Spoilers for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 8 “Birthright”
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode 8 finally gets back to basics and reminds us of the first three episodes. The pointless comedy relief plastering the middle episodes is mostly absent in “Birthright.“ Pointless because there hasn’t been proper tension to warrant the relief. It gets real again as Dr. Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) is passively accused of spying for Japan in front of Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) and Bill Randa (Anders Holm). It’s a ruse to rile the group who formed the early version of Monarch because their superior wants to eliminate their budget. The racist play is a realistic approach that should be addressed more often in the 1955 portion of the story.
Something else the show gets back to is the dichotomy and parallels between the two times the story is focusing on. Much of the episode shares the same settings as scenes switch back and forth from past to 2015 ‘present.’ Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) of 2015 is going off script, while the 1955 Shaw tries his best to do things by the book. Ultimately, Shaw will learn that the motivation behind starting Monarch for him and his team does not match the motivation behind the US Military funding the project.
Safeguarding the world isn’t in the interest of the arrogance behind those who believe they already eliminated the threat of Godzilla. Bill, Lee, and Keiko have kept Godzilla’s survival under wraps for now in order to protect him and prevent the US from building an even more destructive bomb that would only give him more strength.
The double-edged sword of needing a budget to search for Titans and the desire to protect them ties their hands, but Lee encourages Keiko and Bill to figure out where the giants are hiding. An epiphany helps Bill speculate that the monsters are going underground. Hollow Earth isn’t in their zeitgeist yet, and neither is wormhole theory, so Bill’s imagination is considered crazy genius by Keiko.
Modern Lee already understands how the Titans move about, so he wants to prove out by shutting a portal with explosives. His team goes to the tunnel where Keiko is presumed killed. Several hints tease survival by Cate (Anna Sawai) and Kentaro’s (Ren Watabe) grandmother. She’s been a strong character throughout the series, and her surprising demise early in the season is proving to lead the story to that particular intersection again.
Keiko and Bill get closer, and she reveals that she’s a widow and a single mother. Her son, Hiroshi, will eventually become the double life dad who barely has time for his two children between monster hunts.
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Cate, Kentaro, and May have now teamed up with the legitimate side of modern Monarch to locate Lee Shaw. It’s still not convincing to see a handful of kids having better insights into Lee’s whereabouts than an organization whose budget has since reached infinity, but the show finally pokes fun at itself by calling them Goonies.
Aside from the parallel switches from 1955 to 2015, we move from one area of the tunnel to the other as Cate’s group gets closer to Lee’s group. They discover charges set around the perimeter of the portal opening, but for some reason, they aren’t alarmed enough to remove themselves from the danger. A few dog-size exoskeletons weren’t enough to discourage them, so why should an unknown number of explosives?
Before there’s time to finish wondering why they haven’t panicked yet Lee’s group approaches with more weapons for a standoff. It’s Monarch vs Monarch, but Lee wants a word with Cate alone. She’s the only one who would understand the intelligence behind the Titans. She looked into Godzilla’s eyes and saw that he was not just a rampaging beast. Shaw’s conclusion is that Godzilla is trying to keep the Titans on their own side of the world (the hollow underside), so he wants to help by closing all the portals around the globe.
A younger Shaw, looking for a way to keep Monarch’s budget alive, approaches General Puckett (Christopher Heyerdahl) with evidence that Godzilla was not killed at the Bikini Island explosion. Securing the budget is what kept Monarch going, but modern Shaw understands the organization is just a bureaucratic sinkhole with no real plan for handling Titans because they refuse to understand their purpose.
Lee’s original mission to protect Dr. Keiko Miura during her research on radioactivity anomalies grew into a much more important role he seems to have assigned himself. Protect the Earth from the Titans without destroying the Titans. His respect for Keiko is what makes him keep his promise to her. Presuming she died in the fall into the portal is probably groundwork for her eventual return.
Do the mentions of wormholes and time warps come into play? It’s easy to imagine a reunion of sorts where Keiko is still young. Perhaps she’s scheduled to return, having only spent a few hours apart from Bill and Lee. It might explain Lee’s unaddressed age, as he should appear to be much older. He should be in his eighties, and we all know Kurt Russell doesn’t look close to that. Lee reveals in this episode that he’s been to the other side of the portal. We haven’t seen this yet, but if time happens differently in Hollow Earth, he may have been there for a decade or two looking for Keiko. Keiko could very well return to the modern day and meet her grandchildren.
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The only thing that casts doubt on this angle is Lee’s inclination to close the portals. It may just be another plot hole. The show is riddled with them. Or maybe it’s an off-the-wall theory, but it could explain how the Titans are so old.
Now that we have all the characters in one place, what better time than now to have a giant beetle emerge from the nearby portal? This isn’t your Megalon-type giant insect, though. Havoc ensues, and May is the first to disappear into the portal. We already know her character has been made to be essential in the previous episode, so she’s surviving this, right? The question goes away as Lee relives his moment with Keiko. This time, he refuses to let go of Cate, and he disappears with her. The three main characters never die at once, but now Kentaro is separated from the group.
It’s hard to imagine Kentaro surviving the explosion, but this show only kills tertiary characters. The remainder of the season will likely be about his reunion with the rest of the group. He’ll serve as the side of the story that can’t believe what we’re about to see. Cate, May, and Lee are now in the underworld. Tim’s fate is unclear, but given he’s usually used to soften the tension he’s not going anywhere without one of the groups. He survived a helicopter crash. He’ll survive this.
Following Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode 8, episodes should be much more interesting now that the world has unexpectedly changed for the protagonists.
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