Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters Just Pulled Off A Marvel Trick To Solve A Big Mystery
"Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" has been a pleasant surprise. Here is a movie tie-in show that succeeds at telling a compelling standalone story, all while also expanding on its source material in ways that make the Monsterverse movies better.
The show focuses on Cate and Kentaro Randa, two people who discover they are half-siblings and their father had two families, each previously unaware of the other's existence. The rest of the season deals with the fallout of this discovery, as each struggles with their daddy issues while bonding with their newfound sibling. Where the Monsterverse movies have struggled with making us care about the non-kaiju characters, 2023 was a great year for humans. "Godzilla Minus One" gave us a fantastic human story of redemption, and now "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" is giving us some heartfelt human drama.
Meanwhile, the show has been using the mystery box formula to slowly unravel the secrets of Monarch, the organization that has done basically nothing in the movies except pray that Godzilla will save them. We've seen the start of the story that leads up to the creation of Mechagodzilla, as well as how Monarch found out about the Hollow Earth that features prominently in the latest two movies in the franchise. The show explores this through the story of Shaw, Keiko, and Bill, the three founders of Monarch who set out to study the kaijus and how they move around the planet.
So, how does the show solve the mystery of the Hollow Earth, and what happened to Keiko Miura back in the '50s? Well, the story took a page out of Marvel, of course.
Time for some time dilation
In episode 9 of "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters," we find out that Shaw not only believed in Bill's Hollow Earth theories but was part of an expedition by the government to travel to the Hollow Earth. We knew the home of the kaijus (or Titans) had its own sky, somehow, but it turns out it also has its own rules for time.
When Shaw travels to the center of the Earth, he leaves after a few minutes but emerges 20 years in the future. This means that Hollow Earth is home to one of the coolest sci-fi tropes (when done right) — time dilation! This explains why Shaw looks so good despite pushing 90. Now, this raises some questions. How did none of the characters who visited Hollow Earth in "Godzilla vs Kong" get trapped inside for years on end? We don't know how time works there just yet. Hopefully, the show will explain that in the future.
We do learn that Shaw wasn't the only person to get trapped out of time for decades. That's because we discover that Miura was alive this whole time. She lived in the Hollow Earth all along, fending off Titans with a crafty bow and arrow, all while looking exactly the same as she did in 1959.
That's right, "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" took a page out of the Marvel book — specifically "Ant-Man and the Wasp."
Trapped in time
In the first "Ant-Man," we learn that Janet van Dyne was lost decades ago when she shrank to a subatomic level, and in "Ant-Man and the Wasp" she returns, now a survivor and a hunter (who also had a whole thing with Kang, and with Bill Murray, for some reason). It was a way to both kill Janet for dramatic effect, but also keep her alive until it was convenient for the drama. Funnily enough, the same thing happens in the first "Aquaman," wherein Nicole Kidman's queen Atlanna is said to have been executed early on in the film. Towards the end we discover that she is still alive, living in a secret underwater paradise with dinosaurs and other monsters, now as a hunter armed with a bow and arrow — see a pattern?
Fakeout deaths have long been a big trope in fiction, and they can result in fantastic twist moments. But if you are going to have your character stuck in a dangerous fantasy world for years, becoming a hardened survivor in the process, at least make sure the character serves a purpose later on. Don't just turn them into the mom character and forget about them. Hopefully "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" will be different.