Podcast: Download

STV018: Titan X didn’t leave its migration route to attack Australia. It came ashore to nest, and by the time anyone on Monarch’s side works that out, the Secretary of Defense has already signed off on a tactical nuke and Lee Shaw has already used Suzuki’s machine to call Godzilla in for the kill.

Dom Bettinelli and Jeff Haecker go through “Separate Ways,” the 8th episode of Monarch: Legacy of MonstersSeason 2 and the third from last, where the season finally cashes in seven episodes of buildup with a full Titan-on-Titan brawl on an Australian beach.

The reveal at the center of the episode is the egg. Jeff argues it earns its emotional weight because it proves out what Billy Randa and Keiko Miura built Monarch to do in the first place, which was study Titans rather than kill or control them. Dom pushes on the same point from the animal side: a lion can maul you and an elephant can flatten a village, and neither one is a monster. Titan X swam the oceans for centuries without bothering anybody.

That leaves an open question the season never closes. Who’s the father? Parthenogenesis is on the table, and so is the possibility that Titans have no real lifespan at all, which would make the creature on that beach the same one that has been migrating for thousands of years.

The other half of the episode belongs to Shaw. Dom traces the losses that hardened him: Keiko taken by the scarabs, Billy dead in Kong’s shadow, the mass casualties of G-Day, and finally Hiroshi, killed by a severed Titan X tentacle in what was almost certainly an accident. By the funeral, Shaw had decided the only good Titan is a dead one. Jeff reaches for Nietzsche on hunting monsters, and makes the case that Shaw has become exactly what he set out to destroy without ever noticing the turn.

Meanwhile Kentaro makes his call to Isabel Simmons from his father’s old quarters on Outpost 18, May confronts Brenda Holland at a black-site facility where nobody can speak plainly, and Apex shows up with a lifting cradle that just happens to be egg-sized.

Dom lands on the theme running under the whole Monsterverse. Human management of nature keeps producing the exact catastrophe it promised to prevent, whether that’s Michael Crichton’s dinosaurs or Apex’s ambitions. Call it the Tower of Babel with kaiju: we build the tower, we decide we’re in charge, and something much older knocks it down.

Godzilla and Titan X collide, the egg goes missing, and the season heads into its last two episodes with Kate on the wrong helicopter.

Get all new episodes automatically and for free:

Follow by Email | Listen to this episode and subscribe on YouTube.

Help us continue to offer Secrets of TV. Won’t you make a pledge at GiveStarquest.com today?

Links for this episode:

• Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts!
• Join the conversation at the StarQuest Facebook page.
• Be part of the StarQuest Discord community at SQPN.com/discord
• Email us feedback or comments to [email protected]

Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.

YTCode: TRRAWUCBFCRFUMGA