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.
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