Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Parallels and Interiors Season 1 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating 3 stars ***

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Parallels and Interiors Season 1 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating 3 stars ***

There’s no Wyatt Russell or 1950s action in this episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, but you better believe there are still alternating flashbacks and two different timelines. Rather than cutting to more than half a century ago, episode four cuts to a mere year before the show’s “present day” setting of 2015, before Godzilla and the MUTOs devastated San Francisco. We’ve seen what the events of that day did to Cate, but we knew far less about her half-brother, Kentaro.

In 2014, Kentaro was a Tokyo artist who was preparing to launch his first gallery showing, though he didn’t seem to be super interested in having to sell himself as an artist to sell his illuminated sculpture-type pieces. A couple of hours before the opening, he walks outside to snap a picture of the venue and accidentally photographs May as she’s passing by. She asks him to delete the picture, which leads to some flirting, and Kentaro decides to bail on his opening to get some nice whiskey with this new girl he’s just met. He takes her to a swanky-looking speakeasy, which he’s able to get into before it opens because he designed the lighting.

Even though the bartender, Sota, gives Kentaro a little bit of shit and pleads the Fifth when May asks if Kentaro’s done this with other girls, the vibes are good. The pair go to Kentaro’s studio, and he’s still avoiding explaining why he doesn’t feel any urgency to get back to the opening of his first-ever gallery show. They sleep together, and we get to learn a little bit about May — though not quite enough to preclude that her past, as alluded to in episode two, might be more mysterious and possibly connected to the action than what she says here lets on. May says she does “computer shit” and that she came to Japan from her home of Tacoma because Tacoma sucks and Japan is cool. (Fair!) She gives Kentaro her number before he leaves her to finally go to his gallery, and she gets a call from her sister, Lyra, who she simply tells she’s traveling for work.

What happens when Kentaro returns to the gallery remains a mystery because we don’t see what actually happened. Instead, we see a feverish, revealing hallucination that a near-dead Kentaro experiences while lost in the snow in the far north reaches of Alaska, because in 2015, Kentaro has much bigger problems than a gallery opening — literally, they’re bigger because a Titan has trapped him, May, Cate, and Shaw in the frozen wastes.

Kentaro’s able to distract the beast by firing a flare, giving the four of them enough time to run to a cave and hide. May, however, breaks through some ice and falls about shin-deep into some water, instantly raising the stakes even higher. Unless they get help soon, May’s going to get frostbite and worse, and all their long-term odds for survival are not good. Kentaro claims he saw something off in the distance that looked like a big golf ball while the plane was crashing, and even though nobody else saw it, they start hiking up the mountains to find it. There’s a light far off on the horizon that Shaw assumes is a settlement, but it’s not in the direction where Kentaro claims to have seen whatever he saw. He says he’ll look for it on his own, then, and Shaw surprisingly agrees.

It’s a pretty cold move from Shaw, who we’ve seen to be fairly mercenary before. It is somewhat practical — now they have two chances of finding help, and whoever succeeds can get help for the other party. But, you also get the sense that Shaw isn’t especially optimistic about the odds that Hiroshi’s boy, as he called him on their first meeting, will survive. Letting him go his own way is, more immediately, an end to the fighting and a chance to get Shaw, Cate, and May to where he thinks salvation will be.

Suspending your disbelief in a series about giant monsters is essential, but there is something underwhelming about how flippantly everyone is treating splitting up and just walking untold miles across unknown frozen landscapes in the hopes that they’ll find something (and then be able to find each other.) Shaw’s got that Kurt Russell swagger that makes him seem not all that concerned about this life-or-death situation, but his choice to let Kentaro hoof it alone hints at a deeper, graver understanding of their circumstances. He’s putting on a brave face and Kentaro’s probably walking to his death, which somewhat offsets the nonchalant way the hour treats being lost in the arctic.

It certainly seems like Kentaro’s about to die. He’s lost in the blizzard and starting to hallucinate. The flashbacks to his meeting May are increasingly diegetic as he’s seeing things. He sees his father, Hiroshi, walk past him through the snow, and he follows a trail of pencil shavings to the gallery — which reveals itself to actually be a decrepit old base of some sort. Kentaro thinks he’s back in that gallery, though, and he has a conversation with his dad that he never had in real life. Hiroshi, trying to be supportive but being a kind of bad dad in the process, pressured his son into having this show even though Kentaro didn’t think he was ready for it. Kentaro didn’t want to go to the opening because he didn’t want to face his dad’s disappointment — and he didn’t know it would be his last opportunity to see him before his disappearance. The hallucinated Hiroshi says he wouldn’t have missed it for the world and that the opening went great before he fades away — and Kentaro spies a bunch of very real pencil savings by a repaired radio inside the base.

Shaw, Cate, and an increasingly worse for ware May, meanwhile, have walked in a big circle. They’re back at Hiroshi’s tent, where the Titan makes its lair, and Shaw explains that the presence of Titans makes strange things happen. (Do they warp reality? That would be a trip.) May is too injured to make another attempt to get help, so against Shaw’s wishes, they build a fire and start to warm her up. She thinks she’s not going to make it, and she tells Cate to call her sister when she goes as Shaw debates burning Hiroshi’s notes for warmth. He’s concerned about losing whatever discoveries Hiroshi might have made, but Cate says to let them burn. Just then, the Titan emerges from the snow and slurps up the campfire, prompting Shaw to realize that it’s attracted to heat.

Shaw prepares a funeral pyre for Dae-Ho in an attempt to lure the Titan out again so that he can distract it with a big jet fuel explosion, but when helicopters appear, the monster comes out before they’re ready. May uses the laptop — which contains the only copy of Randa’s files since Shaw elected to dump the paper copies overboard the past episode — to block the Titan’s icy breath and save herself before Shaw sets off the explosion. As the Titan slurps up the massive fire, all three of them get to the helicopter, and Shaw sees a massive, glowing crevice as they fly away — a sight that he seems to recognize. The helicopters were Kentaro’s doing, and the pencil shavings at the base prove that Hiroshi is alive, as he was able to fix the radio that Kentaro used to call for help. All four of our present-day heroes are safe, but Randa’s files are destroyed. When they land, Tim, the Monarch agent, greets them — Monarch’s been busy this episode, too.

Barnes, a Monarch agent based in Utah, got a strange, concerning reading from some old piece of equipment in her trailer, interrupting her Sir Mixalot singalong. She calls up Assistant Director Virdugo, and at Monarch’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, she presents her findings. There’s a radiation spike, a pulsar, the sort that’s normally only seen in black holes, coming up from the Earth in Alaska. The last time anybody saw something like this was “the last emergence event” in Yucca Flats, which took place before G-Day. This emergence event is a big, new mystery, and it’s presumably where the past timeline is headed. Tim, speaking to the assembled Monarch brass, makes a compelling case for not dismissing Randa’s files and wanting to track down Lee Shaw because he was there the last time whatever this is happened.

“We gotta be open-minded about other possibilities; we’re all here to learn about atomic-powered monsters and stop any other deaths,” he says. If that’s a stirring call to action that shakes Monarch out of its secretive complacency, it really speaks to how far Monarch has fallen since Billy, Keiko, and Lee’s heyday.

The emergence event teased in this episode — which otherwise largely serves to get the protagonists out of Alaska and fill in some of Kentaro’s backstory — is exciting. From the jump, Monarch’s place in the MonsterVerse timeline seemed to preclude a gigantic, city-smashing kaiju brawl because there was no such public event before the events of 2014’s Godzilla. This seems like a big enough deal for Monarch to be concerned (and Yucca Flats isn’t an especially populated area), so it’s nice to have a big, presumably showy monster event to look forward to. It did take Monarch four episodes to mention it, and given the way the series likes to play with timelines and mystery box-style plots, it’ll probably be a couple more episodes before we get a firmer sense of what the emergence event actually is and what it means to Lee Shaw and the world. But now that Shaw has come out of the cold (literally and figuratively) and is back with a newly invested Monarch, we’re bound to learn something more about this whole legacy of monsters.

Up From the Depths

• I’ll stop short of calling this an intentional Easter egg, as that term gets thrown around too liberally, but the shots of Kentaro walking through the snow reminded me a bit of the iconic poster for The Thing — starring, of course, Kurt Russell.

• That glowing crevasse likely has something to do with the MonsterVerse’s hollow earth, first mentioned in Skull Island and then later explored in King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong. At this point in the timeline, hollow earth is just a theory, as it’s confirmed in King of the Monsters.

• The way the crevasse glows, though, resembles the rifts from Pacific Rim, which is interesting. Pacific Rim comes from Legendary, the same studio as the MonsterVerse, and the director of the (not very good) sequel, Pacific Rim: Uprising, tweeted that he had ideas to have a MonsterVerse and Pacific Rim crossover in a third movie. This crossover never happened (and it’s unclear how serious this idea ever really was). While fan theory peddlers on Reddit might be positing that Monarch is going to involve Jaegers, somehow, that seems pretty doubtful to me. An Apple TV+ show is not the venue for such a big mashing of IPs.

• Calling the Godzilla versus the MUTOs battle in San Francisco “G-Day” is kind of funny because the Titans did wreck Honolulu pretty bad before Godzilla smashed the Golden Gate Bridge. One of the MUTOs messed up Las Vegas before that, too. Those second-tier cities get kind of forgotten about when everybody focuses on the Bay Area.

• This is the first episode that does not feature any Godzilla. It’s fine.

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