Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
The Way Out Season 1 Episode 5 Editor’s Rating «Previous Next» « Previous Episode Next Episode
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
The Way Out Season 1 Episode 5 Editor’s Rating «Previous Next» « Previous Episode Next EpisodeA hurdle that long-running genre series encounter is a diminishing lack of awe. Even if we, the audience, have seen a million zombie shows, there’s something inherently thrilling about seeing it through the eyes of panicked and confused characters dealing with the walking dead for the first time. A show that takes place after zombies have already taken over and are now more of a still-terrifying but known routine doesn’t have that same immediate juice.
Godzilla’s stomped into this, too, as the MonsterVerse shows. For its faults, the 2014 Godzilla that kicked off the American series had a sense of awe because these creatures were new to the world. Later movies, like the beautifully big and stupid Godzilla vs. Kong, need to have extra thrills to make up for the fact that everyone has accepted giant monsters living among them. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes place right after (and several decades before) Godzilla’s first emergence, but it’s largely been concerned with unraveling the show’s various mysteries and conspiracies. The as-yet nebulous “legacy” of the monsters has overshadowed their actual impact, making the fifth episode a welcome corrective. Similarly devoid of ’50s flashbacks as the previous episode but even more tightly focused, “The Way Out” goes into the ruins of San Francisco. And, in doing so, treats the monsters destroying a city — destroying lives — with the awful gravitas that the MonsterVerse sometimes lacks.
The episode opens with Cate, Kentaro, May, and Shaw in solitary confinement in some Monarch black-ops site in Alaska, a situation that’s better than freezing to death in the snow or getting killed by a Titan — but it’s not exactly ideal, either. Tim wants to recruit the trio and have them work with Monarch in the hopes that May will hand over the secret backup of Randa’s files they assume she has, since the Titan turned her laptop into a Popsicle at the end of the last episode. His co-agent Duvall, though, has other ideas. She says they should let them go but put them on a long leash, tracking what they’re doing and waiting for May, who she correctly clocks is tired of running from whatever it is she’s got fake passports in order to run from, to contact them.
Tim drops Cate, Kentaro, and May off at the Nome, Alaska, airport with some money and an apology that only goes so far when they give him flack. “You stuck your noses in shit you don’t understand. You are goddamn lucky to be alive,” he says, and Duvall appreciates the tough-love act. They have plane tickets to Tokyo, and while May wants to go home, Cate and Kentaro want to keep following their dad’s trail. In addition to having two families, Hiroshi had two offices, so they decided to go to the Titan-ravaged ruins of San Francisco to see what they can uncover.
Shaw, however, does not get a furlough from Monarch custody. He already escaped from the (admittedly pretty cushy) retirement home they had him in, and they’re not letting him go again, leading to a couple fun scenes where he matches wits with Verdugo and calls out Monarch.
“Smartest people on the planet had 60 years to prepare for G-Day. ‘Let them fight?’ That’s the best they could come up with?” Shaw says, throwing Ken Watanabe’s much-memed declaration from the 2014 Godzilla in Monarch’s face. “What if Godzilla had lost?”
Given that it’s now been two episodes since we last saw the younger Russell’s timeline (other than a cute little moment where footage of Wyatt’s face projects over Dadda Kurt’s), it seems safe to expect the next few episodes to show how the agency went from a peppy group of globe-trotters to this shadowy, complacent, and frankly ineffective agency. The rest of this episode, though, shows in fairly stark terms what Monarch’s failure to act resulted in.
For one, the trio is flying into Oakland instead of San Francisco, as thanks to Godzilla’s destruction, the San Francisco International Airport now narrowly edges out LAX for the title of “worst airport in California.” James, one of Cate’s mom’s co-workers who is definitely more than just a co-worker, comes to pick them up despite Cate’s objections. When they get back to the FEMA housing where Cate and her mom, Caroline, live, Cate wastes no time in introducing Kentaro Randa. When Caroline reacts poorly to the blunt news that her husband was having an affair, Cate’s further incensed. Caroline suspected Hiroshi wasn’t faithful, but rather than have the courage to investigate herself, she made Cate do it, even as Cate was dealing with her own trauma from G-Day. That trauma, as we see in the flashbacks when the trio sneaks into the red zone in an attempt to get to Hiroshi’s office, is more personal than just having her students die in front of her on the Golden Gate Bridge.
The scenes in the days immediately leading up to Godzilla and the MUTOs’ destructive brawl are pretty chilling. Cate and her girlfriend, Dani, are both teachers at Girard Middle School, and Dani wants Cate to move in with her, though Cate is hesitant. When the students in Cate’s class are watching footage of the Godzilla stomping through Honolulu on their phones, Cate tells them to put the phones away and dismisses any concerns they might have, writing off the monsters as “probably a hoax” — a regretful bit of ignorance that explains why Cate reacts so strongly to accusations that G-Day was a hoax. She once thought like that and looked what happened.
The principal of Cate’s school pops in, clearly more concerned about the possibility of a disaster than Cate is. We can hear the fear in the principal’s voice and we pick up on Cate’s subtle shift as she wonders if she ought to be taking this seriously, too. It’s an eerie calm before the storm, a feeling that should be familiar to viewers who have looked up at a beautiful cloudless day only to have the weather reports forecasting a terribly destructive storm. There are even echoes of the early days of COVID when everybody wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen or what they should do. Kaiju are walking, living disasters, and there’s something uniquely affecting about seeing the lead-up to Godzilla’s attack so directly parallel this uneasily relatable feeling. Godzilla doesn’t even make a proper appearance in this episode, but his presence is felt as strong as it ever has been as we see what it looks like when he bears down on a city.
Cate has personal drama on top of the giant monsters. Just like her dad, she’s a cheater, and just like him, she left someone who was important to her. The morning before G-Day, she woke up in bed with another woman. At school, as the chaos begins to mount and the faculty makes evacuation plans that we know will go tragically wrong, she opts not to stay with Dani. Upon learning that Cate didn’t want to move in — and inferring that this was the end of their relationship, Dani calls Cate out, saying that, “We were good. You just don’t want good.” If Dani didn’t survive G-Day, which seems plausible, then Cate has even more reason to feel guilt and shame.
In the present day (2015), the memories cause Cate to have a breakdown at a really inopportune time. Caroline and James, who have jobs recovering personal items from the ruins of San Francisco, smuggled the trio in with a warning that they’d be shot on sight if they were caught. Cate, suffering from PTSD and self-loathing over her actions (and similarities to her father), freezes up with soldiers bearing down on the group. She says she doesn’t deserve help because she “didn’t do shit for anyone,” but she comes out of it when May reminds Cate that she didn’t abandon her in Alaska and helps talk her down. “The only way out is through,” May says. She’s talking about trauma, but she’s also talking about the tunnel Kentaro discovers that they can go through to escape the soldiers.
They lose the soldiers and make it up to Hiroshi’s office, which is located way up in the Transamerica Pyramid. There’s no safe behind the poster, the way there was in Hiroshi’s Tokyo office, but there are more pencil shavings and a poster that Cate realizes isn’t a satellite map. It’s a star map, but for the Earth, and Kentaro does some kinda silly stuff using his artist expertise, poking holes through a sheet of paper to reveal highlights on the map. It’s a bit of a contrived visual in an otherwise very tight episode, but it gets the job done: They’ve revealed a map of the path Hiroshi took, as San Francisco, Alaska, and somewhere in Africa are all illuminated. Mission success.
Upon getting out of the ruins of San Francisco (just in time), everyone’s feeling pretty good. Cate got some stuff out of her system. Caroline apologizes to her daughter, admitting that while she might have ultimately not followed up on her suspicions because she liked having “a part-time husband,” Cate deserved more than a “part-time father.” (Is Caroline a little thrown when Cate says they think Hiroshi is still alive? Yes. Here’s hoping they can have an awkward conversation later.) Kentaro is feeling good for the first time since Hiroshi disappeared, and he decides to call his mom.
May, however, is done. She slinks away and calls Duvall. She’s not uncovering her family’s legacy (of monsters) and she has no drive to find Hiroshi. She wants to go home, and she’ll do whatever Monarch asks of her to make that happen.
This has been the most Titan-free episode of Monarch so far, and yet you can feel Godzilla’s gigantic footprint all over it, and you can see the kaiju-size impact it left on this world and our characters. Sure, the plot and the various mysteries moved along, but episode five is the strongest so far because of its tight focus. We’ll go back to the “legacy of monsters” next week. This was a fantastic example of what destruction Godzilla and his ilk truly leave behind.
Up From the Depths
• “He should be 90. How does he look like that?” “There’s rumors of a mission gone bad, but it’s classified.” Once more, Monarch acknowledges that Kurt Russell should not be old enough to play Shaw. I’m 50-50 on whether there actually is some in-fiction reason that exposure to the Titans caused Shaw to age slower or if this lampshade-hanging is just a bit.
• Speaking of “showing the actual physical and emotional devastation Godzilla has wrought,” the newest Japanese Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus One, is now in theaters where it’s doing surprisingly well! It’s quite good. Read my interview with the director and the star and see how it places in Vulture’s ranking of every Godzilla movie of the past 40 years.
• If this episode did a great job of conveying the actual stakes of a monster destroying a city, don’t expect the MonsterVerse’s next entry to keep with that ethos. The trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire came out this weekend. Looks pretty dumb and pretty bad! I’ll be there on opening night.
VULTURE NEWSLETTER
Keep up with all the drama of your favorite shows! This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy NoticeMonarch: Legacy of Monsters RecapncG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK57wKuropucmnyuu82aqZygXaGyqK3CsmSonl2ivK%2B%2F056prGWimrCivIyep6Krn5myboGNoaumpA%3D%3D