasty. The six Scotts are the non interventionalist, the parent, the hive mind, the conqueror, the hero and the futurist.

Kang's crash landing sets up Quantumania's visual theme of one splitting into two

The film begins as a story between Kang and Janet Van Dyne. Kang crash lands in the Quantum Realm over Janet's farm. The sky already bears his colour tones of purple and teal, and three pieces of debris break off his ship. Those pieces mirror the three other Kangs from the Kang Dynasty who sabotaged the ship to exile him. The portals in the sky are blue surrounded by swirls of purple, the colours of the dynasty. Later, when Kang and Janet sit together, the portals have shifted colour, perhaps reflecting the purple sky over the dynasty that cast him out. That dynasty didn't count on its outcast meeting an Avenger.

The blue glowing monster that attacks Janet and Kang starts as one and splits into two. This is a recurring visual theme in the Quantum Realm, and it sets up Scott splitting into his Schrodinger doubles in the probability storm. The dune centipede creatures that encounter them also start as one and split into two.

The film marketed itself with Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, casting the Quantum Realm as a kind of Oz. If He Who Remains in Loki was the man behind the curtain, this is the story of the Wizard's balloon landing in Oz and his attempt to reinflate it and escape. I reference The Wizard of Oz a lot because of a working theory I have: every American film is trying to be one of two classics, The Wizard of Oz or Citizen Kane. One is the experience of a dream, the other the experience of solving a puzzle or mystery. Quantumania is definitely trying to be Oz, and I believe it's best looked at that way.

Scott the non interventionalist is happily retired in a dream life

The 2018 predecessor began with a sitcom theme, and this one opens with the Welcome Back, Kotter theme. That sitcom was about a comedian who returns to teach in a Brooklyn high school, and it gave John Travolta his breakout role. Its lyrics talk about dreams being your ticket out and returning to the same old place where the names have all changed. In Ant-Man and the Wasp, Scott had dreams of Janet in the Quantum Realm. The song reflects his path forward: going back to the place he escaped, where the names have changed.

Scott references time traveling with Captain America, alluding to helping the Avengers undo Thanos's snap in Endgame. Reading from his memoir, he says none of this should have happened, acknowledging the violation his dream life represents. He has gone from being fired from Baskin Robbins to employee of the century, and someone in the cafe covers his coffee while thanking him as Spider-Man. In fairness, no one knows who Spider-Man really is anymore after that memory wipe spell.

His memoir, Look Out for the Little Guy, tells readers there's always room to grow, an obvious nod to how the Ant family fights Kang, from oversizing the energy core beyond use to growing big to stop his escape. Having published a memoir suggests Scott's adventures are over, like Bilbo Baggins writing There and Back Again. But something is still broken: the feeling of having missed his daughter Cassie's life.

Scott the parent is not fully accepting responsibility for the Blip

Cassie reflects both Ant-Men. She begins her journey behind bars the way Scott does in the 2015 Ant-Man, but she shrank a police car, while Hank Pym kept a shrunken Soviet tank on his keychain. In their father daughter chat, Cassie reminds Scott that a guy dressed like a bee tried to kill her when she was six. That was Darren Cross, before Scott shrank his body parts and turned him into the form he takes in this movie.

They drive through San Francisco's Union Square. I have shopped at that Macy's, and I can tell you the production definitely would have had to clear some homeless people from that exterior shot. It's a little ironic, considering Cassie was protesting police clearing a homeless encampment. She clarifies that these people lost their homes in the Blip, coming back to find other people living in them. The point is that Scott isn't fully accepting responsibility for the impact he, Banner and the rest left by saving everyone in Endgame. He lets Hope and Cassie do the cleanup while he goes on his book tour, even listening to his own audiobook in the car.

Scott messing with a radio switch that won't turn off foreshadows Cassie's quantum radio not turning off when it pulls them all into the Quantum Realm. Hank enlarges a pizza with old school Pym Particles, invoking the family pizza scene in Back to the Future Part II. Notice too that Hank's hearing aid is visible, which proves critical later when his frequency gets entangled with his super smart ants.

The ants point to my definition of quantumania

What's good for the collective is the key to this story, and the ants are its facilitators. When the family enters the lab, Scott observes an ant farm where each ant wears a helmet with glowing green lights, already building complex structures. This is our first hint at the cure to quantumania, which I believe the movie implicitly defines this way: a state of shock or confusion when one's consciousness drifts from a singular perspective into a shared hive colony as a result of multiversal quantum entanglement.

This is my definition, not anything the movie explicitly states, but I think it helps explain why Lang and Kang are perfect opposites. Lying around Hank's desk are books about ants he has been researching, including Common Ants of California and Journey to the Ants, so these ants aren't just a holdover from the superhero moniker. When the family is sucked in, one of the first things Scott bumps into is the ant farm, which enlarges at a different rate to show the ants spiraling off on a different trajectory.

The family crashes through the same crystalline membrane Hank passed through in the 2018 film. I like that Hope instinctively suits up and goes after her parents rather than helping from outside; she is already steps ahead of Scott on the Avengers pipeline. Cassie, hinting she knows how to work her own suit, punches the button on Scott's glove to shrink them. A key lesson for every parent: if you have technology, your kid is going to figure out how to use it better than you can.

Drinking the ooze starts Scott's move toward the hive

Scott and Cassie are taken to the freedom fighter camp, like Han Solo and friends brought to the Ewok camp in Return of the Jedi. They meet Veb, voiced by David Dastmalchian, who played Kurt in the earlier films, and Quaz the telepath, played by William Jackson Harper, who reads that Scott has seven holes. I love the meta joke, as if Scott is reaching us telepathically to see how long it takes us to count our own seven holes. It sets up Veb getting shot full of holes later, and Veb's eyes go wide on hearing of Scott's, as though he craves holes he can merge into one and grow large. Out of many, one big strong collective.

Scott isn't in the hive mind phase yet. He spent the first part of the film hearing almost exclusively his own inner monologue, literally his own voice on the audiobook, struggling to hear other people like his daughter. So he transforms himself by consuming Veb's ooze to become part of the tribe. I find it kind of beautiful that the tribe chants in celebration of someone new to communicate with: "it's not a threatening chant it's essentially one of us one of us and I love that about them."

The group's leader, Jentorra, tells Scott he comes from above like Kang. This suggests she sees macro dwellers like Scott and Kang as a kind of god, but not gods she looks up to; she hates gods who come to destroy. Extrapolate that to our frame of reference, and by extension the MCU reality may see Celestials the same way, coming from a dimension beyond the atoms of our planets and galaxies.

Axia's circles, Lord Krylar and MODOK fit the Oz dream

Janet, Hank and Hope fly to the city of Axia, where a quantum language over the PA goes untranslated because Hank and Hope haven't drunk the ooze, something we only notice because we just went through it with Scott. Hank marvels at the atomic universe, though you'd think aliens and Celestials would already have blown his mind. A production design detail I really like is that everything is circle based, from the bar's concentric door to a circular written language that also appears on the bands of Kang's core device. That tells us the language came from Kang and trickled down into Quantum Realm culture, the way conquering invaders force locals to adopt their language. It recalls Arrival, a film I love, whose heptapods use circular writing because they see time cyclically.

Lord Krylar, played by Bill Murray, stalls them to turn them over to Kang, kind of like Lando on Cloud City in Empire. Hank later enlarges one of the little squids Krylar likes to eat, and I find it fascinating that the giant creature doesn't eat him. Unlike Kang, not everything in the Quantum Realm thinks in vengeance and zero sum games. Or maybe Bill Murray just refused a stupid death. Jentorra says the Conqueror burned their homes and their stories. Since their buildings are living creatures, these walls really can talk, and it matches Kang later saying he prunes his victims' timelines.

Then there's MODOK, the MCU's version being Darren Cross rather than the comics' George Tarleton. "I will admit that he sticks out as the ugliest sore thumb that I've ever seen in a Marvel film," but remember The Wizard of Oz. This is a dream of a film, and that kind of story would not be complete without some distorted face from waking life. They don't just make Corey Stoll's head huge; they squash it in a weird way. His character also proves that no monster in the Multiverse is beyond redemption.

Kang's flashback shows a sociopath playing a part

In flashback, Kang tells Janet that time is a cage that does everything it can to break you. I love how understated and small Majors plays it. He is a sociopath playing a part to win her over, and when he restores his suit later he repeats the same words with a loftier affect, revealing he was playing her all along. They were trying to reactivate his multiversal engine core, a spear with rotating layered bands. Kang sees time as a circle, and a sphere is circles stacked on the same radial centre, a representation of infinite sacred timelines orbiting themselves. To use two Robert Zemeckis references, it's like the wormhole engine in Contact or the flux capacitor in Back to the Future, the unexplained MacGuffin that makes it all possible.

When Janet touches the engine, sacred timeline imagery from Loki appears, except this time the timeline is torn to pieces, and Kang vaporises fleeing victims in what looks like a burnt out forest. Kang stores entire erased world histories in his memory. He and the Kang Dynasty have been so successful in their genocide that they erased their own existence from the record, which is why no one has heard the name Kang. The eyes and lines on his face light up, and his scars could represent the scar tissue of every timeline he has destroyed, evidence he carries that pain. The first time Kang is said aloud in the MCU, it's Janet asking who he is.

When Janet snatches the core, Kang obliterates her house, ages of friendship destroyed in an instant. Her robes are gone, revealing her red and black 80s Wasp suit underneath. She blows the core up beyond use, which is why Kang practically needs Lang to shrink it. But Kang is also exploiting the guilt that kept Janet from telling her family about him, using the same offer on Scott: time back with his daughter. When Scott says he's an Avenger, Kang asks if he's killed him before, since they all blur together. He isn't trying to scare Scott; the Avengers are just faceless to him. His fear of his own variants echoes He Who Remains, and we see the darker side of quantumania as a sickness: all Kangs fear each other.

Scott the hive mind resists the sickness in the probability storm

Majors described his portrayal as "no moves wasted," and you can see it when Kang merely folds his fingers to slam Scott and torture Cassie behind his back. Majors also said he drew on great conquerors: Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. You can see that full history of ego in his gravitas: the rage of Genghis Khan, the betrayal of Julius Caesar, the weeping of Alexander upon having no worlds left to conquer.

Inside the core, Scott enters a probability storm of variants of every choice he could make. MODOK says he's in Schrodinger's box, referencing the thought experiment of a cat simultaneously alive and dead while the lid stays closed. The first variant splits off as Scott steps toward the core and retreats in the opposite direction, representing his cowardice. That liberates our Scott from his most crippling fear, making him more heroic. One variant is the Scott who never got fired from Baskin Robbins, and off screen you can hear others asking for ice cream. Our Scott is the only one who doesn't raise his helmet, the most courageous one.

The other Scotts suffer quantumania's sickness, but he resists it. When Cassie calls out, they all work together to lift him, not competing. Scott beats quantumania by syncing with his hive mind, adopting the teamwork of an ant colony. Their shared love of Cassie collapses them back into one, including his initial fear, because part of being a parent is fear that something will happen to your kid.

This Kang may have started the Multiverse war himself

Kang tells Janet he saw the Multiverse dying because of his variants, using the term incursions, the term used in Multiverse of Madness for universes colliding. His speech bridges the visual logic of Loki and Multiverse of Madness, showing incursions at a macro scale as two sacred timeline rings atop each other, branches causing bursts of light, one universe competing with another. One could argue this was the one good Kang trying to stop the dynasty, but one could make that argument about any Kang; their vanity is the inability to see their own meddling.

Janet's accusation that he started a war suggests this Kang initially started the Multiverse war He Who Remains described in Loki. Kang is both victim and perpetrator of a self fulfilling prophecy, fixing a mess he started. So what did he lose? We must assume Renslayer, his great love, but I think more than that he's lost his own peace of mind, and blames the other Kangs for making him eternally paranoid.

Scott the conqueror and Scott the hero bring Kang down

Hank's ants aged a thousand years in a day and built a technocratic civilization. Hank hints at socialism, but a technocracy is government by technological experts, and either way the colony overthrew its queen, giving it an advantage over Kang's obsolete military dictatorship. Empowered by their strategy, giant Scott rampages through Kang's fortress city, essentially Cap's advice to Hulk: smash. If Kang weren't so greedy and afraid of the dynasty, he could have escaped in his chair pod instead of waiting on his whole armada. For Kang, the sentient buildings must evoke Macbeth's prophecy of trees coming to life. Shakespeare is all over Majors's work: He Who Remains as Puck, this Kang as Julius Caesar, and now the paranoid Macbeth.

Scott uses a giant disc as a shield, reminding us he's still Team Cap. Kang mocks him for talking to ants, but that's his secret weapon, as Hank leads a Rohirrim charge of ants and a reformed Darren helps break the shield. Darren says he dies an Avenger, and Scott's not quite sure, but beyond the joke Scott truly isn't an Avenger yet. When Kang repels him, he becomes Scott the hero. A hero isn't trying to win, just to save others even if it dooms himself: they both just have to lose. Hope makes her second voluntary leap, using red and blue discs to suck Kang into the vortex. Presumably he could be stuck in the probability storm and might find the cure to his own quantumania. Scott's voice was Cassie; Kang's, I believe, is the queen of his hive, Renslayer.

Scott the futurist completes a mirror of the six original Avengers

The film ends where it began, to the Kotter theme, but it creepily feels like a restarted loop. Scott's narration was justified as his audiobook earlier, so who is narrating now? We don't know, and that's why it's unsettling. He eyes passersby in purple and cannot shake the Kang Dynasty's threat even at Cassie's birthday party. The post credits scenes show the dynasty and Victor Timely, whom Loki season 2 explored. Arguably Victor is scarier, a 1901 inventor hidden among us bearing the name Timely, Marvel's original name.

This fear is Scott the futurist, and all six phases mirror the original Avengers. The non interventionalist is Bruce Banner, knowing when to pull punches. The parent is Clint Barton. The hive mind is Black Widow, the other Avenger named after a bug, whose strength is intuition and trust. The conqueror is Thor. The hero is Steve Rogers, willing to jump on a grenade. The futurist is Tony Stark, defined by paranoia over future threats, which led him to unlock time travel, the technology Kang might have later used for his core. Kang's dynasty remains plagued by quantumania, fear of its variants. The Avengers can win if Scott teaches them to love their multiversal hives, or better, if they teach Kang.

Do you think this Kang was the one good Kang trying to save the Multiverse, or the one who started the war in the first place?