In Review: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (S2 – EP9) Ends of the Earth

Synopsis: In Ends of the Earth, Monarch and the team head to Skull Island. Cate tries to reason with Kentaro and stop Isabel. Shaw and Keiko search for Billy’s long-lost rift.

The Story

Picking up from last week’s episode, Godzilla has chased Titan X back to Skull Island, which is also where Isabel Simmons has taken Kentaro and Cate. Cate is fuming and tries to reason with Kentaro, who now seems fully aligned with Isabel’s plan and doesn’t particularly care about the fate of Titan X or even Kong.

Meanwhile, Tim, Lee, Keiko, and the rest of Monarch have followed Titan X to the island. Lee’s original plan to have Godzilla kill Titan X proves to be a failure, so he pivots to a new idea: finding a way to send the creature home. To that end, he and Keiko set out to locate the portal to Axis Mundi, believed to be somewhere on Skull Island.

Back at the old Monarch facility beneath the island, now under Isabel’s control, her plan begins to take shape. The goal is to lure Titan X into revealing the location of the Axis Mundi portal. Isabel believes the portal could potentially be used as a form of time travel, which explains why Kentaro is so invested, as he hopes it might help him bring his father back.

As the plan develops, Isabel’s team manages to trap and sedate Titan X, implanting some kind of device to torture it into revealing the portal’s location.

Elsewhere on the island, Lee and Keiko discover the portal after finding a series of canisters containing messages from Bill Randa. It turns out that before his death, Randa had visited multiple portal sites and sent canisters through each one, mapping where they all intersect.

Acting

Ren Watabe puts in a solid performance throughout the episode, managing to convey both Kentaro’s numbness and underlying grief at the same time. The scene in which he is chastised by Cate (Anna Sawai) for working with Isabel is particularly effective. When he turns and tells her he doesn’t care what happens to Titan X, it lands with real weight.

From Kentaro’s perspective, Titan X killed his father, and that is all that matters.

The episode doesn’t just explore Kentaro’s grief, though. It also digs into the lingering loss felt by Keiko (Mari Yamamoto) and Lee (Kurt Russell) over Bill Randa. In the scene where they discover the canisters and the location of the Axis Mundi portal, Keiko is visibly shaken. One of the letters moves her to tears, leading her to the realisation that Bill never gave up trying to find her.

Overall

This is a really solid episode that explores how grief can drive people to extremes. We learn that Bill Randa’s grief over losing Keiko drove him to travel the world, tracing the Axis Mundi portals in the hope of finding her again.

At the same time, Kentaro’s grief pushes him toward a far darker path. His willingness to be cruel to Titan X comes from the belief that Axis Mundi might give him a way to reclaim what he’s lost. But the father he truly wants back is the one who died, the man he reconnected with after everything. The only version he could possibly reach through the portals is an earlier one, from before that reunion, when Hiroshi was lost in Axis Mundi. In chasing that, Kentaro isn’t really getting his father back, he’s reaching for a moment in time that can’t replace what he’s lost.

Overall, this is a really strong episode that explores very human themes against a fantastical backdrop, something science fiction and fantasy excel at when done right.