Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Boss Breaks Down the Finale’s Massive Twists — Plus, Is [Spoiler] a Goner?
The following contains spoilers from the season finale of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, now streaming on Apple TV+.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters closed out its season with a series of twists that were, fittingly, titanic in size.
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Not long into her very unplanned trip to Hollow Earth, Cate unexpectedly met her grandmother, Keiko. Keiko in turn learned that Cate was not there as part of any Monarch rescue mission. Keiko then reunited with Lee Shaw, though in a brilliant piece of writing/directing, Lee at first hid himself as he spoke to her and doled out the truth about how many years have actually passed since she fell into the Kazakhstan rift “57 days” ago.
Lee ultimately revealed his aged self, after which he and Cate proceeded to update Kei on her (grown!) son Hirosho, and life in the future in general (iPhones!). Lee, Cate, Keiko and May then lugged the “Titan bait” capsule to the site of Operation Hourglass’ crash landing circa 1962, attached it back to the passenger pod, and waited for a Titan to arrive through the nearby rift. There was white-knuckle drama when a winged Titan that was already in Hollow Earth started sniffing around, knocking loose a cable connecting bait to pod. But Lee clambered out of the capsule and hooked things back up — just as Godzilla emerged from the rift. The capsule got yanked into the aurora, and though Keiko grabbed Lee’s hand as he endeavored to leap back aboard, the colonel opted instead to let go and be left behind, as the others got sucked into the rift.
Keiko, Cate and May landed in some sort of staging area outfitted with gadgets apparently designed to facilitate their arrival. At first alarmed by the hazmat-suited minions swarming around them, they came to realize that Kentaro was part of this operation, having collaborated with his father… for the past two years.
Hiroshi arrived on the scene to reunite with Cate… and then his “Mama,” Keiko. Then, just as Cate & Co. discovered that Kentaro and Tim had aligned with — no, not Monarch, but — Apex Cybernetics (!), alarms signaled Titan activity. As the hangar’s barn doors closed, we realized that we are on Skull Island circa 2017, where the mighty Kong himself emerged from the horizon to thump his chest and roar.
Wow.
TVLine spoke with Monarch: LoM showrunner Chris Black about bringing this Monsterverse TV series to life, Lee Shaw’s fate, that King-sized kameo and what any possible Season 2 might look like….
TVLINE | Ahead of your call I had rewatched the finale, and both times I erupted with cheers while also wiping away tears from all the Keiko stuff.
Look, we’re incredibly proud of it. It was a long journey. We had obviously a big writers strike in the middle of the year last year, so I was not heavily involved in a lot of the post-production. But fortunately the writers strike ended before we did final sound mixes for the end of the season, so I got to see the final cut of Episode 110 on the mix stage on a big screen coming through big speakers, and I was glad they had the lights down because I was crying like a baby. When Hiroshi sees his mother and kind of folds into her arms and says, “Mama”…? I lost it. It’s an abject lesson in what a great cast can do for you, and those actors are so good and had grown into those roles and become those characters over the course of the season in a way that was, quite frankly for me, a miracle. And a gift.
TVLINE | Beyond navigating the strike, what was the biggest challenge about bringing this series to life?
The biggest challenge was just making sure we were telling the right story.
It’s easy to say, “Oh, the production was challenging.” The show was wrapped well before the strikes and we were through most of the picture editing; it was really only some final visual effects and sound mixing that was impacted for us by the strikes at the time. So, the production was challenging — it was by far and away the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved with, both in terms of the budget and in terms of mounting the production. We shot most of it in Vancouver, with units in Hawaii and Japan…. It was a physically demanding shoot, the schedule was exhausting, we’d have two units shooting simultaneously…. Everybody was just wiped out by the end of the season.
But I would say for me the biggest challenge was just making sure the scripts were good, making sure we were telling the right story, making sure that by the time we got these scripts to actors and in front of cameras that we were confident that we were telling the story we wanted to tell, that it was a human story focused on this family that we were serving. There were a lot of masters to serve on this.
TVLINE | I was going to ask, did you have any “marching orders” within the larger Monsterverse about what the TV show had to, or could, accomplish?
I don’t think we had any “marching orders” per se. We had orders, I’d say, that we imposed upon ourselves. We knew going in that we couldn’t do a TV show that was just about monsters; that was unsupportable from a production standpoint, but also I felt personally, as a fan of serialized television, that you weren’t going to tune in week after week to watch Godzilla kicking buildings over. We had to create a story and a set of human characters that people were going to invest in and want to come back to. That was something that Apple was excited about, something they supported and endorsed, and it was the story we wanted to tell. As [fellow executive producer] Matt Fraction, my collaborator and partner on this would say a lot, we wanted to tell a story that was about a brother and a sister searching for their father… and then the monsters just kept getting in the way. And I feel like we largely succeeded.
TVLINE | The timelines you toggled between, the late ’50s and 2015: Were those specifically chosen because they were “safe spaces” within the larger Monsterverse mythology?
I mean, yes and no. We were very mindful of what the feature [films’] timeline was. In our sandbox, obviously the original characters and the larger canon comes from [producer] Toho [Co., Ltd.], but the mythological timeline that we were tasked to work in was from the four, soon to be five, Legendary movies. We knew we had to fit in the timeline between Godzilla (2014) and then King of the Monsters, which is five years later, while Skull Island takes place in 1973…. And we knew very early on that we wanted G-Day, the attack on San Francisco [from Godzilla (2014)], to be our starting point, because that was where Godzilla becomes known to the world. We talk about it as sort of these characters’ 9/11, because their world changed at that point.
And in terms of the 1950s, we wanted to tell an origin story for Monarch, and within the Monsterverse timeline the organization was founded post-World War II, I think by 1945. We wanted a period that felt kind of fun and retro, where we could tell a story set in that cool era and be art-directed and all that kind of stuff, but we also needed to fit with the age of our characters. I think the late-50s then moving on into the early-’60s felt like a sweet spot.
TVLINE | Let’s talk openly about all of the wild and crazy and wonderful and scary things that happened in the finale. First up, I do have one concern going into any potential Season 2, which is that it would have zero Russells in it.
Look, I can’t really speak to that, honestly. We do not have a Season 2 order. The show has done very well, so we’re optimistic and excited…. We feel we have more story to tell.
The character of Lee Shaw, to me what works about the Season 1 stuff is he accomplished his mission. This was really important to Kurt and Wyatt [Russell], early on when we talking about them coming onto the show, they wanted to know why are they in the show, what is this character’s purpose? Lee Shaw is not a scientist, and they didn’t want to be just “the guy with the gun.” And so his mission as part of this team, which Kurt and Wyatt saw very early on, is to support and protect Keiko and Billy. And at the end of the pilot episode, Lee fails, he loses her. And so to me, the arc of that story throughout the season was a redemption tale. At the end of Episode 110, he is given a second chance to complete his mission, and I think he does that in a really heartbreaking and satisfying way. He gets a chance to save Keiko and send her back to her family. And so, if that is the end of that story, I think it’s an incredibly satisfying and complete story.
That said, we as storytellers don’t want to close the door firmly on anything. And it is a science fiction show, you have all kinds of possibilities of what could happen.
TVLINE | Do you think any Season 2 would have more of a singular timeline?
I don’t know. Matt Fraction and I are kind of having those conversations now, like, “What would be a story we could tell if we’re given the opportunity to tell it?” I think we really like the idea of running parallel timelines. I think it worked as a conceit in the first [season], and Monarch, as we said, has a long history, there are other eras to explore. If Monarch runs from the late-1940s to the present day, what was it like in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s…? As a mechanism to tell the history of Monarch and the Randa family within it, I personally enjoyed it. I would love, if we are given the opportunity, to exploit it more. I thought it was fun.
TVLINE | I need to know, do you have any rules in your mind about the passage of time in Hollow Earth versus up here? Because it’s didn’t quite sync up. One week was 20 years for Lee, while 57 days was 60 years for Keiko, a day was two years for Cate and May….
Are you asking me to explain our bulls–t, made-up science? [Laughs]
TVLINE | Sort of…?
Trust me, there were ennnnndless conversations about, “Was it sort of an exponentially increasing algorithm where the first hour you’re down there is a day but then the second hour is two days and the third hour is five days and the fourth hour is 10…?” Oh my God, we went down that rabbit hole, and at a certain point we kind of stepped back and went, “Look, I’m sure someone out there on the Internet is gonna try and do the math.” But for us, we just said, “OK, you know, whether it’s a gravity well, some kind of singularity, whether something happens during the passage through this portal in Hollow Earth, whichever version of it is that ultimately explains how it happened, time has passed more slowly for those characters there, that allows them to come back.”
Look, pulling back the curtain, full exposure: I just wanted to make sure we got Mari Yamamoto back in the show (as Keiko). We did not want to recast that actor, because we love her so much and she was so important. And the idea of bringing her into the world in the present day to interact with Cate and May and Kentaro and Hiroshi was sooooo exciting to us. We were like, “We’ll figure out the time travel stuff. That’s not a problem.”
TVLINE | Speaking of time travel, was that a knowing Back to the Future wink-wink with the cable that Lee needed to reconnect before the ship could take off?
It’s funny, I don’t know that it was in script. I do remember writing a line which Kurt I thought delivered beautifully — like, “Why can’t anything ever be easy?” — but I think the staging of it was all Andy Goddard, the director, who did a brilliant job. That idea of him pulling the pieces together [grunting] really was the way Andy staged it, with the lightning and the chaos and the wind blowing. I haven’t spoken to him about it, but I’m sure Back to the Future was in his head.
TVLINE | Last but not least… Kong. Was that just a shameless, crowd-pleasing cameo, or might his appearance speak to any semblance of an idea you have for Season 2?
I will cop to being shameless about wanting the crowd to be pleased. I mean, come on! [Laughs] We didn’t want the show to be just a monsterfest. We didn’t want it to be just “destroy all monsters,” where you have every famous creature from canon appearing. We created some new creatures, some kaiju of our own, but we really wanted to focus on this season being about Godzilla as the primary kaiju character.
Moving into a potential second season, there are a lot of other great [monsters]. There’s Kong, there’s Rodan, Mothra…. And Toho has a deep bench, too, of lesser-known characters — Ebirah, Biollante, Hedorah…. It could be any of these characters. Kong is definitely definitely a crowd pleaser, and if we are given the opportunity to move forward, I don’t think we wouldn’t want that to be just a shameless, “Oh, you got Kong and now we’re gonna do something else.” We would need to come up with a consistent transition from the end of Season 1 into a potential Season 2.
TVLINE | You should have subtitled his roar at the end, “Go see Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire — in theaters March 29th!”
I think Legendary would probably have been very happy for us to do that. I have no doubt that movie is going to be huge.
TVLINE | I haven’t gotten to Godzilla Minus One yet, which I hear is fantastic, but I know that’s also a bit of a different thing.
The fact that you have overlapping three separate Monsterverse properties right now — you have our show, you have the big legendary movie, Godzilla x Kong, coming out in a couple of months, you have Godzilla Minus One, which is just a masterpiece….. It really is kind of a testament to the fact that “there’s a Godzilla for everyone.” There are so many different ways to tell that story, and there is no right way. That’s a testament to the staying power of that character for 70 years. The pull of it is there, the allure of it is there. We’re just grateful that we feel we were able to tell it successfully within the contours of the show we wanted to do.
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