Week-to-Week: Monarch, Midquels, and the MonsterVerse
And a little bit of MCU thrown in for alliterative measure
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When I first reviewed Monarch: Legacy of Monsters upon its debut in the fall, I briefly expressed annoyance that Kurt Russell had been cast as a 90-year-old man. I appreciated the novelty of Kurt and his son Wyatt playing the same characters across timelines, but those timelines didn’t really add up, and early on there was no reason to think this wasn’t just the show hand waving away logic for the sake of the family connection.
But midway through the season, that changed: a character diegetically acknowledged that Kurt looked awfully good for someone who was allegedly over 90, and suddenly my annoyance was revealed to be a clue to the show’s elliptical storytelling approach. It turns out that Lee Shaw had traveled to Axis Mundi—a liminal world between Earth and the “Hollow Earth” where the Titans live—shortly after Bill and Keiko Randa had first confirmed its existence, but returned after only a week to find that twenty years had passed. It explains Kurt’s youthfulness, sure, but it also laid the foundation for the penultimate episode’s big twist: Keiko, who was sucked into the same portal that Shaw, Cate, and May fell into in the previous episode over fifty years earlier, is still alive in Axis Mundi.
Above all else, the end of Monarch’s first season works as a satisfying end to the narrative it cobbled out of the aftermath of the MonsterVerse’s first Godzilla film. I don’t know that Matt Fraction and Chris Black ever really managed to make this story connect meaningfully to John Goodman’s Bill Randa as seen in Kong: Skull Island, but using his lineage as a cross-generational, global story of family trauma was an effective storytelling engine that created enough Titan moments without entirely dwarfing the human dimensions of the story. It was easy to predict that Lee—whose life had basically dwindled down to nothing before this adventure—would sacrifice himself to allow Keiko and the others to get back home, but it doesn’t make it any less effective as a way to punctuate the cosmic connection between these characters that the show got to follow across both timelines and dimensions.
That timeline point, though, became an ongoing question mark for me as the season progressed. I didn’t rewatch any of the MonsterVerse films before the series started, and the early episodes didn’t make this seem necessary: we got the flashbacks of Cate’s experience during “G-Day” to remind us about what happened before this film, and the fact this is a “midquel” between that 2013 film and 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters. But as the season progressed, the show started to lean more and more into the mythology. First, May was revealed to be on the run after sabotaging research efforts at what will become Apex Cybernetics, who are revealed in Godzilla vs. Kong as the architects behind the Mechagodzilla project. And then, in this finale, Cate and May’s trip to Axis Mundi is revealed to be two years of real time on Earth, and they surfaced in 2017 at an Apex facility on Skull Island in the process of bracing for an appearance by the one and only Kong.
There’s a clear thrill in seeing Kong in this setting, much as it was always a little bit exciting when a “TV show” featured Godzilla in previous weeks, but I was ultimately left somewhat befuddled by the show’s aspirational transmedia approach to this material. Godzilla vs. Kong was a perfectly fun and dumb movie, but I can’t say that I was desperate for more insight into Apex once they were revealed as the film’s antagonists. Similarly, while the four-year-gap between the two previous Godzilla films is technically a gap capable of being explored, nothing about the story in Kong of the Monsters demanded explanation. Every time Monarch made connections to the larger MonsterVerse, I always had to look them up, and even once I got my answer the reaction was more “huh, okay” as opposed to “oooh, exciting.”
It’s a fascinating discourse to see playing out at the same time as Marvel is being widely criticized for overestimating audiences’ willingness to follow along with a transmedia narrative across the Disney+ series. At the end of the day, Legendary isn’t actually treating Monarch as required viewing for fans of the franchise (if the MonsterVerse itself, rather than Kong and Godzilla broadly, has a plethora of fans): when they debuted the trailer for the next theatrical entry arriving on March 29, there’s no foregrounding of anything that’s discussed in Monarch, even if the internet has started to speculate about how some of the details we learn about Apex might be relevant to the film’s villain.
But it’s also somewhat misleading to think about Monarch in this synergistic lens. Because Legendary went to Apple as opposed to Warner Bros. when launching the streaming extension of the MonterVerse, there isn’t actually any direct incentive for the projects’ distributors to work together. Monarch delivered a big budget spectacle to Apple that seemed to resonate with their general audience subscriber base, consistently ranking as their #1 series across its run. Monarch isn’t being amortized as marketing for theatrical releases: Apple is paying Legendary for big monsters, and Legendary is walking a fine line deepening the lore of their film franchise without actually making it seem as though you need to understand it to connect with the story of Cate and Kentaro’s search for their missing father and their dive into the family business. They’re channeling the energy of officially licensed novels, creating ancillary texts that deepen the audience’s connection to the series but at no point register as vital parts of the “core” story.
In the end, I hope that Legendary doesn’t think that I’m suddenly deeply invested in MonsterVerse lore, and my overall impression is that they don’t. Monarch’s human stories were the strongest in the franchise thus far, admittedly a low bar, and following our remaining characters into the two-year gap before King of the Monsters—and potentially into the future of the franchise if it were to continue—with some Kongeos sounds like a perfectly good way to spend some time in 2025.
And if you haven’t been following Caroline Siede’s great reviews of Echo, which debuted as a binge this week, I can’t help but think about the complete nonsense of Marvel’s attempt to use the show to launch a “Spotlight” shingle where shows sit outside of the franchise’s intense transmedia continuity. Not only does Echo spend its frankensteined opening episode rehashing the events of Hawkeye and inserting a gratuitous Daredevil sequence, but it also ends with a mid-credit setup for the new Daredevil series that has nothing to do with Maya’s story. Without those details, Echo is a compelling and specific story that delivers a satisfying (if a bit rushed) arc across its five episodes that is absolutely worth your time even if you don’t care about—or are far behind on—the rest of the MCU output. But the show can’t commit to that fact, and the opening episode and the final note create even more confusion than there was before Marvel created an entirely new designation to try to alleviate the fatigue impacting their ongoing releases.
I doubt the MonsterVerse will ever have enough output to face the same problem, but Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is nonetheless a new wrinkle in the franchise’s future, and should it return it will be interesting to see how Black and Fraction—if they remain in charge—continue this midquel story in conversation with the theatrical side of the franchise returning in the months ahead.
Episodic Observations
If you didn’t see the comments on my previous newsletter, Substack has clarified their position on Nazis, which is to say that they are newly interpreting their existing policies to actually preclude Nazis from profiting off their platform. It’s a welcome development, albeit one that in no way suggests a shift in philosophy that would avoid situations like this in the future, and thus I remain anxious to see how competing platforms develop in the months and years ahead (and understand why others are still choosing to leave). I appreciate everyone who’s willing to help us weather the capitalist hellscape, and here’s to a brief moment of still disingenuous accountability therein.
Speaking of Apple, this week they launched Criminal Record, a Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi crime drama about a detective who uncovers evidence of a wrongful conviction and runs headlong into the corrupt officers who orchestrated it. Although an Apple original, it’s decidedly British in its sensibilities, and very watchable even if it doesn’t always offer enough substance to the convict’s side of the story for the balance to work as they intend. I was never fully invested in it, and half-watched it while preparing course pages last weekend, but if well-acted British crime drama sounds like a good way to spend your time, it might fit the bill.
I toyed with the idea of adding coverage of season two of The Traitors, but ultimately I couldn’t shake the feeling there’s not enough actual gameplay to result in substantive analysis. The opening three episodes more or less affirmed this: they showcased some solid challenge design, and it was interesting to see them deferring the casting of the third traitor to the producer-chosen traitors, but the voting/murdering remains good drama engines that don’t really spawn a lot of analysis. As someone with only a passing understanding of some of these reality franchises, there isn’t yet someone like season one’s Kate who has emerged from the crowd despite a lack of familiarity, but the overall vibes are solid and I’ll be more than happy to discuss the season with folks in the subscriber chat.
The Curse struggled to gain traction culturally speaking, including in terms of a comment community here at Episodic Medium, but Ben Rosenstock’s reviews were consistently insightful and I wasn’t surprised to see the conversation emerge once the bonkers finale aired this week. Personally, I don’t know if the “radical” rejection of traditional narrative closure ends up accomplishing enough to justify its wild turn, but it’s definitely the most anyone has cared about the series, so on that front I suppose it’s probably achieving what Fielder and Safdie hoped it would. Curious if they ever end up reflecting on its meaning, or if they just let the mystery be.
Re The Curse, I’ve been torn between my love for Emma Stone and my dislike of Safdie’s thing. Will probably get to it at some point, and I will certainly appreciate the reviews being there when I do.
Ditto Echo, which I will watch sooner rather than later, but certainly haven’t been able to watch at the speed they’re getting reviewed here.
I know the comments and water-cooler-ness are a big part of how the success of these reviews are gauged, but I’m often finding myself reading old AV Club reviews of shows I’m watching again, or for the first time. So for me at least, there is definitely a long tail of value to these pieces.
In fact I’ve been rewatching X-Files and Millenium with my kids on and off for the past year or so. Just last night I had the experience of coming across a comment I made in 2011 while re-reading Zack and Emily’s reviews. (I bought their book, but it has no Millenium and no comments, so I fire up the ad blocker and return to what’s left of AVC.)
Loved Monarch and hoping that, should it return, EM might add regular coverage of it. I don't think it's required viewing relative to the movies, but I do think it's probably the best installment of the Monsterverse hands down in terms of writing and storytelling, kinda like TSCC was for Terminator.
One can feel Michael Dougherty's influence on it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it brings back more of the characters who were clearly meant to be bigger in the Monarch mythology, like the twins played by Zhang Ziyi.
Regarding the four-year gap: I would say that there are actually some interesting things to explore there. KOTM greatly increased the scope and scale of emerging titans, going from just the three of Godzilla to a whopping 17, and felt less like a part two than the concluding chapter of a trilogy.
There was also some stuff that clearly occurred BTS that led to Godzilla vs. Kong getting heavily rejiggered and I wonder if Monarch might try to explore some of the plotlines or concepts that were consequently dropped.