After being teased in the first movie as well as in teasers, posters, and trailers in the run-up to the film’s release, Ant-Man and the Wasp finally reveals the fate of Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), the original Wasp and mother to Hope (Evangeline Lilly).
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Spoilers ahead for Ant-Man and the Wasp, in theaters now.
The film begins with a pre-credits cold open in which Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) tells Hope that Janet may somehow still be alive inside the Quantum Realm, a subatomic cosmic space briefly visited by Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) in the first film’s climax. That the hero had been able to return from going subatomic had imbued him with hope that his wife might still be able to be saved.
It was this conviction that brought the team back together; in the time between Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, Lang’s relationship with Hope evaporated after he joined up with Captain America’s forces during Captain America: Civil War without consulting Hope or her father. Besides being a betrayal of their trust, this also apparently made them violators of the Sokovia Accords, since it was their technology that made Scott into Giant Man.
Fairly early in the film, Lang has an extremely vivid dream, in which he finds himself in the Quantum Realm, briefly sees his own face replaced by Janet’s, and then experiences being in Janet’s body as she plays hide-and-seek with a young Hope in the Pym family home.
After waking up, Scott uses a burner phone to contact Hank, and shortly thereafter finds himself knocked out and spirited away to Hank and Hope’s hideout, where he is informed of Hank’s plans to build a Quantum Tunnel into the Quantum Realm and recover Janet.
After about three-quarters of a movie’s worth of obstacles, they succeed in recovering Janet, who has managed to survive in the Quantum Realm and who has developed some kind of energy-based powers after having been in the Quantum Realm for thirty years.
There is, ultimately, a plot reason for those powers — although the only uses them once before her next “fate” is revealed: during an experiment in a mid-credits scene, Hank, Janet, and Hope send Scott into the Quantum Realm to retrieve an energy sample. The trio are all snapped out of existence by the events of Avengers: Infinity War, leaving Scott stranded in the Quantum Realm and apparently off the board for Avengers 4.
