The penultimate episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters really let me empathize with Lee Shaw because I also felt like I’d experienced a jarring, inexplicable jump through time that left me feeling like I’d missed out on so much. “Axis Mundi” marks the grand reveal of what happened to Lee, Billy, Hiroshi, and Monarch in the past that led to the present-day situation — an adventure to the center of the earth that would’ve been more thrilling if it hadn’t felt so rushed.
Monarch has been busy in the years since Keiko’s death, as we abruptly learn when the episode kicks off in 1962 at a Monarch test site somewhere in Kansas. Though we’ve seen the Titan-studying agency have its ups and downs in this past timeline, Monarch appears to be at the height of its powers. Even without Keiko, Billy and Lee have managed to get the once-adversarial Puckett enthusiastically, proudly onboard with Monarch’s most ambitious venture yet. Operation Hourglass, described as the culmination of nearly two decades of Monarch’s work, will send Lee into the bowels of the earth and into Titan territory on a mission of exploration. (He’s not alone — he’s joined by three others who, in Monarch’s beautiful tradition of introducing companions solely so that they can get killed by giant monsters, are so clearly marked for death that we don’t learn anything about them beyond the fact that all three of their last names start with “B.”)
Free-falling into some portal in the earth in the wake of a giant monster you lured while sitting in what looks to be a slightly fancier bathysphere is dangerous work, as Lee tells young Hiroshi before he Right Stuffs his way to the launch. In the wake of Keiko’s death, Lee’s been acting as an uncle to the boy as his stepfather, Billy, raises him. It’s touching stuff, but, especially considering how charged this relationship will be when Lee returns to the surface decades later, I can’t help but want more. Hiroshi is arguably the most important character in this show, as he has Randa’s notes and it’s his secret rogue mission that results in the present-day characters’ globe-trotting mission. But it was only toward the end of the last episode that we learned that Keiko had already had Hiroshi, and Billy was his stepfather rather than his biological relation. We’ve not gotten a chance to actually see Keiko or Billy raise Hiroshi, nor have we gotten to see Hiroshi raise Cate or Kentaro. We don’t see Hiroshi’s work with Monarch outside of Tim’s recollections last week and a few scenes in this episode, but even then Hiroshi already seems to resent Monarch. When he nonchalantly appears again in this episode’s 2015 timeline, we don’t have many answers, either. Who is Hiroshi? It’s either an important question we’re not getting the answer to, or it’s not actually an important one, which makes the character’s role as a fulcrum of multigenerational action frustrating. It’s hard to feel too torn up about the impact Lee’s disappearance had on Hiroshi’s life when we hardly know about Hiroshi’s life.
Shaw does indeed disappear, though, as Operation Hourglass — the setup of which we also haven’t really seen — goes wrong. After giving Hiroshi his pocketknife for temporary safekeeping and having a sweetly understated farewell with Billy, he gets into the sphere. A Titan lure entices a monster to come near the surface, but when its presence opens the portal needed to get into this subterranean world, everything goes to hell. The sphere’s sucked into the portal, and Billy narrowly avoids getting sucked in with it.
Later, as Billy pores over his notes, trying to find an explanation for what went wrong, Puckett informs Billy that there will be no further funding for Monarch in the wake of the disaster. Exploring outer space? The bigwigs understand that. A network of portals connecting to a hidden realm of monsters? Less so. It’s an interesting scene, as Puckett, who has been a kaiju-size asshole in every previous appearance in the show, actually shows some empathy and understanding. He says it’s his fault, not Billy’s, that something went wrong, and he basically tells Billy to walk away for Hiroshi’s sake. “Your boy’s already lost a mother. Now an uncle. Do not take away his father, too.”
Billy doesn’t listen, though, and as we saw in Kong: Skull Island, he eventually dies trying to prove his theories. Hiroshi grows up (offscreen, of course) without him or any other family — until Lee reappears 20 years later, in 1982. As Lee eventually explains, one member of his team died during the trip down when the sphere fell in the wake of the flying kaiju they lured near the surface. Upon landing, they called for an evacuation to no avail, and his other two teammates were killed before he was eventually sucked back up and sent to the surface, popping up in the woods in Japan near a shrine that local folklore said was a doorway to another realm. All of this is given a very, very cursory recap that makes this incredible, traumatic mission feel like an underwhelming jaunt in Lee’s life. Presumably, it’s handwaved because this reveal is told in tandem with May, Cate, and Shaw’s experience inside the earth, and that’s where the show wants our point of view to be. The result, though, just makes the most important event of Shaw’s life feel like a handwave — a “previously on” recap of an episode that wasn’t worth making, apparently.
As Hiroshi explains to Lee after he takes a nurse hostage while demanding to speak with Bill Randa, it’s been 20 years, even though it wasn’t nearly that for Lee when he was down in Axis Mundi, described as a realm between where the Titans live and our own world. (This, presumably, explains why Rebecca Hall & Co. didn’t experience time dilation when they went into the Hollow Earth in Godzilla vs. Kong because they followed the big ape all the way in. All of this Hollow Earth stuff the MonsterVerse is so keen on continues to be needlessly complicated and not that interesting.) Hiroshi also tells Shaw that he’s soured on Monarch because Monarch cost him his mother, father, and, as far as he knew, his uncle Lee for two decades. He informs Lee that his time with Titans is at an end and that he’ll be sent to a retirement home for study. We then see a sequence where Lee becomes Shaw (and Wyatt becomes Kurt), as he spends decades complacently taking pills until news footage of Godzilla and a MUTOs fight in Honolulu snaps him out of it, setting off a sequence of events that will eventually send him back into the earth along with Cate and May.
Kentaro, however, did not fall into the hole at the end of the last episode. He wakes up in the hospital with Tim and Verdugo looking over him. They break the news that his half-sister and ex didn’t make it and tell him that Monarch no longer has any use for him, either. Bereft, Kentaro doesn’t know what to do, and Verdugo tells him that he should “live.” (In a bit of poor timing, this episode comes a few weeks after the U.S. premiere of Japan’s latest Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus One, which also makes the decision to “live” a major emotional theme, only Minus One is very good, unlike Monarch.) Kentaro then goes home and chats with his mom, who we learned this episode was the nurse Lee took hostage when he came back from the underworld. He’s super depressed, understandably, and she tries to give him support. Eventually, Kentaro goes to his dad’s office shortly before Hiroshi just … strolls in. Hiroshi, who is a bad dad, is mad about his missing files and being called out on having two families, but he breaks down when Kentaro angrily informs him that his actions have led to the death of his daughter.
Cate is not dead, though. Granted, she’s been separated from her impromptu spelunking companions. Shaw finds a disoriented May and explains the whole time-dilation deal as they dodge lightning that shoots up from the ground in the wake of the rift. It’s not until the very end of the episode that we catch up with Cate, who finds herself being stalked by some kind of big monstrous boar — a kaijavelina, if you will.
Just when it’s about to charge her, though, an arrow to the face drives it away. Cate has been saved by none other than … Keiko! She did not die when bugs swarmed her and fell into the reactor in the series premiere; she actually made it to Axis Mundi and managed to survive in this strange wilderness. Presumably, the message that Barnes found hidden in the Gamma bursts earlier in the episode was coming from her. She hasn’t aged a day.
It’s an exciting twist, albeit probably at the expense of Lee’s voyage to the center of the earth. Had we known about Operation Hourglass or gotten confirmation that Lee didn’t age before now, it might’ve been too easy to guess that Keiko would get the same treatment and that Mari Yamamoto would still be playing her upon her present-day return. Because Keiko is arguably the most interesting character in the show and the 1950s story line has been the stronger half of the series by far, it’s nice to see her step 56 years into the future and return for the finale. We just had to rush what should have been a major deal into one warp-speed episode in order to do so.
Up From the Depths
• What was the plan with Operation Hourglass? They just drop a metal sphere down a portal into who knows where and then do … what, to retrieve them? The culmination of Monarch’s research seems as rushed in its conception as this episode’s depiction of it.
• The disastrous Operation Hourglass in 1962 is the last time we see Bill Randa. He’ll die in 1973, as seen in Kong: Skull Island. This means he’s going from Anders Holm to John Goodman in just 11 years. No disrespect to John Goodman, who is a treasure, but jeez … that’s a rough 11 years.
• The status of Hollow Earth as a theory continues not to make any sense. When we hear about it in Kong: Skull Island, it’s seismologist Houston Brooks’s fringe theory, not Randa’s. Why is it a fringe theory in the ’70s if the American government was funding a manned mission into hollow Earth — the place where Titans come from — in the early ’60s? Why does Monarch not seem to believe it in 2015? Also, what’s Monarch’s status? Puckett said they’d be getting no further funding, but clearly Monarch continued to exist through the ’70s (Skull Island) and into the 2010s, where they apparently had enough funding to monitor MUTO eggs in Japan and Las Vegas and to send a bunch of scary researchers on to the Golden Gate Bridge after Godzilla waded through it. The show seems to want Monarch to eternally be both a scrappy underdog and also an omnipresent scary government agency. Pick a lane!
• Didn’t some of Shaw’s men get sucked into Axis Mundi when they blew up a rift two episodes ago? He seems not to care, which is interesting because he knows firsthand how much it sucks down there. I would say Monarch has a redshirt problem if I weren’t so tickled by how gratuitous it is.
