May’s mysterious and shady past is brought to light along side some rather major Titan secrets, thanks to her past employment in episode 7, while episode 8 just decides to throw everyone into a giant hole!
Episode 7
The Present
The episode kicks off with the wreckage of Monarch’s helicopter, which crashed last episode due to clipping of of Godzilla’s dorsal fins, to reveal that Tim, of all people, managed to survive the crash, if a bit shaken up by the event. In the meantime, the Randa siblings are waiting to board a plane in first class in an Algerian airport, when they realise May has gone missing. The episode cuts to May on the edge of a panic attack in the airport bathroom when two suited figures walk in. Cate decides to look for May and finds her belongings on the bathroom floor. Simultaneously, we are shown May already aboard a plane with her captors.
Cate and Kentaro then run into Tim, as he stumbles into the airport, and quickly start pressing him for answers about May’s rather sudden disappearance and her deal with Monarch. While Tim tells the siblings his side of the story, as well as Monarch’s true intentions, Tim is taken aback when the siblings reveal Hiroshi is alive, but reveals that he was working on a way to stop a second G-Day from happening. Cate tries to make a deal with Tim to lead Monarch to Shaw, who has currently gone rogue, in exchange for Hiroshi and May. Tim contacts Verdugo but is shocked to learn that Monarch doesn’t have May and that there may be another party involved here.
While en route, Cate lets Tim know she was told that if anything were to happen to May, Cate was to call her sister. Tim shares that he had previously ran background checks on the trio back when Monarch first captured them and found out the passport May has been using is a fake, revealing May’s name is actually Corah. Elsewhere, at an Alaskan Monarch outpost, Outpost 88, Shaw and his Anti-Monarch show up and take over the facility with little resistance, putting themselves in control. Barnes manages to escape before Shaw can initiate a full lockdown and swiftly contacts Monarch and Verdugo to let them know what Shaw is doing. Meanwhile, Shaw finds a surprisingly large amount of explosives at the base and decides they would better serve Anti-Monarch.
The Randa siblings and Tim arrive at Corah/May’s last known residential address in Washington. When they get there, they meet Corah’s mother and sister, reveal to them that Corah was hiding in Japan and start to inquire where Corah could currently be. The questions start to draw suspicion from Corah’s sister, who questions how the group even know her. After they leave the home, the decide to follow Corah’s sister in the hopes she will lead them to Corah. Corah’s sister manages to trick the group and briefly attacks them, asking if they are from the “company”, which later is revealed to be AET. Things almost take a turn for the worst until Kentaro shares some intimate information with Corah’s sister as proof the group really do know Corah.
Corah’s sister admits she has been in contact with Corah and that Corah made a deal with her former employer, AET, to return home to her family. We then cut to AET HQ, where Corah is being interrogated by department head Brenda about a source code Corah had corrupted. In doing so, Corah had destroyed years of research that AET had been working on. Brenda reveals that the secret work AET had been doing wasn’t to help disabled people to walk again, but instead allow them to control Titans. Knowing she is running out of options, Corah makes a deal with Brenda, AET will let her go in exchange for any and all information Corah learns about the Titans from Monarch.
The group decides to make use of Tim’s connections in Monarch and hatch an elaborate plan to rescue Corah that involves triggering the Titan Warning System to allow them to sneak into AET during the resultant chaos. They manage to reunite with Corah and she finally comes clean to everyone about her identity and past life. She confesses that when Cate and Kentaro came to her with the Randa files, she could pass them along to AET and be free. She begs the group to forget about her as she doesn’t want to cause them anymore pain or put them in more danger.
Our plucky group run into Deputy Director Verdugo and Cate makes a deal with her that if they help the Randa siblings get Corah back, the Randa siblings will cooperate with Monarch to capture Shaw. With a single visit from Verdugo and a deal set in place with AET, Corah is allowed to go home and work with the Randa siblings to find Shaw. Tim convinces Verdugo that Monarch need to step out of the shadows at last and let the world know they exist, so Verdugo does just that with a press conference, revealing Monarch’s mission to study the Titans and, hopefully, prevent a second G-Day. Meanwhile, AET is renamed Apex Cybernetics. Yes, the same Apex Cybernetics behind the events of Godzilla vs. Kong. The episode comes to an end with Shaw using the experimental explosives he found at Outpost 88 to kill the wolf Titan and seal what appears to be a tunnel to Hollow Earth, proving that Anti-Monarch can, in fact, stop Titan attacks.
The Past
The flashback segment for this week’s episode focuses on May/Corah and her mysterious past, starting in Seattle three years before the series starts. The story starts with Corah having drinks with Brenda, who promises a hefty income if Corah comes to work for AET, Applied Experimental Technologies. Flash forward a few months and we see Corah took the job offer from Brenda and has shown up at AET HQ for the job. She quickly questions Brenda as to why she was recruited and what her purpose in AET is. Corah also reveals how she wants to work in the neuro-cybernetics department but is told it is way above her pay grade. Corah pokes into the department anyway and makes a horrifying discovery, AET isn’t trying to help disabled people walk at all but is instead working on a way to control the Titans. Some more time passes and Corah is receiving messages, asking if she corrupted some important source code. In a bit of a panic, she packs her bags and asks her sister to cover for her. In a rather tearful goodbye, she tells her sister she needs to flee the country.
Episode 8
The Present
The present starts off with Shaw traveling with his Anti-Monarch group to the Kazakhstan nuclear power plant, which we haven’s seen since episode 1, with a grand, mysterious plan the team is hoping to successfully execute. Tim brings Cate, Kentaro, and Corah into Monarch HQ, where he mentions that their grandmother, Keiko Muira, had some fairly wild theories in the latter part of her career that involved wormholes and teleportation. Sound familiar? While at Monarch HQ, they see Monarch has global monitoring bases and the ability to track any form of gamma radiation, which the Titans seem to emit. Deputy Director Verdugo informs the group of Shaw’s attack on the wolf Titan in Alaska and that it wiped all forms of Gamma radiation in the area, while simultaneously spiking radiation in 12 other locations. If the group is unable to stop Shaw and Anti-Monarch, there’s a high potential for another G-Day level event. As the group dig through Monarch files hoping to recreate Hiroshi’s map, Cate discovers a file that confirm’s Keiko’s fate in episode 1. She had died in the Kazakhstan power plant during Monarch’s expedition there and that Lt. Shaw had requested that her death benefits be sent to her spouse, William Randa. Hazarding a guess that Shaw is the sentimental type and remembering that Kazakhstan was one of the locations on Hiroshi’s map, the group set off to Kazakhstan in the hopes of finding Shaw.
When the group arrive at the Kazakhstan site, they quickly find evidence Shaw and Anti-Monarch are already there. Using Monarch’s equipment, they also find faint readings of Gamma radiation. Tim points out that, despite a total nuclear meltdown having happened there that was supposed to make the area inhospitable for a thousand years, something there has been absorbing all of the radiation. As the group make their way through the power plant, they come across multiple insect moults and, what appears to be, a bottomless hole surrounded by bombs set by Shaw and Anti-Monarch.
Tim mentions that the hole reminds him of one of Keiko’s theories about portals and Kentaro theorises that Shaw is attempting to close the holes to stop Titans emerging. They find one of Shaw’s bombs and Anti-Monarch reveals themselves, holding the group at gun point. Cate and Shaw split away from the two groups to discuss things more privately, with Shaw telling Cate that Godzilla is a sentient being, not a destructive force of nature. He also tells her about an entire world hidden beneath Earth’s surface, where the Titans live.
He goes on to explain how Godzilla is just the force that keeps the two worlds separate and prevents the Titans from causing chaos on Earth’s surface. With this knowledge, Shaw reveals he is trying to help Godzilla by sealing our world off from Hollow Earth permanently and that he is doing so to atone for being unable to save Keiko decades before. He then activates the bombs but, when he does, the power plant starts to shake as a Titan emerges from the bottomless hole, which causes Corah, Cate, and Shaw to fall into Hollow Earth. When the bombs finally detonate, the collapsing power plant seals the portal, leaving Kentaro on our side.
The Past
The past, and episode 8 itself, starts with Billy and Keiko traveling together, talking about Hiroshi as a baby and what features he will inherit from both parents. As Keiko turns to Shaw and asks if they’ll make it home in time for Hiroshi’s birthday, confirming that Keiko is Cate and Kentaro’s grandmother at last, and also confirms that Keiko and Shaw’s relationship never really recovered after Shaw gave Monarch to the U.S Government. Flashing back to the U.S, Shaw, Keiko, and Billy report their Godzilla findings to Lt. Hatch, who is hesitant about the Titans existing and where they go when not causing chaos on the surface. Doubting all of their work entirely, Lt. Hatch makes a rather unsavoury racist comment about Keiko, prompting Billy to punch him. With the realisation that Monarch’s fate is rather uncertain, Shaw proposes that the group makes a map allowing them to track Titan locations as well as monitor any Titan movements as a way to prove Titans are real, and not random fantasy pockets that many in the U.S Government would rather just dismiss.
While Billy and Keiko get to work on the proposed map, their personal relationship also starts to bloom into something romantic. Shaw spots signs of this budding romance but decides not to make his presence known. Billy, meanwhile, is getting frustrated with the map making no sense when an ant crawls through a hole in it. Swiftly heading to Keiko’s place to discuss this new theory with her. He learns Keiko has a little boy named Hiroshi. She lets Billy know that with the money she is making at Monarch, she was able to bring her son over to the U.S from Japan but kept it secret that she is a widow. Billy comforts her by letting her know he has her back. Lt. Shaw gives a copy of the Titan Map to General Puckett, bypassing Hatch entirely. The map promises to have projections of every Titan threat Monarch has encountered and informs Puckett that Godzilla survived the bombing at Bikini Atoll. He also makes sure that Puckett is aware of who did the work, not Lt. Hatch, but Keiko, Billy, and himself, thus ensuring Monarch’s survival.
My Opinion
In my opinion, both episodes this week were really solid and added a lot to the Monsterverse lore, especially explaining where Apex Cybernetics came from and where the got the idea for making their own Titan from. Episode 7 was the weaker of the pair in my opinion, but that’s just because I have been really enjoying the 1950s storyline. May/Corah getting her backstory explained at last was a good way to better introduce Apex Cybernetics, considering they just seemed to randomly appear in the movies. Having Cate, Corah (yes, I will be calling May Corah from now on), and Shaw seemingly fall into Hollow Earth does mess a little with the lore established in Godzilla vs. Kong, but they could find a way to explain that in episode 9. I’m excited to see where the last few episodes take us.
Have you seen Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episodes 7 & 8? What do you think of Shaw’s plan to seal off the Hollow Earth? Let us know in the comments below!
