When Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters was first announced, there was some conjecture concerning how a show could consistently deliver the monstrous goods on a TV budget – the answer, it seems, is episodes like The Way Out.
While the previous episode dropped the 1950s flashbacks in order to focus more fully on the back story of bickering exes Kentaro and May and how they first met, the fifth episode of Apple +’s lavish Monsterverse shows not only also skips the period stuff, but also skips the monsters too, choosing to focus on dealing more fully with the post traumatic stress of Cate Randa and her personal events leading up to G-Day. Anyone hoping for a sniffter of a Frost Vark or a hint of an Ion Dragon may violently balk at a Kaiju show with no Kaiju in it, but this is the ultimate answer to the earlier question. You want to get a show with Godzilla in it? Sometimes you need an episode that saves some pennies…
After recovering from their near-fatal Alaskan encounter that nearly saw them frozen alive by a heat absorbing monster, Cate, Kentaro and May languish in separate cells in a Monarch outpost. After a spot of interrogation, it becomes obvious that half-siblings Cate and Kentaro are oblivious to the majority of shady stuff that the organisation is trying to keep silent, but agent Duvall suspects that May is the key to cracking the group. However, Deputy Director Verdugo is convinced that rogue, ex-Monarch old timer Lee Shaw is the real big fish as the two debate the validity of Monarch’s approach to the existence of giant monsters.
Under the suggestion of Tim and Duvall, May, Kentaro and Cate are released with the hope that the lure of Hiroshi Randa’s many secrets will draw the trio back into the mystery, the trio hypothesize that if their missing father had a secret office in Tokyo to be close to one of his secret families, then logic dictates that he should have had one near the other, located in the ruined San Francisco.
Heading back to America and dropping the bomb of Hiroshi’s indiscretions on her mother, Cate and co. smuggle their way into the restricted site of the battle between Godzilla and the MUTOs, but being in such horribly familiar circumstances brings on a fresh bout of PTSD for the traumatized teacher.
While they desperately try to make their way to Hiroshi’s office without being shot on sight as looters, Cate has to deal with her inner trauma as the days leading up to G-Day seem fresh in her mind as the day it happened – but it isn’t just Godzilla’s attack or the abandonment from her father that’s weighing on her mind…
Ok, real talk. Anyone approaching this episode with the hope of more monster mayhem is going to walk away profoundly disappointed that the only footage we get of marauding Kaiju is recycled footage of Godzilla’s attack from the first episode. However, if you allow more mature heads to prevail, The Way Out not only gives us some much needed character insight, but it also gives us a hell of a lot of intriguing world building of what has happened to San Francisco after G-Day saw it used as an arena in the world’s biggest death match.
Despite having an incredibly intimate relationship with a Kaiju attack (Godzilla inadvertently killing the kids under her care is pretty damn personal) and finding out her dad had a whole secret family while he mounted clandestine missions to seek out Kaiju, Cate Randa probably has had the least character development of everyone to date, so the show runners have decided that his high time we focused on what makes her tick. We finally get to meet her mother, Caroline, we see a brief glimpse of her life in the days before G-Day hit and we also get to the bottom of her understandable anger at her father’s betrayal. Simply put, it turns out that Cate is no angel herself when it comes to relationships, cheating on the budding relationship she has with fellow teacher Dani a mere two days before Godzilla emergence drastically reduced the size of her class and as a result, it’s added to her personal feelings to being unworthy of love.
However, while it’s good to finally get this back story out and the writers should be applauded by trying to mix grounded, human drama into proceedings, Cate’s issues simply aren’t anywhere near as engrossing as a tentacle-faced ice Kaiju, or the past adventures of Lee, Bill and Keiko and the show noticably seems to be floundering whenever creatures aren’t directly waiting in the wings.
However, while I’m profoundly missing the thread of Monarch’s early days (the show’s true backbone, in my opinion), the episode does throw up some intriguing, ground level, world building that the Monsterverse has been sorely lacking since the likes of Kong, MechaGodzilla and King Ghidorah started showing up. Keeping firmly within Gareth Edwards’ original, gritty aesthetic, we find that San Francisco a year on is being treated exactly like the city of Janjira was in the first movie after the Male MUTO destroyed the Nuclear Power Plant complete with patrolling soldiers and random stray cats substituting for stray dogs. On top of that, we find from a random commercial that luxury underground housing complexes for the super rich are now a thing and that there even used to be tours of the ruined San Francisco for conspiracy-obsessed ghouls dubbed “Trauma Tourists”. However, the most touching aspect is that most people displaced by Godzilla’s antics – Caroline included – chose to stay as close as Oakland in FEMA provided housing and that Cate’s mother provides a service where she is legally allowed to enter San Francisco to retrieve people’s lost personal belonging on order to help with the healing a year on.
Elsewhere, a captive Lee Shaw has some interesting – and amusingly damning – opinions concerning Dr. Serizawa’s iconic suggestion in Kaiju removal, dismissing the air punching quote of “Let them fight!” with a dismissive “That’s the best they could do?”. To be fair, after 60 years of prep with some of the world’s best minds involved, you can’t say that Shaw doesn’t have a point, but the fact that he’s separated from the main cast ultimately proves to be as harmful as the noticable lack of monsters.
Look, I’m not an idiot. Episodes like this are vital in big budget shows with huge scope as they not only keep the small, personal things in focus (Cate and Kentaro finally bonding over Japanese jingles their father sang to them is a subtle high point) but they take some much needed pressure off the purse strings. With a mid-season trailer recently released to assure us that big things are still to come, there’s still plenty of creature comforts left to come, however, as the halfway point of the entire season, you can’t help but miss the monsters and the legacy parts of the title.
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