Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters Is Finally Filling In The Gaps Between Two Godzilla Movies
This article contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters."
Ever since it was announced that the Monster-Verse would expand to television with (the somewhat clunkily-titled) "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters," it felt clear that the series would have to balance kaiju action with human drama in a way none of the big-screen efforts have quite managed to accomplish so far. The early returns have been promising enough (you can check out /Film's review by Chris Evangelista here, which made the case for upping the monster mayhem), with last week's episode "Terrifying Miracles" perhaps finding the best of both worlds. That storyline, involving our present-day characters (led by the trio of Anna Sawai's Cate, Ren Watabe's Kentaro, and Kiersey Clemons's May) searching for Cate and Kentaro's long-lost father Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira), intersected dramatically with the (re)discovery of Godzilla.
By comparison, this week's "Will the Real May Please Stand Up?" dives right back to its human-sized concerns ... but, in the process, includes some major Easter eggs that further connect the two most recent "Godzilla" movies while also hinting at the long-term stakes of the series. To this point, "Monarch" has most directly featured callbacks to the 2014 "Godzilla" movie, rather than setting up any blatant connective tissue for movies set further along in the timeline — such as "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" and "Godzilla vs. Kong." That has finally changed as of episode 7 in one of the show's biggest crossovers yet, casually announced in a last-minute reveal that may not have felt as momentous as it actually is.
In other words, if you ran to Google to look up what "Apex Cybernetics" means, consider this the explainer for you.
Past is prologue
True to its title, this latest episode focuses squarely on the mystery of May's backstory regarding her hacker past that landed her in deep water with a former employer: Applied Experimental Technologies. In a series of flashbacks, we find out she became dissatisfied by the nature of her work, her lack of agency in ownership of her own coding, and, as a final straw, the company's Elon Musk-like torture of animals during research into cybernetic links. May, then living under her actual name Corah, made the rash decision to hack AET and destroy decades of their research with a few keyboard strokes, prompting her to give everything up and go into hiding in Japan under an alias. So when Cate and Kentaro initially came to her for help in decrypting the old Monarch files they found in the premiere, it turns out she'd only done so in an attempt to get herself out of trouble with AET. But she couldn't have anticipated just how connected AET would be with one of Monarch's biggest rivals — Apex Cybernetics.
It all clicks into place during one of the final scenes of the hour, when May's old AET boss Brenda Holland (Dominique Tipper) retreats to her office and takes a call from a very important (and unseen) individual. Set up by Holland's prior remark about the company going through a "rebranding" effort, her conversation reveals that the company has been taken over by (or merged with) Apex. The man on the other end is none other than Walter Simmons, the CEO played by Demián Bichir in "Godzilla vs. Kong," who was chiefly responsible for the creation of Mechagodzilla.
In the span of just a few minutes, "Monarch" throws down the gauntlet and suggests an even deeper conspiracy to come.
What's a god to a mech?
Look, "Godzilla vs. Kong" isn't what you might call a "good movie" (except for that one shot early on where Kong scratches his butt, of course), but it certainly made some choices – ones that we have to consider official canon moving forward. The biggest one of those was the introduction of Mechagodzilla, the telepathically-controlled giant robot that proves to be more than a match for both Godzilla and Kong combined. It appears that "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" is laying the groundwork for the tech companies that would eventually make such a game-changing weapon against the Titans possible in the first place.
Now, the question becomes whether this is meant as a one-off Easter egg for the diehard MonsterVerse fans among us ... or an implicit foreshadowing of the main conflict for the remaining episodes of the season. Given the fact that May is not out of the woods just yet, having struck another secret deal (this time with Holland and, unbeknownst to her, Simmons as well), it would seem we haven't seen the last of Holland and AET. Combine that with the shenanigans that the older Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) has been up to lately, the most recent of which involves blowing up that radioactive fissure in Alaska for mysterious reasons, and it feels likely that "Monarch" is building up to some bigger reveal that could subsequently tie the show even closer to the events of "Godzilla vs. Kong."
Either way, the show has accomplished the task of filling in some of the gaps between "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" and the crossover movie with Kong, retroactively making that Mechagodzilla twist less abrupt than it was. With only three episodes to go, things are quickly ramping up.
"Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" is currently streaming on Apple TV+.