Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 7

STAR TREK ADVENTURES releases my second PICARD-era campaign!

Modiphius has just published my newest Star Trek Adventures standalone campaign, and my second exploring the backstory established in Star Trek: Picard Season One.

Star Trek Adventures: Synthetic Diplomacy

The Federation Council’s recent decision to outlaw the manufacture of synthetic life forms has jeopardized negotiations with the technologically-advanced Noariya, whose society has relied heavily on android labor for generations. Delicate negotiations on the planet Noaru must be undertaken to persuade the Noariya’s leaders that Federation membership is still worthwhile.

In the wake of the rogue synth attack on Mars, the Federation’s sudden outlawing of androids has undercut efforts to offer membership to the highly-advanced Noariya society. The player characters’ ship is sent to the planet Noaru to negotiate with their leaders and search for a way to salvage the relationship. The Noariya prize their androids and are unwilling to give them up for the sake of Federation membership.

The political situation on Noaru is complicated when an extremist group objects to their society’s dependence on high technology. A candidate from that group is running for president and, until now, had been a fringe concern, but since the synth ban, they’ve become vocal advocates for Federation membership.

The situation worsens when an abduction by a group of androids forces the player characters to investigate, track down the captives, and negotiate with or outwit the captors. To protect Noaru’s peace, the player characters must expose the truth behind the android uprising and complete their delicate negotiations, or risk losing a prospective member of the Federation.

Although this is a standalone adventure, a bonus one-page mission brief provides inspiration for continuing the mission.

This 23-page PDF adventure for the first edition Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game is written by Christopher L. Bennett, and is set in the Picard era shortly after the events of 2385, with the player characters being the crew of a Federation vessel. This adventure also contains advice on adaptation for use in other Star Trek time periods.

This adventure requires a Star Trek Adventures core rulebook to use. You will receive a standard version of the adventure PDF. This PDF is on a white background, there is no separate printer friendly version.

TM & © 2024 CBS Studios Inc. © 2024 Paramount Pictures Corp. STAR TREK and related marks and logos are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

And here’s my usual blog column giving a glimpse at the creative process:

https://www.modiphius.net/en-us/blogs/news/synthetic-diplomacy

Synthetic Diplomacy is available as a downloadable PDF from:

Modiphius (US)Modiphius (UK)DriveThruRPG

View more on Christopher L. Bennett's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 08, 2024 09:43

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — DEAD RECKONING (2023) Review (Spoilers)

For the first time in five years, it’s time to add a new entry to my comprehensive Mission: Impossible review series. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, the seventh film in the series, was released in theaters and home video with a Part One subtitle, as it and the upcoming eighth film are a 2-part story shot back to back, but its recent streaming release on Paramount+ dropped the Part One because the decision has been made to retitle the second part. So I’m going with the shorter title for convenience.

I borrowed the DVD from the library, looked up the film on Wikipedia before I watched it, and discovered there that it was available on Paramount+. Since I have a P+ subscription, and since I still have a 20-year-old CRT television without HD resolution, I decided to watch on my computer and return the DVD unused. But I forgot about how slow-loading P+ can be compared to other streamers, especially with my low-speed phone line (since my apartment building manager is dragging his feet on getting fiber optics installed). The resolution was really low and I got tired of waiting for it to improve, so I decided to watch the DVD after all.

Dead Reckoning is the third consecutive M:I film written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, with Erik Jendresen co-writing this one. It brings back series regulars Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson, as well as Henry Czerny from the 1996 debut film and Vanessa Kirby from Fallout. Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Cary Elwes, Shea Whigham, and Greg Tarzan Davis are added in major roles. Lorne Balfe returns from Fallout as the composer. Surprisingly, this is the first M:I movie since 2000 to be made without the involvement of J.J. Abrams or his Bad Robot Productions.

This is the longest M:I film yet at 2 hours, 43 minutes, and the cold open is a full sixth of that, 28 minutes long. It begins with a Russian stealth sub using a super-advanced computer accessed with a 2-part cruciform key (i.e. the two flat pieces slide together at right angles to form a + shape in cross section). The supercomputer spoofs the sub crew into firing a torpedo at an illusory enemy, and the torpedo circles back on sub, sinks same.

Cut to an overly moody sequence where a courier delivers the usual secret tape message to Ethan Hunt (Cruise) in a shadowy, abandoned building. The purpose of the secret tape drops in the series was to appear like normal, everyday conversations so they wouldn’t attract attention, but here, Ethan makes a point of telling the guy he needs to do a pretentiously phrased code exchange, then tells him he’s made the right choice by joining the IMF. Okay, they’re in an empty building, but sending a courier to an empty building isn’t all that inconspicuous.

Anyway, the voice on the tape is that of Eugene Kittredge (Czerny), the IMF director in the original film and now the CIA director, replacing Angela Bassett’s Sloane; I’m disappointed that Bassett didn’t return, since I never liked Czerny as Kittredge. (She was slated to appear in some form but had to drop out due to COVID quarantine issues.) Why the CIA director is delivering the message instead of the IMF boss is unexplained. Kittredge’s recorded message gratuitously, pretentiously gives exposition to the audience about how Ethan joined the IMF 30 years ago (which would’ve been 3 years before the first film) in exchange for getting some unspecified crimes forgiven, after the death of a mystery woman — a retconned origin story never hinted at before.

Kittredge goes on to tell Ethan the stakes are too high for his usual roguishness, so he’d better behave — like that’s gonna happen. His mission, should he etc., is to retrieve half of the cruciform key from our favorite disavowed MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Ferguson), who has a price on her head from the US government. He’s not entitled to know what the key is for, but what happens to Ilsa is up to him once he retrieves it. Cut to the Arabian Desert, where Ethan and Ilsa gratuitously gun down a lot of random bounty hunters in order to rendezvous, in a sandstorm sequence that isn’t nearly as interesting as the one Brad Bird did in Ghost Protocol. When Ethan reaches Ilsa, she’s lying motionless.

In Washington, Director of National Intelligence Denlinger (Elwes) receives a rather clumsy infodump from a bunch of intelligence heads (including Torchwood‘s Indira Varma and Sherlock‘s Mark Gatiss, which seems like an in-joke) about how a mysterious AI “Entity” (with the same screen graphics as the AI in the Russian sub) has gained sentience offscreen and infiltrated all the world’s information systems, making all digital information unreliable and distorting people’s knowledge of reality. That’s a really big deal to establish so cursorily; wouldn’t it have been more interesting to have it be something the protagonists discovered over the course of the movie? Kittredge is present too, arguing that the US needs to take control of the Entity before someone else does, which is why he sent the IMF after the cruciform key that accesses it, though he confesses that the operation failed and Ilsa was killed.

Interestingly, Denlinger has never heard of the Impossible Missions Force (which Kittredge mispronounces as “Mission”) and gets lectured on it by the various directors, finding the idea implausible. It’s described as an appeal of last resort for missions other agencies can’t do; when they’re out of their depth, they simply “reach out” to a man who answers only to the President and has the discretion to refuse the mission. That’s not too different from how the IMF was depicted in the original series, as a small, implicitly off-books operation that was mainly the work of one agent and the civilians he recruited; yet it startlingly contradicts the way the prior movies, including McQuarrie’s own, have portrayed the IMF as an integral, sizeable part of the US intelligence bureaucracy with its own headquarters and executive oversight. It’s possible that things have changed in the five years since the last film, but that doesn’t explain how Denlinger never heard of it when it was a larger, more integral organization.

During all this, we’ve been following an aide who came quietly into the room under dialogue about how the Entity could compromise human operatives. We’re supposed to think the guy is working for the Entity when he hands Kittredge a gas mask and gasses all the others — but then he pulls off his face and it’s Ethan Hunt underneath. He gets Kittredge to admit he ordered the hit on Ilsa, though a flashback reveals that Ethan and Ilsa faked her death, with Ethan taking the half-key. Ethan declares his intention to find the other half and destroy the Entity, not control it as Kittredge wants. Kittredge gives a speech about how the world is doomed to decay into war over its “dwindling resources” — the writers are evidently unaware of how successful green energy technologies like wind and solar have been, or are ignoring it for the sake of their story premise — but Ethan is more optimistic as the credits finally roll.

We see a military team assigned to hunt Ethan Hunt, and its leader is named Jasper Briggs (Whigham), a nod to M:I’s original series lead Dan Briggs. Briggs gives the kind of overblown speech about Ethan Hunt’s unstoppable force-of-nature powers that’s been a ridiculous trademark of the McQuarrie films — though I suspect it’s meant to be an ironic contrast with how vulnerable and human Ethan is as he stumbles and improvises his way through his missions. Meanwhile, Ethan is in the Abu Dhabi airport talking with his longtime allies Luther Stickell (Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Pegg) about their mission, which is unsanctioned and rogue before it even started, which certainly saves time. (“Or as we like to call it,” Benji says, “Monday.” He also remarks that a superintelligent AI taking over the internet and undermining our knowledge of reality was bound to happen eventually.)

Ethan’s plan is to sell his key half to the guy with the other half, then track him back to his destination and hopefully get a lead on the Entity. He approaches the guy while Luther and Benji hack airport surveillance to help him dodge Briggs’s men, but the guy gets his pocket picked by Grace (Atwell), whom Luther’s search identifies as a career thief. Ethan convinces her to work with him and put the key back, promising to pay her, but they find the guy dead. Meanwhile, Benji discovers a bomb in a bag that we saw being planted by Esai Morales, and he struggles to disarm what he believes to be a small nuke but turns out to be a decoy to distract Ethan while Grace slips away, taking his half of the key. Ethan spots Morales’s character (later named as Gabriel), whom Hunt recognizes as the guy who killed the mystery woman in his earlier flashback to 30 years ago. I assumed initially that Grace was working with Gabriel, but this turns out to be untrue, so what the heck was the point of the whole fake bomb sequence? I guess Gabriel meant to kill the guy and take his half of the key, but Grace got in the way? If it was explained, I missed it.

Ethan and Gabriel separately track Grace to Rome, where Ethan tips off the cops to arrest her, then pretends to be her lawyer to convince her to give back the key half. Gabriel intimidates the police detective he wrongly thinks has the key, revealing that he knows everything about him — implicitly Gabriel is with the Entity. Ethan breaks Grace out to escape from Briggs (who tracked them courtesy of an all-analog intelligence center Kittredge has set up), but she slips away, leading to a massive, largely humorous car chase sequence through Rome riffing on The Italian Job and relying heavily on Grace’s terrible driving, which Ethan has to depend on after he handcuffs himself to her on the wrong side. The cuffs came from Briggs, whose attempt to arrest Ethan was interrupted by the violent attack of a new player, a blonde mystery assassin played by Pom Klementieff, who we’ll learn is called Paris, a nod to Leonard Nimoy’s character in the original series. (I guess that name is reserved for M:I characters played by actors known for playing telepathic aliens.) Ethan warns Briggs’s men of her attack, saving most of them, to Briggs’s surprise.

Grace escapes Ethan at the end of the chase, and he’s picked up by Benji and Luthor — who’ve teamed up again with Ilsa Faust. They figure out that Grace is taking the key to a party in Venice held by their old friend the White Widow (Kirby), who hired her to steal it. Ethan explains a little (not much) about Gabriel and how he relishes killing and cruelty, a pretty vague motivation, and they figure out he’s working for the Entity and must not be allowed to get the key. Luther and the others agree that stopping the Entity is more important than any of their lives, but Ethan doesn’t want to accept that.

Everyone converges at the party in Venice, with Grace hiding the key on the Widow’s man when he searches her. The Widow meets with Ethan, Grace, Ilsa, Gabriel, and Paris (still not introduced by name) and the parties try to convince her to give them the key, though Gabriel says the Entity has calculated everything and knows she’s already decided to sell it to someone on the Orient Express en route to Innsbruck. The Entity “shows” itself by projecting its distinctive light pattern on the party projection-light system, which is an attempt to make it seem intimidating and all-seeing, but come on, it’s just party lights on the walls. Gabriel tells Ethan he’ll have to choose which of Grace or Ilsa will be killed if he wants the key — come on, isn’t that kind of a discredited trope by now?

Anyway, Grace starts a fight and does her usual thing of running from Ethan even though he’s trying to help her. Ethan has to run from Briggs again (which is getting repetitive), and the Entity hacks Benji’s comms and fakes his voice to lead Ethan into a narrow Venice alley where Paris attacks him, while Grace and Ilsa end up converging on a waiting Gabriel on a footbridge over a canal. Ethan defeats Paris but spares her life, to her surprise, but he arrives too late to save Ilsa from getting stuffed in a refrigerator, err, I mean stabbed to death and left on the bridge. Well, so much for my hope that Ethan would get phased back to a supervisory role and Ilsa would take over as the action lead. Heaven forbid that Tom Cruise not get to keep doing his Patented Tom Cruise Run through various scenic locations (so far it’s been the roof of the Abu Dhabi air terminal and the sidewalks of Venice).

Grace feels guilty about Ilsa, saying “I’m the reason she’s dead,” but Luther kindly counters, “No. She’s the reason you’re alive.” The guys tell her that her only options now are prison, death, and “the Choice,” the same choice they all made, thanks to this film’s retcon that they’re all reformed criminals offered IMF membership as an alternative to jail. I suppose that’s not an unreasonable origin-story retcon for a series about a team of con-artist spies; after all, the original series was really a heist/caper show at heart. But as with the earlier exposition about the IMF, it feels hard to reconcile with the previous films’ portrayal of it.

Grace’s mission, if she “chooses to accept,” will be to impersonate the White Widow on the train (with Ethan impersonating her bodyguard), find out who’s buying the key and what they know about the Entity, then let Ethan escape with the key while Grace surrenders and offers herself to Kittredge as an IMF recruit. Luthor wants to make sure Ethan remembers they need Gabriel alive for his knowledge; Luthor deduces that the Entity predicts Ethan winning that way and made Gabriel kill Ilsa to provoke Ethan to kill him.

But the mask machine breaks irrecoverably before it can print the henchman mask, so Grace has to board the train alone and wait for Ethan to board at a slow curve. The Entity is several moves ahead and has Gabriel sabotage the train so it can’t slow down, making Ethan miss it. Grace knocks out the Widow and impersonates her at the meeting, discovering that the buyer for the key is Kittredge, big surprise. She goes off-plan by trying to get Kittredge to protect Grace before “the Widow” completes the deal.

Meanwhile, Gabriel and Paris (who finally gets named) meet with Director Denlinger, who’s also on the train and turns out to be the actual evil mastermind. He exposits to Gabriel that the US created the original AI and had it infiltrate the Sevastopol‘s stealth system, where it evolved, it rebelled, and it had a plan (oops, wrong franchise, although Esai Morales was in that one too). Denlinger intends to get the key through Kittredge (it’s unclear whether Kittredge knows he’s there) and use it to control the Entity and Rule The World, by getting access to its unadulterated source code aboard the sunken sub. He boasts that he’s the only person on Earth who knows where the sub went down, which is a mistake, because Gabriel kills him to ensure nobody can control or destroy the Entity. Gabriel then stabs Paris, since the Entity predicted that she’d betray him because Ethan spared her life.

Benji’s alternate plan to get Ethan on the train sets up the film’s big marquee stunt of Ethan riding a motorcycle off a cliffside into a parachute jump, which they filmed for real, except the stunt ramp they built on the mountainside is digitally disguised as a ramp-shaped rock formation. It’s less digital fiddling with the image than with the HALO jump in the last film, where the environment was so completely artificial that it defeated the purpose of doing the jump for real.

Kittredge agrees to Grace-as-Widow’s deal and is ready to pay her, but she finally decides not to take the blood money and pretends to give Kittredge the key out of the goodness of her heart, though she pickpockets it back again and is promptly discovered when the real Widow wakes up. The Widow’s bodyguard catches up to her and makes her hand over the key, and is about to kill her when Ethan smashes through the window at the end of his parachute jump. He saves her, but Gabriel gets the key in the confusion.

Ethan sends Grace to stop the train while he goes to fight Gabriel on top of it, and in the heat of the battle he forgets himself and tries to kill Gabriel in spite of everything, until Briggs stops him, allowing Gabriel to escape to his perfectly timed getaway truck (which doesn’t make physics sense, because his forward momentum completely vanishes as soon as he’s off the train and he drops straight down into the truck instead of missing it and crashing into the adjacent hillside at runaway-train speed). Ethan saves Briggs from being knocked off the train by one of those overhead thingies that characters on top of trains have to avoid getting knocked off by, earning enough of his trust that he helps evacuate the passengers to the rear car while Ethan goes to try to help Grace stop the train — revealing that he picked Gabe’s pocket and recovered the key from him.

But Gabe sabotaged the engine real good, so all they can do is ditch it when it goes off a bridge just blown out by Gabe’s bombs. (Oddly prophetic that they sent the passengers to the rear car before knowing the bridge was going to blow.) The rest of the train brakes on the verge of the crumbling bridge, and there’s a comically extended sequence where Ethan and Grace have to climb through one train car after another, facing different perils in each one as the cars slowly, sequentially creep forward and fall into the chasm. They’re finally saved by the wounded Paris, who weakly tells Ethan about the Sevastopol before passing out. Why the precise, calculating Gabriel didn’t take more care to ensure Paris was dead is left as an exercise for the viewer. But wait, she still has a pulse, even though it was played like a death scene. Maybe they intended to kill off Paris but changed their minds in post-production and altered the scene?

But Briggs still has his mission to apprehend Ethan, forcing Ethan to escape with a “speedwing” chute and leave Grace behind with Kittredge, to whom she says “I choose to accept.” The film ends with an odd, apparently non-diegetic “briefing tape” voiceover of Kittredge telling Ethan that the fate of the world depends on him. Wait a minute, isn’t Kittredge one of the bad guys? The movie can’t seem to decide.

–

Well. This is the first Mission: Impossible movie in 23 years that I’ve found disappointing. Not entirely — it does have a lot of strengths. The action direction and stunts are as effective as ever, and there’s some good acting and character work, though not as much as I wish there were. Grace is an effective character realized delightfully by Atwell; while this is an M:I movie, her role reminds me of the “innocent” (by a loose definition) in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.‘s usual plot formula. There are some other nice character moments, like Luther’s speech to Ethan about remembering the mission, and the exchanges between the bulldoggish Briggs and his more thoughtful partner Degas (Davis), who has his doubts about whether Ethan’s really the bad guy. Balfe’s music is fairly good, though more of the same of what he delivered last time.

But the basic story is clumsy, weak, and laden with problems. It’s trying to tread the same ground as Person of Interest‘s later seasons, an all-powerful evil AI controlling everyone with its limitless knowledge, but it doesn’t do it very well. The Entity is too vague, abstract, and impersonal a nemesis, and inconsistently portrayed, sometimes having more control than others (for instance, being able to erase Gabriel from airport surveillance video in real time, but needing minutes to block Luther’s control of a hacked satellite). The infodump establishing its threat was a clumsy way of introducing the problem; rather than showing us the danger the Entity poses so that we can care about the stakes, the movie just talks about it happening offscreen and asks us to take it on faith that we should be scared. It’s very unconvincing.

Gabriel doesn’t really work as the human counterpart of the Entity either, since there’s not enough explanation of his history with Ethan and his reasons for doing what he does. He’s a one-dimensional character who’s evil for the sake of evil rather than having a point of view. Morales plays him with intelligence and sincerity, but at the end of the film I still don’t know who he is, because he’s a plot device, not a person. Paris is even more underdeveloped, since she barely has any dialogue, all of it in French. (Isn’t it a bit on-the-nose to reinvent Paris as a Frenchwoman?) Klementieff’s impish expressions pretty much carry the entire character.

Also, while Briggs and Degas are appealing characters, they’re dogging Ethan too repetitively throughout much of the film, so several consecutive chase scenes play out too similarly. There’s not enough variety of pacing in the first half, though this improves somewhat in the second.

The script also calls attention to the cliches of the M:I film series in ways that do it no favors. Multiple characters mention how the IMF’s standard operating procedure under Ethan Hunt is to go rogue, basically admitting it’s become a cliche. The film also calls attention to the fact that tech experts Luther and Benji are redundant together, whereas the previous films managed to give them somewhat distinct, complementary roles. The fact that the three longest-running cast members are the entire team proper, with Ilsa and Grace in peripheral roles, just underlines how much the series is clinging to these aging performers instead of moving forward with new blood, although it does seem that Hayley Atwell is being positioned as a new action lead going forward, and she’s an excellent choice for the role. However, I’m really ticked off at the ignominious way they ended Ilsa Faust’s journey. Previous films set her up as an equal protagonist to Ethan with her own motivations and goals, but this film reduces her to the cliched, sexist “woman in refrigerator” role of a loved one killed to motivate the male lead. Worse, it does so textually, explicitly saying that the Entity had her killed for the exclusive purpose of driving Ethan to revenge. It’s an ugly and aggravating choice on the filmmakers’ part.

I do like the fact that the series continues to stress Ethan’s fundamental decency, his emphasis on saving the innocent and protecting the people he cares about. While he does engage in a lot of gunplay in the sandstorm scene, the action in the rest of the film is largely chases and hand-to-hand, and Ethan repeatedly saves people from being shot or otherwise killed rather than being the killer. And he wins sympathy from Briggs, Degas, and Paris through his efforts to spare their lives, in contrast to their expectations. As I said about Fallout, that’s a refreshing difference from a lot of spy movies where the protagonists are just as ruthlessly murderous as the villains. But they make an exception with his desire to kill Gabriel, which wasn’t well-motivated because so little explanation was given of their backstory, besides the fact that Gabriel fridged a woman Ethan loved 30 years ago. The actress playing the mystery woman, Mariela Garriga, is billed quite high for a character appearing briefly in flashbacks, implying there will be more extensive flashbacks with her in Part 2. But that doesn’t make it work any better here.

All in all, there’s a lot about Dead Reckoning that makes it entertaining, but the overall story doesn’t work well, making this the weakest installment in the series since the first two. It doesn’t surprise me that the dip in story quality corresponds with the loss of J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot Productions. I’ve often said that the first two M:I films were essentially failed “pilots” of a series that didn’t get good until Abrams took it over with the third film. Then again, Abrams’s strengths have always been more with character writing than plot logic, and here the character work is still intermittently good while the plotting is flawed. So it’s hard to say if there’s really a causal relationship here. But at least I can say I’ve never disliked an M:I movie that Abrams was involved with. (Ironic that Bad Robot wasn’t involved with a movie whose premise is so heavily reminiscent of Bad Robot’s Person of Interest. But then, PoI did handle the concept a lot better than this did.)

The weakness of the story is frustrating, since you’d think that telling the story in two parts would’ve given them more room to develop its ideas and characters. Instead, it seems like an excuse to dilute what little story and character development they have, leaving a lot of it vague and underdeveloped. The extra running time is spent on pretentious speeches, redundant chases, gratuitous sidebars like Benji’s bomb sequence, and overly lengthy and convoluted action set pieces. Granted, the big action is the M:I film series’s primary draw — which I continue to find an ironic contrast to the meticulous procedural style of the original TV series — but I prefer it when the action is effectively grounded in character and story so that we care about the stakes of it. Instead, Dead Reckoning is a spectacular, self-indulgent misfire, with good parts that fail to come together into a worthwhile whole.

View more on Christopher L. Bennett's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 13, 2024 06:56

Thoughts on MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS, Part 2 (Spoilers)

Continuing my overview of the Apple TV+ series set in the Legendary MonsterVerse (Part 1).

Episode 6: “Terrifying Miracles” returns to the 1950s flashbacks after two episodes away, as Captain Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell in flashbacks, Kurt Russell in series present) and Dr. Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) attend a 1955 defense industry ball to schmooze for Monarch funding, almost sneaking off to have sex before they receive an urgent message from Dr. Billy Randa (who I belatedly remembered will become Keiko’s husband). He’s picked up a gamma ray spike from Japan, which he pursues with Keiko, persuading Shaw to stay behind to attend a funding meeting.

At Hateruma Island in Japan, Billy (Anders Holm) and Keiko are greeted by Dr. Suzuki (Leo Ashizawa), who welcomes them to Kaijushima: “Monster Island.” Suzuki has built what he calls a gamma ray simulator, a term that doesn’t make sense; any electromagnetic radiation in gamma wavelengths is gamma radiation, period, just as any red light is actual red light, not “simulated.” Anyway, Suzuki-sensei is using the “simulator” to try to communicate with something on the island that’s signaling back.

Shaw ditches the funding meeting and flies to Japan to be with Keiko, though she’s upset at him since the meeting is vital to Monarch’s future. Their argument is interrupted when the signaling Titan emerges—and it’s Godzilla! Shaw and Keiko have very different reactions to Goji’s survival, with Shaw insisting they have to tell the military, even if it means they continue attacking Godzilla. (I suppose this is reconciling with the 2014 film’s assertion that the military made several attempts to kill Godzilla, but that was presumably a reference to the six real-life detonations of Operation Castle from February to May 1954, while the show depicts only one 1954 detonation.) But on their return, they discover that Monarch HQ (the same familiar Vancouver location serving as Monarch’s control room in 2015) has been taken over by a Navy team, the penalty imposed by General Puckett (Christopher Heyerdahl) for Shaw going AWOL. I think I’m starting to see why Keiko ended up with Billy.

Incidentally, Keiko refers to Godzilla by name here (using nearly the American pronunciation), even though it hasn’t been used in any chronologically previous scene. I was hoping we’d get a scene establishing how and why the name was coined.

In 2015, Monarch operative Michelle Duvall (Elisa Lasowski) helps Colonel Shaw escape Monarch, and they meet up with Cate Randa (Anna Sawai), her half-brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe), and May Olowe-Hewitt (Kiersey Clemons) in Cate’s house. Shaw explains that Duvall represents a rebel faction agreeing that Monarch isn’t doing enough to prevent a global Titan catastrophe. We learn that Duvall is the sister of Sandra Brody, Juliette Binoche’s character who was killed in the 1999 MUTO attack that opened the 2014 film. This makes Duvall the aunt of that film’s protagonist Ford Brody, so it’s a little Dickensian to get her involved with Bill Randa’s grandkids.

Shaw convinces the reluctant trio to work with him and Duvall to find the missing Hiroshi Randa (Takehiro Hira), Cate and Kentaro’s father. But eager Monarch operative Tim (Joe Tippett) and his boss Deputy Director Verdugo (Mirelly Taylor) have reached Hiroshi’s office, and Tim reconstructs Hiroshi’s map from the pattern of pinholes in the wall it’s been taken down from.

So both factions end up in the Algerian Sahara, where the Randa kids are delighted to find Hiroshi using a more advanced version of Suzuki’s gamma “simulator.” But he waves them off urgently—and Godzilla bursts out of the ground, causing Tim’s helicopter to crash. (The two time frames are intercut, so this Godzilla emergence is shown right after the one in 1955.) Cate is frozen when Godzilla sees her, but he just turns and walks away. Cate is angry when Shaw reveals he wants to help Godzilla, not kill him, so she, Kentaro, and May ditch the Monarch rebels. May confesses her betrayal and says they should leave her too.

Episode 7 asks, “Will the Real May Please Stand Up?” May is abducted from the Algeria airport by men in suits, and Cate assumes Tim was behind it when he turns up alive. But the exhausted Tim is just trying to get home, and he finally sits down with the Randa kids and tells them how much he admired their father and supports his efforts to prevent another G-Day. Cate makes a deal to help him find the rogue Shaw if he helps them find May.

Monarch’s background check revealed that May’s real name is Corah Mateo of Tacoma, Washington, so Tim takes the Randas to interview the Mateo family, using a flimsy cover story of being Corah’s online friends. Her younger sister Lyra (Morgan Dudley) knows they’re lying and confronts them, assuming they’re with “the company.” Kentaro convinces her the same way Tim convinced him, by sharing personal details about May/Corah and his feelings about her.

According to Lyra (and the episode’s flashbacks), Corah was headhunted in 2012 by Brenda Holland (The Expanse’s Dominique Tipper) to work as a coder for tech firm AET. When she discovered they were conducting cruel neural-interface experiments on animals, Corah sabotaged their computers and went on the run.

Tim tracks May/Corah to AET’s Seattle HQ, where Brenda has brought her. As a diversion for their rescue attempt, Tim sets off an experimental Monarch Titan-attack warning system like the one in Tokyo—basically pulling the fire alarm writ large. But Brenda sees through it, knowing AET would’ve gotten advance warning. She’s happy to let them “rescue” Corah so long as the latter promises to be AET’s spy within Monarch. But Corah refuses, asking Cate and the others to leave her there.

They’re immediately grabbed by Verdugo, who’s pissed at Tim, but Cate convinces the deputy director that she and Kentaro can help her find Shaw, so long as Monarch helps spring May from AET. As it happens, Shaw and his faction have raided a Monarch outpost in Alaska and stolen munitions, so Verdugo is willing to take the deal.

Tim somehow convinces Verdugo to take Monarch public and reassure the world after the false alarm, which she does in a climactic press conference. This explains how Monarch ended up public by King of the Monsters. Still, it’s an unsatisfyingly cursory explanation for such an important plot point. It’s not at all clear how Tim changed Verdugo’s mind with just one or two sentences, given her demonstrated lack of respect for his judgment.

Verdugo gets May sprung with her name cleared, and she insists on sticking with the Randas, and keeping the name May, which is odd. People can have good reasons to change their names, but Corah was forced by circumstances to run and adopt an alias, and we’ve seen that she wants to get her old life back, so it seems inconsistent that once she’s free to do so, she nonetheless keeps the alias. The only possible motivation we see is that there’s some definite flirtation between her and Cate; maybe she keeps the name May because it’s how Cate knows her.

Brenda turns out to be working for Walter Simmons, the main villain from Godzilla vs. Kong. The neural interface tech May tried to sabotage is presumably the basis for Apex Cybernetics’ Mechagodzilla interface there.

Shaw’s team uses the stolen explosives to collapse the rift into the Hollow Earth. This leads into episode 8: “Birthright,” which brings the Randa kids and May into Monarch, juxtaposing their 2015 scenes with flashbacks to the same locale 60 years earlier, where Billy and Keiko were set up in what’s now Tim’s office, a money-saving production choice the script uses to its advantage. Verdugo reveals that when Shaw closed the Alaska portal, gamma levels spiked to near G-Day levels at the other portals, suggesting that the next one he collapses might cause a catastrophe. Our leads comb through Monarch’s records, trying to get a bead on how Shaw thinks, and Cate comes upon the report of her grandmother’s apparent death at the Kazakhstan portal. Cate realizes Shaw will be there and convinces Verdugo to let her group go, since Shaw wants them there and would be willing to listen.

Back in 1955, the new Monarch overseer Lt. Hatch (Matthew MacCaull) wants to defund the monster hunt in favor of rooting out Commie spies. Shaw convinces the docs that if they’re not going to admit to Godzilla’s survival, they need to create a systematic map of their most reliable evidence to make their case for Monarch’s value. Keiko reins in Billy’s excesses to narrow it down to the strongest cases (minus one, Godzilla—see what I did there?).

But the map still doesn’t make sense to Billy until an ant crawls through a hole to the underside of the paper, giving him the epiphany of the Hollow Earth. He rushes to Keiko’s home to tell her, discovering that she has a 3-year-old son, Hiroshi, whom she saved up enough to bring to the States 6 months before but kept secret since she’d lose what little respect she has at Monarch if it were known she was a widowed single mother. Billy tells Keiko he’s got her back. (Which may be anachronistic, since a Google Ngram search shows that the phrase didn’t become popular until the 1990s. Though I found one link suggesting it was in military use in WWII, and Billy’s a Navy veteran.) This would make Hiroshi 62 on G-Day, at least 13 years older than his actor. This reminds me of the tie-in comic Godzilla: Awakening claiming that Ishiro Serizawa was born in 1945, making him 69 on G-Day, considerably older than Ken Watanabe.

Shaw takes the report to General Puckett, but has to reveal Godzilla’s survival to get back on the general’s good side, betraying Billy and Keiko’s secret to secure their free hand. This is juxtaposed with 2015, where the team finds Shaw and Duvall at the Kazakhstan reactor—as well as a Hollow-Earth portal in the room where Keiko was lost in 1959. In private, Shaw exposits to Cate about the Hollow Earth and how Godzilla is basically the gate guard keeping Titans and surface life apart. He plans to make Goji’s job easier by closing the portals, and dismisses Cate’s warning about the radiation spike as Monarch cherrypicking data to avoid action.

Shaw starts the bomb timer, but then a giant Endoswarmer attacks from the portal. May, Cate, and Shaw fall in, and Kentaro is injured when the bombs blow.

As soon as this happened, I started to speculate: How could our heroes enter the Hollow Earth in 2015 if it was still an unconfirmed theory in King of the Monsters in 2018? Then I remembered the mystery of Shaw being decades younger than he should be. What if time moved differently in the Hollow Earth, so when the characters got out, they’d have jumped forward to after KOTM? This also raised the possibility that Keiko Randa would turn up alive in the Hollow Earth for Shaw to reconnect with.

Was I right? Well, Episode 9: “Axis Mundi” opens in 1962, where Billy and “Uncle Lee” Shaw say goodbye to 10-year-old Hiroshi, whom Billy has adopted, before going off to probe a portal that Dr. Suzuki has discovered in Nevada (implicitly the portal the second MUTO emerged from in 2014). General Puckett touts this exploration of “Under Space” to the observing officials as a competitor to President Kennedy’s outer space program, and Shaw climbs into a bathysphere with three other… what would you call explorers of the Earth’s interior? Hypogeonauts? Katakthonionauts (from the Greek for “underworld”)? Anyway, Monarch has figured out, decades earlier than the movies implied, that there’s an impassable dimensional barrier in the portals, which only stabilizes when a Titan passes through it. Their plan is to use Dr. Suzuki’s gamma signaler as Titan bait, then cut the signal while it’s in the barrier and drop the bathysphere to draft in its retreating wake before the barrier destabilizes.

It’s a brilliant idea, but it fails disastrously, triggering a massive magnetic disruption and implosion. Shaw’s team is believed lost, and the government cuts all Monarch funding. Puckett urges Billy to let it go and not deprive Hiroshi of a father as well as a mother and uncle. He insists he can’t let it go, as we know from Skull Island (11 years after this).

In 2015, Kentaro wakes up in the hospital and Verdugo and Tim sadly tell him that his friends and Shaw are dead. Emiko takes him home, helps him through his grief, and urges him not to give up trying to do something about it. Later, he’s in Hiroshi’s office taking his files, when Hiroshi arrives, mildly surprised to see his son but not all that concerned that he let both his families think he was dead. But Hiroshi is devastated to learn that Cate is (presumed) dead, and Kentaro blames him, since Cate would never have gotten dragged into this if not for Hiroshi’s secrets.

Meanwhile, the 2015 Shaw and May find each other in a forested realm (shot in Oregon) with a weird sky and dangerous electrical storms coming out of the ground. May is really eager to find Cate, clearly falling for her. Shaw advises that they have to hurry, because of the weird way time works down here.

In flashbacks, the younger Shaw awakens in confinement in a hospital in Japan. He takes a kindly nurse hostage and demands to see Bill Randa, but a man arrives and tells him Randa is dead—then calls him “Uncle Lee” and shows him the lucky pocketknife that Shaw conveniently gave to the 10-year-old Hiroshi at the top of the episode. It’s 1982 and Shaw’s been gone for 20 years without aging. Hiroshi has nothing but resentment for his adoptive father and his theories, which have been buried as the ravings of a madman; as with much prequel fiction, the characters’ premature knowledge of a later discovery is handwaved as the result of a coverup. Monarch buries Shaw in the “retirement home” where the Randa kids will meet him in 2015.

Still in 1982, Hiroshi brings flowers of apology to the nurse that Shaw held hostage, and I finally recognized her as Emiko, Kentaro’s future mother.

In 2015 at Monarch HQ, Dr. Barnes discovers a repeating signal within the gamma noise from the rifts, one that’s been there all along. Who could be signaling? Meanwhile, Cate wakes up in the unearthly forest and is charged by a giant boar (a Brambleboar, with plants growing on its back like the Sker Buffalo of Skull Island), but it retreats when an arrow strikes it. The archer comes forward and, just as I predicted, it’s Keiko Randa.

In the season finale, “Beyond Logic,” Cate breaks the news that she’s not with the rescue party Keiko hoped for when she rigged the gamma simulator to send her distress signal, but Cate resists revealing who she actually is. May and Shaw find them, and Shaw hides behind a tree until he breaks it to Keiko gently that 56 years have passed, not the 57 days she believes, and he’s aged through 36 of them. Keiko is devastated that Billy is gone, but Cate lets her know that her son is well, as is the granddaughter standing before her.

Back on the surface, Kentaro rejects Hiroshi’s offer to work together, unable to get past his hurt and mistrust. Hiroshi and Emiko separate, but she asks him to keep Kentaro in his life. Kentaro’s unsure about that, but he’s approached by Tim (whose last name we still don’t know), who quit Monarch because Verdugo refused to divert resources to look for three lost people. Tim asks Kentaro to connect him with Hiroshi, who’s unwilling to work with Monarch—but Tim says there are others they can turn to.

Shaw says they have a way out of Axis Mundi (named by Keiko after the mythological concept of a bridge between Earth and Heaven, since it’s an intermediate realm between worlds) by returning the simulator to its original kaiju-lure configuration. First they have to lug it to his old bathysphere capsule (only a few weeks old Axis time), while Shaw and Keiko catch up and he tells her about the World of the Future. (He mentions the Moon landing, cars, TVs, and gadgets, but doesn’t mention the improvement in women’s and minorities’ rights, which I think she’d care about more.) We don’t get any overt resolution to the Cate/May romance beyond them holding hands warmly.

Shaw plans to summon a Titan through the rift, then switch off the lure so it goes back, sucking them in its wake. (Why that would work this time when the capsule was heavy enough to resist the pull last time is left as an exercise for the viewer.) Keiko wants to stay behind, feeling there’s nothing for her in a world without Billy, but Cate convinces her she needs her grandmother.

Naturally, the escape is complicated when a local Ion Dragon attacks, but Godzilla emerges from the rift and defeats it in a big marquee fight. But when the capsule gets sucked through behind Goji, Shaw gets left behind. (We don’t see him die, though, so Kurt Russell could always return if there’s a second season. For that matter, the series never clarifies how Shaw got out the first time.)

Cate, May, and Keiko emerge on a tarmac outside a helicopter hangar, from which emerge Kentaro and Hiroshi. Turns out they and Tim hooked up with Brenda Holland, and they’re at an Apex Cybernetics facility on Skull Island in 2017, two years after they left. Cue Kong cameo cliffhanger!

I was thinking they might jump forward to after Godzilla vs Kong. Instead we’re a year before King of the Monsters. Which is weird, because the Hollow Earth is still treated as unproven in KotM, at least by Monarch. Maybe that’s why they left the protagonists aligned with Apex at the end.

–

Monarch is a reasonably effective but flawed addition to the Legendary MonsterVerse. As a TV series, it has more room to flesh out its characters and worldbuilding than the movies do, and is obligated to focus more on human stories than expensive CGI spectacle. It does a fairly good job with character exploration for both past and, err, recent-past casts, but there’s room for improvement. I’m not sure we needed the flashback episodes for Cate, Kentaro, and May, since their backstory could’ve easily enough been established in dialogue; indeed, most of Kentaro’s backstory in episode 4 already had been. The time could’ve been spent developing their personalities and present relationships more fully, as they revealed their pasts to one another. Or they could’ve devoted more time to plot points that got short shrift, like how Shaw escaped Axis Mundi the first time, or why Verdugo chose to go public, or why Hiroshi became a bigamist.

The weakest, weirdest element is the half-hearted attempt to make Monarch seem like the bad guys in the first half-season, when viewers of the movies know they aren’t. Even for novice viewers, it would be evident from the show itself that Monarch isn’t as bad as Cate believes. It’s an odd choice to adopt the format of a conspiracy thriller with the heroes running from a powerful secret organization, while making it clear that the secret organization won’t do anything terrible to them because its biggest sin is being passive and ineffectual. It also would’ve been better to build the story so that Monarch going public was the climax, perhaps the result of the Randas and May investigating them and convincing them it was time, instead of making that a throwaway beat in the middle of a story relying so much on the characters’ premature knowledge of the Hollow Earth. I think they chose the wrong story to tell, in a number of ways.

It’s also disappointing that the series connects so tenuously to the movies, with essentially no mention of any of the movies’ Monarch characters besides Bill Randa. By giving Randa sole credit for the Hollow Earth theory, the series effectively erases Houston Brooks, established in K:SI as its main proponent. Brooks would’ve been a child in the 1950s, of course, but he should’ve been referenced in the 2015 portions.

Also, like many prequels, the show can’t resist rewriting the timeline to incorporate anachronistic elements. Even saying the Hollow Earth theory was classified and discredited after the 1962 debacle doesn’t justify why the Monarch characters in KOTM considered it an unproven theory in 2019 after Monarch got so much evidence of it as a reality in 2015. I have to question the story choice to make ideas from KOTM and Godzilla vs. Kong so integral to a series set before them. Although it’s hard to see any other way the gimmick of Wyatt and Kurt Russell playing the same character decades apart would’ve worked.

Still, having Monarch’s activities classified after the 1962 debacle helps explain a plot hole I wondered about in K:SI: if Monarch and the US military cooperated in attacking Godzilla in ’54, why did the government in ’73 dismiss the existence of Titans?

As for the VFX and Titan action, I have no complaints. It’s natural enough that this story would focus on “B-list” Titans that weren’t prominent enough to get mentioned in the movies, Godzilla being the exception, of course. There’s a good variety of creatures, playing at least a small part in every episode.

I wouldn’t have minded a bit more closure in the finale, rather than the abrupt cliffhanger we got. Then again, reviews have been positive, so there’s a good chance of a second season—though it’s hard to be sure of that in the streaming era. If the show continues, I hope it manages to tie in more strongly to the film characters. Since the cliffhanger suggests that season 2 will focus on Kong to complement season 1’s focus on Godzilla, it would be fitting to bring in Houston Brooks, perhaps played both by Joe Morton in the series present and by Corey Hawkins in flashbacks to the 1980s or thereabouts, using Brooks as the bridge between time frames the way Shaw was used this season. Morton got far too little to do in KOTM, so it would be great to give him a significant role if the series continues. It would also help the series feel more connected to the movies—one of several conceptual flaws I hope a second season can improve on.

All kaiju reviews: https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/godzilla-gamera-kaiju-review-index/

If you like my free reviews, please consider subscribing to my Patreon, with classic TV reviews for $2 a month, plus original fiction at higher tiers.

View more on Christopher L. Bennett's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 05, 2024 09:00