Monarch, S2: Ends of the Earth

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STV019: Godzilla chases Titan X across the ocean, lets it slip back onto Skull Island, and then goes back to sleep — order restored, problem delegated, peace out. Everything else in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Episode 9, “Ends of the Earth” converges on that island: Monarch’s away team, Isabel Simmons’ rogue operation, Cate, Kentaro, Keiko, and Shaw, all moving toward a fight the show is saving for next week.

Dom Bettinelli, Jeff Haecker, and Patrick Mason work through the penultimate episode and land on the same verdict from different directions: the monster plot is treading water, and the 1958 and 1968 flashbacks carry the hour.

Those flashbacks are the best material the season has produced. Bill Randa cannot come up with his wedding vows in Papua New Guinea, interrupts his own ceremony to shout “probes,” and needs a decade — and Keiko’s disappearance, and the discovery of her letter to Shaw — before he finds the words. He spends that decade dropping probes into every rift he can find, Loch Ness included, each one carrying a message promising to love her to the ends of the earth and beyond. Every probe surfaces at a single point on Skull Island, the Grand Central Station of the rift network. Bill was right the whole time, and it cost him his son.

The present-day thread fares worse. Isabel Simmons is pitching a one-way trip into the future — hop into a rift with cancer, come out five years later when there’s a cure — and the panel finds the idea genuinely fascinating and the villain entirely unconvincing. Amber Midthunder was excellent in Prey; the problem here is writing and direction, a poor-little-rich-girl backstory attached to a plan that amounts to trying harder at the thing that already failed. Patrick offers the structural explanation: in this franchise the real heavies live in the movies — the eco-terrorists of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Apex Cybernetics in Godzilla vs. Kong — leaving the series without one for two seasons running.

Kentaro’s turn draws the sharpest criticism. His conviction that the rift can be run backward to save Hiroshi arrives with no setup, and Jeff argues the writers spent audience goodwill keeping him on the wrong side of the story purely to fill an episode order. Along the way: Monarch sends a cadre of red shirts onto Skull Island to be eaten by tree monsters, Keiko finds Bill’s camera in the Valley of the Bones with her grief still only weeks old, and Dom asks why anyone who watched Kong: Skull Island would volunteer for this. Also: the eighties action movie that starred two future state governors.

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