Whenever you get to the end of the debut season of any Netflix show these days, you can’t help but get a little bit nervous. After all, if the last couple of years have taught us anything, if your favoured show on the notoriously fickle streaming service doesn’t rhyme with “Ranger Wings”, there’s a good chance it’ll get smothered in its crib by Netflix’s baffling business plan.
This leads us to Skull Island’s final episode that, thankfully, continues the hot streak started by the previous installment that belatedly gave us more Kong for our buck. However, while it continues to give us the hot, Kaiju action we were hoping for from day one, it regrettably stumbles at the very last hurdle with a sequel baiting, non-ending that might make people who have been previously hurt by Netflix’s cancel-happy antics feel large amounts of genuine anxiety.
Charlie’s riduculous plan to negate the threat of the giant Kraken with a giant ape like some sort of crazy game of Kaiju rock paper scissors is unsurprisingly met with horror, but if something isn’t done soon, Mike will almost certainly succumb to his wounds. The plan is simple: Charlie, Annie and Dog will head back to Kong’s lair and snatch the most favoured one of his human trinkets he has hanging up on his wall, causing the quick tempered King of Skull Island to naturally lose his shit and chase them to the beach where natural selection will hopefully take over.
The stealing section of the plan goes off without a hitch with Charlie pointing out the necklace that once belonged to the deceased Island Girl and Dog making like the roadrunner after Kong blows his stack as planned, however, during the chase, Dog is injured and Charlie realises that they aren’t all going to make it unless he lightens the load. However while his selfless act means that Annie and Dog can make it to the beach, Charlie is now effectively stranded in the middle of a lethal jungle entirely on his own – well… not entirely on his own, as he falls foul of a snare trap and a clutch of spear clutching natives.
Meanwhile, while the others look on in awe, Kong arrives at the beach with the intention of squashing the thieves flatter than the head of a watered down beer, but after Annie and manages to survive the great ape’s rage, the Kraken shows up and it’s on. But as the two Titans engage in a suitably epic scrap, the humans left in its wake have to now try and survive the effects two gargantuan monsters have on the surrounding environment as the ocean tides flood inland, putting Annie and Dog in watery jeopardy. As they do their best not to drown, Cap dashes off into the jungle to find out what has become of his son, but as the ordeal comes to its violent end, not every plot thread gets a clear ending.
To sum up Skull Island as a whole, it’s been something of an positive experience and if the show had seen fit to include Kong more in proceedings, it could have been something truly special. However, despite the often frustrating lack of the big hairy legend, there was much to endorse in Skull Island, such as some superlative voice acting from Betty Gilpin, Mae Whitman, Benjamin Bratt and Nicolas Cantu, or the cool, throwback, 90’s, Johnny Quest: The Real Adventures sort of vibe the animation style gave out.
Thanks mostly to a super-strong episode 7, which made up for Kong’s absence by essentially dedicating an entire episode to him, the show has a sizable amount of momentum going into its finale, but while watching a huge monkey go all cage match all over a murderous lump of calamari is the big finish the show needed, it doesn’t quite stick the landing.
As I alluded to earlier, any fledgling series that’s bankrolled by Netflix is often in the firing line the second it drops, regardless of the fact that many cliffhangers endings are left simply unresolved, so it’s odd that Skull Island goes so hard to leave so many questions unanswered. With a healthy spoiler warning in place, show creator Brian Duffield seems confident enough to end the season with virtually all of the character fates left up in the air with Charlie in the clutches of those mysterious tribespeople (possibly the Iwi, but the the fact that one of them speaks english might suggest they may be survivors of Island Girl’s people), Cap wandering in the jungle and Mick still on the verge of death due to the poison racing through his veins. In fact, the only thing we get that’s even close to a resolution is Annie waking up in hospital after being in a coma to find that she’s no longer on Skull Island at all, but in a major city with only her mother, Irene, as the sole familiar face. As endings go, it’s certainly jarring, especially seeing as all the characters I just mentioned, we don’t even find out what has become of Dog either and I would hardly call it a satisfying wrap up. In fact, considering that it’s part of a larger franchise, I would sort of call it incredibly foolhardy, especially sinse we have no idea whether or not we’re even going to get a second season to clear those massive holes up. Still, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous got three seasons, so we might be ok….
Frustrating ending aside, the season’s final episode brings the carnage and even though it’s not quite as awesome as the monster mashing seen in the previous episode, the Kong Vs. Kraken fight still does us proud. Massive in scale and loaded with incident, Kong proves to be every inch the inventive fighter we saw in Kong: Skull Island as he uses the wreckage of half a boat like a broken bottle to avoid a nasty, Godzilla Vs. Kong style drowning, while his adversary flings him about the place like a God-sized ragdoll with its thrashing tentacles. The Kraken, now seen in it’s full glory, looks pretty cool as it resembles a merging of other Kraken designs (namely the one from Pirates Of The Caribbean and the one from the Clash Of The Titans remake) to make something that’s not quite squid, but not entirely crab either. The show also is smart enough to have the fight end with one of the MonsterVerse most endearing in-jokes, namely having the hero Kaiju messily defeat his enemy with some super brutal finishing move. So, joining such sights as Godzilla blasting his radioactive fire down the throat of a MUTO and Kong yanking out the innards of a Skull Crawler through its mouth, we have Kong beating the Kraken’s brains in with his bare hands – and when that doesn’t do the trick, he simply liftes the fucker above his head and angrily tears it in half like the Hulk trying to get into some plastic packaging with sweaty palms.
The violence of the subsequent victory is what causes Annie to have he accident (shot-putting the corpse of a giant squid into fifty feet of water is going to cause sizable waves no matter which way you slice it) and even though the ending is way too abrupt to be entirely satisfying, the arrival of a second season could connect more fully to the MonsterVerse as a whole. With Annie and Irene back in a major city, it would be far more convenient for them to be sought out by Monarch who could expand on the whole Hollow Earth thread that was touched on here. Also, if Charlie and co. are still on Skull Island, a closer look at the more indigenous peoples could prove to be enlightening, not to mention more bonding time with Dog. Finally, Kong himself needs some closure on the character arc that episode 7 alluded to that his temper-fueled, rash behavior is as much a threat to his friends as it is to his enemies with his recent victory celebration being directly responsible for the tsunami that scattered the cast.
Not exactly a perfect finish, then. But if we do get a second season (maybe in the wake of the upcoming Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire), there’s plenty to build on – just make sure Kong’s in it for more than two episodes, will you?
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