Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters Season 1 Ending Explained: A Satisfying Finale

This post contains spoilers for "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" season 1.

"Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" wrapped up its first season this week with a surprisingly satisfying finale that wove together disparate threads the show has been untangling all season. The sci-fi series' overlong debut season still managed to keep plenty of viewers intrigued with a myriad of monsters, an endless stream of mysteries, and two Russells for the price of one, but its final two episodes are the best "Monarch" has been yet.

There's no bloat in the season's big payoff episode, which sees Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell, with Wyatt Russell playing him in flashback) and his team of assorted and sundry amateur sleuths enter the Titan realm (AKA the Hollow Earth) after an attempt to seal it off went wrong. Along the way, they finally figure out what happened to Shaw's friend and colleague Kei (Mari Yamamoto) all those years ago. Part emotional reunion, part thrilling, monster-filled adventure, the show's finale left some major lingering questions behind like a giant Godzilla footprint in the sand.

There are a few things to keep in mind when unpacking the "Monarch" finale, including a massive lore download that came one episode earlier. In case you forgot, episode 9 finally dove deep into Lee Shaw's backstory, revealing that the Monarch military man got caught inside the rift from which big monsters (aka Titans) enter Earth. The exact specifics of this realm, which was introduced in earlier MonsterVerse films, skew towards the metaphysical (at one point they describe it as both beneath Earth and around it) but suffice it to say, time gets weird there.

Lee was initially gone for what seemed like a relatively short amount of time, but when he made his way back to the real world, two decades had passed. He was dumped inside an old folks' home so he wouldn't spill the beans about Monarch — and presumably freak everyone out by suddenly reappearing twenty years younger than he should've been — and stayed there until Kentaro (Ren Watabe), Cate (Anna Sawai), and May (Kiersey Clemons) busted him out in the show's second episode.

It's also worth noting that there's a reason the finale doesn't feature much closure for the third part of the original Monarch trio, Bill Randa (Anders Holm). While viewers briefly saw older Bill, played by John Goodman, in the premiere, the character actually died in the 2017 film "Kong: Skull Island." If Randa's plot seems anticlimactic here, it's because he already had a big, cinematic goodbye — in a Warner Brothers movie that this Apple TV series didn't and possibly couldn't show us clips from.

There are two words that sum up the best part of the "Monarch" finale: Mari Yamamoto. Her character, Keiko, appeared at the end of episode 9 in a moment that revealed she hadn't died during an excursion decades earlier, but had fallen through a rift into the Hollow Earth, a Titan-filled underworld of sorts. Yamamoto gives a wonderful performance here when Kei, reunited with an older Shaw and her own granddaughter Cate, struggles to process the news about her time slippage and everything that's happened since she left.

Meanwhile, Kentaro reunites with his dad, who has a weirdly anticlimactic but poignant reason for disappearing to wander the earth like he did. It turns out Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira) was trying to prove his own parents, who he assumes are dead, weren't crazy by luring a Titan out for the world to see. Sure! Regardless, after a realistically emotionally unsatisfying father-son moment, he teams up with Kentaro to find a way to get May, Cate, and Lee back.

When it becomes clear that they'll be able to leave the rift space with a jerry-rigged machine and some Titan-inspired momentum, Kei is at first determined to stay since the world has nothing left for her, but Cate talks her into coming back. Ultimately, it's Lee who stays behind, seemingly sacrificing himself in the midst of a vicious fight between Godzilla and a monster that looked a lot like Rodan. Classic Kurt Russell character move! When the group gets back, they find out it's been two years since they entered the Titan realm, and now Ken and Hiro seem to be in cahoots with shady exec Brenda (Dominique Tipper) and Monarch staffer Tim (Joe Tippett). Also, a Kong is right outside, because why not?

Though the "Monarch" finale is as action-packed and climactic as anyone could've hoped for, it does leave the specifics of its time travel plot — and details about the Hollow Earth — pretty vague. Given that Hiro asked his son Ken to help him solve "the secret of co-existence," it's clear that there's still a lot these characters don't know about how this plane full of monsters functions. Keiko does seem to know why it manipulates time, though, because when Shaw tells her how many years have passed, she mutters something about a "warping of spacetime" due to "gravitational distortion."

There's more blink-and-you'll-miss-it sciencey jargon in the episode, too, like when Kei says she "reconfigured the emitter tube to send out a directional gamma ray pulse" to tell others she was trapped in the rift. Tim eventually found the pulse, meaning her plan for a rescue signal worked, yet no one came for her decades earlier. Suspicious! Was the time wonkiness to blame, or was someone ignoring Keiko's calls for help?

Monarch also isn't the only company researching Titans; Brenda's company, formerly called AET, used May's code to do animal testing related to the way creatures like Godzilla move and function. The company – which was seemingly in bed with Monarch all along – ultimately rebranded itself as Apex Cybernetics, and that's the name on the building that Keiko, May, and Cate show up in during the final time jump sequence. Could Apex have created its own apex predator in the form of the King Kong-like ape outside? It seems very possible.

Once a show introduces time travel, it's a cork that typically never really goes back in the bottle. This series' theory of temporal displacement so far seems pretty linear, with people entering the kaiju world when young and exiting it older, but what are its limitations? This seems like a question that one of the multiple shady companies in the series likely would've tried to answer by now.

Is it possible that some of the modern-day Titans featured in "Monarch," like the massive ape at the end, could've been kick-started by Apex and placed into the Titan rift to mature quickly? We already know Monarch and Apex aren't afraid to make monsters of their own, given that the scientist responsible for the creation of Mechagodzilla in "Godzilla vs. Kong" gets a name-drop in the episode about the Apex rebrand.

The show's first season has been squarely focused on man-made problems, whether it's Hiro's secret second family or the racism and jingoistic attitudes that slowed down Monarch's progress in the '50s. It wouldn't be a total shocker, then, if more of the Titans turned out to be man-made problems, too. Whether Apex made a big Kong by putting monkeys in the rift and setting them to "quick cook," or Monarch allowed G-Day by simply ignoring everything the original research trio tried to tell them, it's likely that the future of the world depends on some of the very people who ignorantly broke it in the first place.

Although "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" is slated for release this year, it's worth noting that "Monarch" won't function directly as a bridge series for that movie. "Monarch" explores the Hollow Earth idea that's been put forth by previous MonsterVerse films, but director Matt Shakman told Collider that Godzilla canon will remain pretty messy. More specifically, he said that both the show and Adam Wingard's upcoming film share a "mythology department" that helps keep kaiju lore somewhat consistent, but that the two projects aren't that intertwined.

"In terms of how closely the narratives overlap, it's not as involved to say, an MCU kind of Disney+ film crossover," Shakman told the outlet. "It's less organized." This means that even though a potential second season of "Monarch" seems poised to be set in 2017, fans shouldn't expect an exact timeline match between this series and, say, "Godzilla: King of Monsters," which takes place 2 years after this series.

If the show does earn a sophomore season, it doesn't seem to have entirely closed the door on a Lee Shaw return. Audiences didn't actually see Shaw die: rather, he was whisked away from the team due to the force of the rift opening. The impact from his fall into the ether should've killed him, but then again, this whole show is built on a series of unlikely scientific outcomes. Whether or not Shaw survived, a possible season 2 will likely explore the shady alliance between Apex and Monarch, as well as Keiko's re-adjustment back into the world in which her son is now older than her. There's no firm news yet on a season 2 renewal, but all episodes of "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" are now streaming.