While I have a Godzilla-sized soft spot for Legacy’s MonterVerse, even I have to agree that some of the recent drama-heavy/monster light episodes we’ve had of late was starting to make me antsy. However, with o ly one episode left to go, Monarch has presented us with that big episode that fills in a lot of the blanks, smooths out the odd plot hole (while possibly creating more) and even gives Kentaro something to do that doesn’t involve complaining. Well… actually that’s not true – he does complain, but for an actual good reason this time.
Anyway, now that the majority of flashbacks have finally been filled, the show now joins the last few dots, chucks a new monster into the mix and leads us by the hand once again into that trippy-ass realm known as the Hollow Earth.
But be warned, there may be one last shock backstory left to tell…
We jump to a Monarch test site located in Kansas in 1962 to find Lee Shaw reassuring a nervous, young Hiroshi that the mission he’s about to embark on isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as it sounds as Bill Randa – who has been raising Hiro as his own after the death of his mother Keiko – looks on. It’s bullshit of course, because Shaw’s mission is about as dangerous as it gets as he and a bunch of other personnel are about to take a manned trip into the Hollow Earth. Figuring out that portal open and closes naturally when a Titan passes through it, their plan of goading an Ion Dragon almost to the surface with tasty gamma rays and then following it through when it returns empty bellied. However, as Shaw travels through, something goes wrong and the portal collapses, leaving their pod stranded in a realm of monsters and crazy physics.
Jumping forward to 2015 and we find that after his detonation of the portal lurking under the ruined Kazakhstan nuclear facility, Shaw has once again found himself stranded in the Hollow Earth with May for company and as they struggle to survive the insanely hostile landscape they try to find the third member of their stranded party – Cate.
However, as Shaw motivates May into action, he reveals the real danger of this bizarro realm is that time is just as squirly down here as everything else and some more handy flashbacks reveal the horrible truth.
While Shaw made it back, it took him twenty years to do it and by 1982, Bill Randa was long dead after his misadventures on Skull Island.
Meanwhile, Kentaro awakes in a hospital in Tokyo and after despairing about the apparently dead Cate and May, finally manages to track down his errant father and give him the verbal blocking the absent, cheating parent has had coming for a long time – but back in the Hollow Earth, Cate wakens to have the biggest shock yet. No, not the sight of a huge, twiggy, Bramble Boar, but instead the identity of the person who saves her from it.
Finally, Monarch has shaken off the lethargy of the fifth and seventh episodes to deliver a string of twists, shocks and beasties to deliver an installment that harkens back to the early days of the show. Keeping the 2015 moments moving fast, the bulk of the show finally reveals just how Lee Shaw looks so damn good for someone who should be North of their nineties by now. The big secret is that thanks to his disastrous trip to the Hollow Earth, he eventually returned to surface civilisation the same age he was when he arrived despite a double decade passing by for the rest of us. It’s a neat little twist that not only explains why we’ve never heard of Shaw in the MonsterVerse before, but amusingly gives Wyatt Russell his own “man out of time” moment after playing twitchy Captain America replacement U.S.Agent in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. His return manages to cause a bunch of plot strands to click into place as not only is a grown and bitter Hiroshi there to greet him, but a panicked escape attempt leads to a fateful meeting between Hiro and a nurse named Masamoto – aka. Kentaro’s eventual mother.
While this trip to the Hollow Earth manages to throw up a ton of conflicting information concerning what we’ve already seen from the movies (no one mentioned time dilation in Godzilla Vs. Kong or previous trips to the Titan’s realm for that matter), if you can keep ahold of your franchise-based OCD for about five minutes, Axis Mundi’s take on the Hollow Earth gives Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters its most visually stirring episode to date. The realm itself invokes memories of the eerie Shimmer from Alex Garland’s Annihilation as rainbow colours emanate through an ever-present haze and kinetic lighting erupts from the ground like an electrical Old Faithful. Weirder yet, the memories of what catalogues of horrors afflicted Shaw’s crew are freeze framed as the camera moves around them, bullet-time style, in a way that makes bring zapped by ground-lightning or being scarfed up by an Ion Dragon look stunningly beautiful. Even our glimpse of the wildlife is dangerously enchanting as Cate comes face to snout by a branch sprouting Bramble Boar whose design fits right in with the wildlife seen on Skull Island.
Even Kentaro’s whining is utilized for good as he manages to finally catch up with his wayward father and give him some brutal home truths. But the real kicker here is the moment the epidode ends on where Cate is saved by being mauled by a twiggy pig thanks to an arrow fired by none other than a still-alive Keiko who, not only takes a page from Nicole Kidman from Aquaman and Michelle Pfeiffer from Ant-Man by going full warrior woman after being stranded in an alien environment, but who also hasn’t even aged a day. No doubt this’ll mean yet more flashbacks to break up the monster action in the final episode, but this is one I’ll definately welcome, even if it lessens the Godzilla time.
Ah yes, the Big G. Conspicuous once again by his gargantuan absence, this is one of those episodes that feeds us so much of the right backstory that his lack of presence is minimal.
However, while Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters has managed to get that momentum up to the necessary levels, there’s still everything to play for and while episode nine has delivered almost everything I want from an installment of Monarch, the show has to do us right in the finale and unleash Godzilla doing what he does best – whupping enormous ass and taking huge names. The king of the monsters deserves no less.
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