‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Season 1 Finale Recap: Reunion

This was an odd one. “Beyond Logic,” the season finale of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, feels like two finales in one. The first continues and ties a bow on the human drama from which the show has derived most of its uniqueness and power — the tender, red-hot romantic connections between the characters. The second is the kind of nerd-culture fan-pleaser that ends with a climactic shot of a familiar character, like a comic book where you turn the last page and go “Oh my god, Commissioner Gordon was the Joker this whole time?!?!?” You can probably tell which of the two I prefer.

As regards the former, you’ve got a lot going on. We’ll start with the low-key but still pretty obvious at this point romantic feelings developing between May and Cate. (Cate, you remember, is the half-sister of May’s ex-boyfriend Kentaro, which I can’t imagine getting complicated.) This is really all about body language, actors Anna Sawai and Kiersey Clemons holding hands, throwing their arms around each other’s shoulders, and generally behaving like two people who will take any excuse to touch each other, convinced no one else is noticing. We’re noticing!

The real haymaker though — of course — is the reunion between Kei and Lee. For Keiko, it’s barely been two months since they saw each other. For Lee, it’s been 23 years. For the world, it’s been over half a century — across a millennial divide, even. Keiko hasn’t aged a day. Lee is an old man. And their beloved Bill died while they were both in a Hollow Earth time warp, unable to do a thing, or even just to say goodbye. 

It’s a lot to deal with, and in different ways for each actor to convey. Kurt Russell — who I remind you has been at this shit so long that Walt fucking Disney’s dying words were alleged to be “Kurt Russell” — has to get across that he’s afraid what the impact of his information will do to this woman he loves; that he’s dying to look at her again; that he’s ashamed to look at her because he’s an old man who spent 33 years in a nursing home being drugged and she’s still as young and brilliant and beautiful as he remembers her. 

Mari Yamamoto, meanwhile, must convey all of this in reverse: shock over what has become of her, grief over the loss of Bill and her estrangement from their son Hiroshi and the decades of normal life that have been taken from her, and tender sorrow for her beloved Lee, now so far removed from the vibrant young man she knew. Even if they were to reunite, they could never make up for so much loss.

I really, really, really want to call attention to the score by composer Leopold Ross in this scene. Director Andy Goddard, working off a script from showrunner Chris Black, lets the moment linger. He pretty much just points the camera at the two actors and lets them cook. But Ross’s score fills in the blanks. It’s a woozy, swooning, repetitive series of two notes, like a deep inhale and a deep exhale. Taken in tandem with the radiant acting of Russell and Yamamoto and the dreamlike background provided by the strange neither-here-nor-there fauna of the so-called “axis mundi” between our world and that of the titans into which they’ve fallen, it feels like a dream you might have of reuniting with someone you once loved, finding yourself as you are and them as they were, and all you have to share is sadness. I loved it.

I honestly loved the big Godzilla fight that happens too. Oh yeah, there’s a big Godzilla fight at last! The G-Man takes down (I’m pretty sure) the dragon that dwelled in the wreckage of Bill Randa’s ship from World War II way earlier in the season, peeling its limbs off like a mean kid with a cicada. It’s a fun fight, full of little surprises, like the dragon barfing up some kind of corrosive liquid spew in order to stop Godzilla from letting loose with his atomic breath. It clearly conveys how Godzilla is the alpha titan; smaller creatures will take him on because that’s just how they roll, but they’re doomed.

A brief aside here about the Hollow Earth, on which the MonsterVerse has gone all in. We’re now learning that it’s not some strange Jules Verne place close to the Earth’s core, but an entire parallel dimension, the portals to which just so happen to be located underground. I’m realizing now that this is essentially the plot of The Mist: There’s another dimension out there full of gigantic monsters, and because the military did something idiotic, now they’re coming through.

I have my reservations about the concept. For one thing, Godzilla and Kong’s status as modern-day earth spirts or gods of nature is kind of undermined if they’re not from this earth at all. For another, removing giant monsters from the trappings of human civilization makes their size harder to parse and minimizes the threat they present for humanity. Like, Cloverfield works because the monster isn’t on its home planet, it’s in Manhattan. Finally, King Ghidorah’s extraterrestrial origin was supposed to be unique, not standard, and I’m not sure how they square that circle. But I have to admit the idea of all our favorite kaiju are invaders from some strange huge hollow realm full of nightmare beings — Monster Island, but an entire planet — is pretty mint.

At any rate, this happens when Lee and Keiko rig her beacon, which is the signal the folks at Monarch have unearthed, to attract titans, allowing them to travel back up the rift when the titan retreats and creates a sort of spacetime undertow that will carry them home. The dragon complicates things though, and Lee falls from the ship while Keiko, May, and Cate make their escape. (I doubt it’s the last we’ll see of him, but who knows? The Russells are in demand, one imagines.)

The return to the world of 2017, which in MonsterVerse terms brings us one step closer to a bunch of stuff: the all-out titan attack led by King Ghidorah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and the battle between Godzilla, Kong, and Mecha-Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong. Indeed, the final scene reveals that Kentaro, Hiroshi, and Tim have been working with May’s sinister old boss, Senior Vice President of the Mecha-Godzilla Corporation, to find their missing friends, and that the company has its eye on ol’ Kong, who shows up for the season-ending cameo. 

I don’t really understand the logic there. It’s hardly a surprise that King Kong showed up in the King Kong vs. Godzilla Universe, given that he’s done so twice before and is about to do so a third time. It’s a bit like how Ahsoka rolled out the red carpet for a C-3PO cameo, as if we don’t see him more frequently than Kamala Harris. 

Ah well. With the apparently sole exception of Andor, the dance-between-the-raindrops remit given to television shows designed to flesh out their corresponding cinematic universes are always gonna stumble here and there. They simply have more masters than your average standalone show to answer to. And none of these are, like, grievous sins — they’re just something a slightly better television show wouldn’t have done, is all.

But the fact that it could be better doesn’t mean Monarch isn’t good. On the contrary, the monster effects beat the snot out of at least the first movie in the film franchise itself, and the character work runs laps around anything in any of the movies. It isn’t as ambitious in this regard as Shin Godzilla or Godzilla Minus One, since there really isn’t an accompanying social critique to go with it as there is in those two movies, but it compensates with a talent for romance I truly haven’t seen on TV since, like, Halt and Catch Fire. I never would have believed it, but there’s a lot I never would have believed about what a Godzilla story is capable of doing until recently. I’m looking forward to not believing a lot of what I see in Season 2 as well. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.