Summary
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 pulls off another neat trick in “Ends of the Earth”, using the sci-fi gimmicks to enhance the pathos, even though it’s a bit teasing when it comes to the monster action.
Despite Monarch: Legacy of Monsters really coasting on the idea of giant Titan fights, Season 2 has pretty effectively made the case that the best use of the show’s highfalutin sci-fi concepts is to make the human drama more powerful. This was the case with Shaw talking to himself across time, and it’s equally true of Episode 9, “Ends of the Earth”, which weaves a decades-long love story into the desperate search for a rift on — where else? — Skull Island.
It’s always nice to see Skull Island. It’s such a great setting, stuffed to the brim with weird beasties and the ever-present threat of a rampaging giant ape. It also seems to be pretty central to this franchise’s fiction. After their minor beef at the end of the previous episode, Godzilla chases Titan X all the way there, but refrains from getting violent. As Keiko theorises, Godzilla has done his job of keeping the Titans in line by getting Titan X back to where it was supposed to go. And if it was supposed to go to Skull Island all along, that means there’s a way to get to Axis Mundi from there, too.
And thus we have our structure. All roads converge on Skull Island, with the remaining Monarch crew tracking an unauthorized craft in Skull Island’s airspace that contains Cate and Kentaro, while Isabel’s Apex offshoot — funded by her trust fund, and comprising only a small group of trusted academics and, now, Kentaro — enact a fiendish master plan involving Titan X, Kong, and a stable rift that might be the central hub of the entire Titan network.
We’ll start with Isabel. Now that Cate is tagging along, Kentaro is forced to really question his allegiances, and I’m not sure I’m buying his heel turn at all. He is grieving his father’s death, which I’m sure is informing his decision-making, but it’s mostly just annoying that he can’t see through Isabel’s nakedly nefarious schemes. She’s imagining the Axis Mundi as a kind of personal time machine, a place where people can go — I’m assuming, perhaps cynically, for a cost — to wait out the present until a more appealing future presents itself. It sounds like a pipe dream to me, but Isabel is pretty adamant that Titan X can open a rift that’ll remain stable for a long enough period of time that she can establish her Cape Canaveral on-location.
There’s only one, very large problem with this, which is Kong. Even though Kentaro has drunk the Kool-Aid, he isn’t especially keen on Isabel’s plan to use Titan X to kill Kong, which involves using Brenda’s neural implants not to dull its aggressive instincts, but to turn them all the way up. If I had to make a list of terrible plans, that’d be near the top. But you know what nepo babies are like, and when Isabel is able to gas Titan X and hack into its nervous system, she gets at least the first part of her wish. We’ll find out how the Kong thing goes in the finale.
None of this is the best stuff in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Episode 9. That honor goes to everything involving Keiko, Shaw, and Billy. After arriving on Skull Island, Keiko and Shaw start following Billy’s old maps of potential rifts; since he believed that Titan X’s migratory route ended on Skull Island, it follows that one of those rifts is stable enough to allow Titan X to return to Axis Mundi. While fighting off the locals — including a tree monster that looks like something from Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 — Keiko and Shaw get separated, so they continue to search while also having choice flashbacks to 1958, 1959, and 1968.
These past scenes seem unrelated at first, there to add thematic texture. The first shows us Keiko and Bill getting married in a hurry, though Bill temporarily interrupts the nuptials to float a theory for sending probes through the rifts. The second shows us Bill and Lee at a Kazakhstan train station after Keiko has been trapped in Axis Mundi, with Bill struggling to let her go and move on. The third finds Bill as a lecturer, arguing with Zook about some odd-looking devices that Bill insists he keeps making.
The significance of all of this eventually reveals itself. After stumbling on a “slaughterhouse” that is the scene of Bill’s death in Kong: Skull Island, Keiko and Shaw eventually make their way to the final rift on his map, where they find one of the devices we saw in 1968. And another, and another. Keiko realises they’re all probes that Bill sent through rifts all over the world, which have all popped out in the same place, the “Grand Central Station” of the Titan network. In each one is a letter to Keiko, containing the vows Bill couldn’t put into words on the day of their wedding. Bill travelled the ends of the earth looking for Keiko, and never gave up on finding her. It’s a very nicely orchestrated moment that proves this show is about much more than giant monsters. But with the finale right around the corner, I think you can expect plenty of those, too.
