Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Birthright Season 1 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 3 stars ***

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Birthright Season 1 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 3 stars ***

When Kong: Skull Island introduced the MonsterVerse’s version of the “Hollow Earth” theory, establishing a world with a secret world inside it where giant monsters hide out, it seemed like a nifty little narrative contrivance: vaguely pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo that mostly exists as a way to get Godzilla from point A to point B and give the human characters something to chatter about. As the franchise continues, however, and as Monarch: Legacy of Monsters shows, there may not actually be a lot going on inside that premise. The disconnect between how silly the Hollow Earth is and how seriously the MonsterVerse seems to be treating it is jarring — especially in this prequel series that’s largely about our heroic scientists’ brave attempts to prove the existence of something crazy that later movies will treat with passing nonchalance.

Take, for instance, Billy’s eureka moment in this episode. Having lost operational control of Monarch because Lee went after Keiko instead of kissing up to Puckett and making that budget meeting, our 1950s trio now has to deal with a new boss, Lieutenant Hatch. He belittles their work, prepares a report that will make them look like con artists, and makes racist accusations about Keiko. That prompts Billy to take a swing at him, and once they’re all banished to the basement, Lee realizes they need to make a last-ditch effort to prove how vital Monarch is. Billy and Keiko have three days to take all of their notes and make a map that will concisely and convincingly show the military brass what they need to worry about.

By putting the scientists to work, Lee has also put himself on the losing side of this love triangle. He overhears the pair working into the wee hours of the night under the (surprisingly romantic) red paper lantern lights Keiko has strung up around the office, and he seems to realize — and accept — that they’re growing close. They’re also making progress as they flirt in ways that almost comically tease the Hollow Earth breakthrough. Eventually, though, Billy figures it out alone when an ant crawls through a hole in the map of the Titan sightings they’ve documented, leading him to realize there may well be a world on the other side of our own.

Perhaps this discovery is more impactful for anybody watching Monarch who hasn’t seen the later MonsterVerse movies, if such a person exists. Billy’s breakthrough via ant is cute, and the revelation that all these monsters are lurking right under our feet should feel monumental. But because of Monarch’s place in the greater franchise, we knew this already. The older Bill Randa, played by John Goodman in Skull Island and again in the Monarch premiere, died trying to prove his theory. (Although in that movie, it’s billed as seismologist Houston Brooks’s theory, not Randa’s. Chalk that up to a retcon, I guess?) By the time of Godzilla vs. Kong, which takes place about six years after the “present day” Monarch timeline, major swaths of the action occur inside the Hollow Earth, where Kong’s ancestors lived, yet Alexander Skarsgård’s character, Nathan Lind, is initially considered a fringe scientist because he’s a Hollow Earth theorist? With this context, the impact of Billy’s discovery is the worst of both worlds (and the worlds inside those worlds). He’s discovering something the audience knows all about, yet we get the sense that his discovery didn’t actually convince anyone of Hollow Earth’s existence. It’s a confounding place to be, especially as Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire seems poised to go even deeper into the Hollow Earth and further from whatever veneer of realism this franchise once had. The MonsterVerse is going all in on this Hollow Earth thing, so I suppose it makes sense to have a spinoff series focus on its origins, messy as they are.

In any case, within the world of the show, this discovery is big news, and it prompts Billy to rush to Keiko’s house, where we get a reveal that actually is surprising: Keiko has a son, Hiroshi. He’s not Billy’s or Lee’s biological child but Keiko’s from her first marriage. He’s why Keiko applied to do postgrad work at Berkeley, and she was working all this time to get visas for Hiroshi and her mother to come join her in the U.S., keeping her son a secret from Billy, Lee, and everyone else because it was already hard enough for her to get respect without their knowing she’s a widowed single mother. Billy says she doesn’t have to do it alone, and perhaps that’s a big part of the reason Keiko ends up with Billy instead of Lee. He’s a fellow scientist who wants to learn and teach. Lee, for all his strengths, told Keiko his favorite part of kids was making them. One of these is clearly a better father for a kid who already exists.

Lee’s going to do what it takes to ensure the safety of Monarch, though, which, in a way, is his baby. He goes to Puckett with the only slightly exaggerated map that Billy and Keiko made of all the potential Titan threats they’re monitoring. Still smarting because Lee turned down his advice, Puckett’s ready to write Lee off, but Lee drops a bomb that changes the generals’ minds when he finally reveals that they didn’t kill Godzilla with their bomb. Billy and Keiko had warned Lee against revealing this, but by framing this as information that they uncovered and that Hatch didn’t, Lee appears to have ensured the two will remain Monarch’s scientific leads.

We learn in 2015 that things didn’t go totally according to plan, however. Tim takes Cate, Kentaro, and May into his office at Monarch HQ, which happens to be the same little room where Billy and Keiko did their work decades earlier. (The hole Billy punched in the wall is still there.) Tim reveals that Billy took over once Keiko died and started pushing theories about wormholes. Tim calls it “tinfoil hat” stuff and explains that Hiroshi and his dad had a falling out before he turns to the matter at hand: The gamma levels at the rift Shaw blew up in Alaska have died down, but they have risen in 12 other locations to levels just below what they saw on G-Day. If Shaw blows up another one, Monarch’s afraid it could send them over the line. Verdugo asks Cate and Kentaro to figure out which rift Shaw’s headed for next, and when digging through mountains of old paper files, Cate figures it out. He’s going to Kazakhstan because that’s where Keiko died.

Working with a small team since Monarch can’t operate in Kazakhstan (for some reason?), Cate, Kentaro, May, and Tim head into the abandoned power plant we saw in the first episode, only now it has a big dome around it that Shaw believes was “a feeble attempt to keep something in.” Cautioning Monarch against going in guns a-blazin’, Cate and Kentaro want to talk directly to Shaw, who clearly wants them to continue the family business. Arriving at the center of the power planet — the site of Keiko’s death — they find a deep, deep hole that Tim pegs as an entry point to “tinfoil-hat land.” They also find a ton of explosives primed to blow.

Shaw and Duvall’s men appear, guns drawn, leading to a standoff until Shaw agrees to speak with Cate alone. Godzilla, he explains, isn’t a mindless, destructive force, which Cate should know from looking into his eyes. Shaw believes Godzilla’s just trying to keep Titans in their world and humans in ours and he wants to seal off every portal to help ensure this happens. The science and those rising gamma levels may not support his theory, but Shaw says it’s about belief and atonement. He’s doing this for Keiko.

He didn’t do it fast enough, though. Before Shaw can detonate the explosives, a gigantic, grown-up Titan bug emerges from the portal and clambers through the hole. Chaos ensues, and May, Cate, and Shaw fall into the hole — presumably into that other hidden world Billy theorized about all those years ago. Viewers who have already watched the next two movies in the MonsterVerse series know what to expect from this world. Let’s see if Monarch surprises us.

Up From the Depths

• “When we were in the desert, the way he talked about her, I thought he was going to tell me that he was our grandfather.” Well, Cate, you and a whole bunch of Monarch fan theorists, too.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Recap: Planet of the Monsters