Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Will the Real May Please Stand Up? Season 1 Episode 7 Editor’s Rating 2 stars **

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Will the Real May Please Stand Up? Season 1 Episode 7 Editor’s Rating 2 stars **

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters has done a pretty good job of existing on its own terms for a spin-off TV show set between movies in a big cinematic universe. Sure, the events of the 2014 Godzilla are fairly essential to understanding what’s going on, and having seen Kong: Skull Island and King of the Monsters doesn’t hurt, but Monarch has mostly avoided feeling like homework the way the less successful Marvel or Star Wars TV shows do. Ultimately, Monarch is about Monarch, and thanks to its dual timelines, the main focus is on seeing how the clandestine monster-researching agency went from what it was to the sad thing it became — and how it might be good once again. It’s retroactively setting up the next films in the franchise, KotM and Godzilla vs. Kong, but in ways that have felt like an extension of the story it’s telling rather than contrived connections … until now.

“Will the Real May Please Stand Up” is another episode without any ’50s flashbacks, instead devoting its runtime primarily to May’s backstory and the reveal that she worked for the company that would … go on to create Mechagodzilla as seen in Godzilla vs. Kong!!! Yep, finally, we know the origin story of Apex Cybernetics, the bad guys of the fourth movie in the franchise — a movie that I earnestly love but that can’t boast “having a great story” as one of its strengths. So it’s more than a little underwhelming to have an episode teeing up a future plot development that’s ultimately not that interesting, especially when the human drama around it isn’t the best Monarch can do.

Cate, Kentaro, and May made it to an airport in Tindouf, Algeria, which seems to be both close enough to where Godzilla emerged from the ground to easily walk to but not close enough for anybody in the town to have noticed that Godzilla emerged from the ground. Cate and Kentaro are torn about what to do next. She wants to keep looking for their dad, while Kentaro is upset that Hiroshi bailed on them when a monster emerged from the earth. He just wants to take the first-class ticket May bought as an apology for selling them out to Duvall and go home. Before they can decide what to do, though, they realize that May has disappeared, leaving her passport and phone behind — but then Tim stumbles through the doors of the airport.

Yep, Tim’s alive, as Monarch didn’t kill a major character off-screen. He emerged from the sand in a shot that echoed Godzilla’s titanic emergence in the previous episode (a cute touch) and made his way to the Tindouf airport. He is, understandably, annoyed because he was almost killed by Godzilla and then had to limp through the desert to get here. While chugging water, he reveals that he didn’t know about Duvall’s defection and tells Cate and Kentaro about how Hiroshi helped “open his eyes to the world.” Cate’s not buying it, and though she was very mad at May for selling them out, she wants to know what happened to her. Tim swears that Monarch had nothing to do with it, prompting Cate to lay out an ultimatum: Help them find May, and they will help Monarch find Shaw.

May has been kidnapped by her old employer, and throughout a few flashbacks we learn what it was that prompted May to go on the run in the first place — or should I say Corah, because that’s May’s real name. Three years ago, she was a talented coder working in Seattle who took a job working at a tech company called Applied Experimental Technologies, or AET. But after a few months working there she feels underutilized, wanting to work on the cutting-edge stuff rather than sharing office space with mobile game developers. Her boss, Holland (The Expanse’s Dominique Tipper), basically gives her a Don Draper speech telling her to just accept the checks and not worry about why some of the code she wrote was snatched up by the Cybernetic Neural Interface Unit.

This warning didn’t deter Corah, who hacked her way into AET’s off-limits areas where she discovered that the Cybernetic Neural Interface Unit was doing horrifying animal testing. Unable to morally stomach this, Corah used her coding skills to wipe all the program’s data and basically torpedo it, though Holland instantly knew she was responsible. Corah’s only chance to escape legal repercussions — or worse — was to flee, and she only told her little sister, Lyra, why she had to go.

In the present day, Tim picks up that Lyra clearly knows more about where her sister really is than the rest of May’s family when they have an awkward home visit. Cate, Kentaro, and their new Monarch frenemy were able to make it to Tacoma, Washington, because Cate knew to contact Lyra after May’s near-death experience in Alaska a few episodes prior. Following a fun scene where Tim showed his weeb credentials when he faked a manga club cover story for their relationship with May off the dome, Lyra eventually gave them the information they needed to track May down in AET’s Seattle headquarters. The only problem is that they have no way of getting into the building where Holland is interrogating May.

Tim finds a solution using some creativity instead of the meager resources Verdugo has given him. He activates a prototype Titan warning-system alarm that freaks out the entire city of Seattle when all their phones start buzzing. The chaos lets Tim, Cate, and Kentaro sneak into AET, but Holland is not fooled, nor is she bothered. She explains to May that studying Titans is going to be the future, and she offers to let May go if goes back to working with her little Monarch friends and reports back on all the information she learns.

May, however, doesn’t want to keep living a lie, nor does she want to help AET. When Cate and Kentaro come to rescue her, she Old Yellers them, lashing out in an attempt to drive them away and leave her to whatever fate Holland has in store for her. Cate and Kentaro walk out, rejected, only to get pulled into some vans where they come face to face with Verdugo. Cate makes the same pitch to Verdugo that she made to her underling, Tim: Save May; get Shaw. Verdugo, swayed by the fact that the Randas accomplished so much without Monarch’s help, makes some calls to more formally bring them into the fold. Thanks to some deal between Monarch and AET that we don’t learn the full extent of, May is free to return to her family — though she opts to keep globetrotting with Cate and Kentaro because she likes them and doesn’t want to leave them dealing with monsters and Monarch without her.

Monarch, for its part, starts to come out of the shadows. On Tim’s suggestions, Verdugo makes a public broadcast explaining what Monarch’s whole deal is and apologizing for the errant Titan alert rather than trying to cover it up as best they can. It’s meant to be comforting, though I would personally be terrified if some strange woman in front of a weird logo appeared on my TV and said stuff like “monsters are an inescapable reality.”

Still working very much in the shadows, though, are Shaw and Duvall, who commandeer Monarch Outpost 88 up in Alaska and steal all the explosives they can find on the base. Only a well-timed pee break from Dr. Barnes, the researcher who identified the gamma rays and flew up to the base for further study, alerts Monarch brass that there’s a situation. Shaw blows the rift to hell, causing a gigantic vortex that sucks in the Titan and some of his men before seemingly sealing itself. Shaw seems psyched that he’s done it, but surely it can’t be that easy, right? Just blowing stuff up is rarely enough in the kaiju genre.

Assuming that the exploded rift won’t stick, the real reveal in this episode was the twist that Holland is working for Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir), the villain from Godzilla vs. Kong who is responsible for the creation of Mechagodzilla. There’s even a scene where the camera ominously (and bluntly) focuses on AET’s new logo and rebranded name, Apex Cybernetics. It’s a pretty underwhelming twist, one precipitated entirely on the retroactive backstory for a generic bad corporation that didn’t exactly scream for more depth. May’s entire plot has seemingly been leading to this glorified Easter egg, making this episode feel somewhat empty on its own terms. There were some real developments — Cate and Kentaro are working with Monarch proper now, Monarch’s going public, and Shaw’s blowing up rifts — but they feel secondary to a mystery and a character that function as a winking nod to a future movie rather than this show we’re watching.

Up From the Depths

• How did AET track May down in Algeria? Actually, you know what? It’s fine. Let’s leave AET behind and focus on the other, more interesting mysteries this show has.

• In the span of a few days, Cate has gone from San Francisco to Tokyo to Korea to Alaska to San Francisco to Algeria to Seattle. Jet lag must be crazy.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Recap: Terror of Mechagodzilla