In episode 3 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Apex took over Monarch’s ship right after it arrived at a port in Tokyo. Why? To use Monarch’s assets to track down the El Gran Dios Del Mar. Tim wasn’t happy about this, and when he got in touch with Barris to convince him to chuck Apex out of their vessel, Barris advised Tim to cooperate with Apex and also hand over Keiko and Lee to Monarch so that they could be questioned about their time in the Axis Mundi. Instead of doing that, Tim helped Keiko, Lee, Hiroshi, and Kentaro escape from the ship so that they could get to Hiroshi’s Titan dog whistle device, which was kept in Hiroshi’s workshop, and use it to divert the El Gran Dios Del Mar away from densely populated spaces. The protagonists then split up; Hiroshi and Kentaro went to look for some additional parts for the device, while Lee and Keiko acquired the blueprints for the device. That said, when they returned to the workshop, they found out that Apex had stolen it. What were Cate and May up to? May was in Tokyo, and Tim reached out to her in order to convince her to take up a job at Apex and leak insider information to him; May accepted that proposal. Meanwhile, Cate went back to San Francisco, got drunk, partied until a citywide Titan alert went off, and then passed out at the beach near the Golden Gate Bridge. What happened next? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
The El Gran Dios Del Mar’s Possible Mission Is Exposed
Episode 4 of Season 2 opens with a short montage of Bill going on a worldwide monster hunting tour, which ended on Skull Island in 1973. His belongings were packed and kept in the storage facility of Monarch until 2015, which is when some thieves from Apex Cybernetics broke into the facility and stole all his stuff. To what end? We’ll get to that in a bit. The focus of the episode shifts from the Monarch storage unit to the Ofu Beach in American Samoa, where a couple of surfers try to catch a wave even though there’s a Titan alert (“Godzilla don’t surf” is an all-timer line) in place. As soon as they hit the waters, a sailor aboard a Monarch patrol vessel tells them to get back to land, because that Titan alert isn’t a joke. Surprisingly enough, the surfers heed the sailor’s advice and return to the beach instead of continuing to try and surf. However, the surfers and the Monarch boat fail to get out of harm’s way when the El Gran Dios Del Mar emerges from the waters to drag them into the depths of the ocean (like a classic Kraken) while summoning the Scarabs, which seemingly kill the surfers before reuniting with their leader. By the way, this probably explains what the El Gran Dios Del Mar is actually doing. Before being banished to Axis Mundi, the Titan most likely roamed the oceans of the planet quite freely. I don’t know about its gender; maybe it had a partner and, before it died, they fornicated to give birth to those scarabs, or the Titan birthed them through the process of parthenogenesis. Whatever the case may be, after El Gran Dios Del Mar’s banishment to the Axis Mundi, these scarabs became directionless and spread all across the globe. Now that the Titan is back, it’s going around the world to collect its kids. This is just a theory, though; the truth behind the El Gran Dios Del Mar’s movements may be something else entirely.
Cate Probably Has Superpowers
Cate finally wakes up on the beach and notices calls from her mom, her dad, and May as well, because they were worried about her after the Titan alert. But instead of returning any of those calls, Cate walks into the ocean, because she seems to be experiencing some otherworldly sensations in the water. When she submerges herself in the ocean, she seemingly sees something, but the show doesn’t reveal her perspective. Back in the day, Keiko sensed the El Gran Dios Del Mar’s arrival in Santa Soledad way before it actually showed up. Lee, who was right next to her, didn’t experience anything, which might mean that Keiko has some superpowers. Those abilities have probably been passed down through the generations, and have been activated in Cate after she essentially freed the El Gran Dios Del Mar from its confines. I know this might be a stretch for Monsterverse fans, but if you have watched all the Godzilla films, you’ll be familiar with the Shobijin, these humanoid individuals that were telepathically linked to Mothra. Mothra has already appeared in the MonsterVerse, and since we have spent a few years with this franchise, the showrunners are trying to create this universe’s iteration of the Shobijin. I suppose we’ll learn more about this as the series progresses. On her way home, Cate encounters a mother whose son she had saved when they were trapped on the Golden Gate Bridge, while Godzilla was destroying it. Cate probably was of two minds regarding what she wanted to do, but this interaction motivates her to reunite with her friends and work with them on their Titan-related missions. When she tells this plan to her mother, Caroline freaks out because she doesn’t want to lose her daughter again. However, it seems like Cate is too determined to return to the fray, and she won’t listen to her mother.
Apex Cons Monarch
A Monarch operative informs Tim and Jason about the Titan sighting near Ofu Beach, and while Tim is worried about the sailors aboard the Monarch ship, Jason wants everyone to focus on the Titan. So, naturally, nobody has a choice but to do what Jason wants them to do, and Tim asks an Apex analyst to use their uber-advanced program to predict where the Titan is headed. They learn that what seems to be the El Gran Dios Del Mar is going to make landfall in San Francisco in the next 23 hours. Jason uses this as an opportunity to market Apex’s tech and tells Tim that, via this collaboration, he can not only save lives but also re-enter Barris’ good books. Later on, Jason asks Tim about what kind of progress has been made regarding evacuating San Francisco Bay. Tim says that, although people are being evacuated, and the Pacific Fleet is being armed to deal with the Titan, this isn’t a solution that they can rely on every time a monster shows up. That prompts Jason to reveal that Apex’s final plan is to find a way to coexist with Titans, see how their brains work, and then prevent any kind of clashes, period. This is probably a lie because, as we have seen in Godzilla vs. Kong, Apex’s primary goal is to extract energy from Hollow Earth to power their devices (weapons, mostly). They don’t want to avoid Titan fights; they want to track them so that they can get to their home planet and deplete it of its resources, just like humans have already done to Earth. Now, while Tim is busy tracking the aforementioned Titan and pontificating on Jason’s little theory, Jason and his Apex team just up and leave the ship. Tim notices that happening and confronts Jason, who says that he is going to San Francisco to collect ground data after the Pacific Fleet is done blowing the Titan to bits. Tim doesn’t have the luxury of grilling Jason until he spills the truth, so he allows Jason and his crew to leave and focuses on tracking the Titan. That turns out to be a big mistake, because all this while, Monarch hasn’t been tracking a Titan; they have been going after a goddamn whale. Yeah, Apex wasn’t there to help Monarch; they were there to steal their data and get away without any hindrances.
Apex’s Research Facility Is Infiltrated By Lee And Co.
Kentaro, Lee, Hiroshi, and Keiko meet May at a motel in Pensacola, Florida, to infiltrate the Apex research facility there and reacquire Hiroshi’s Titan dog whistle. This is where they learn that Cate is in San Francisco, which is where the El Gran Dios Del Mar is going to allegedly appear, and Hiroshi almost leaves to get to his daughter. But Lee dissuades him from doing so, because by the time he reaches San Francisco, it’ll be too late; their best option is to get the device and lure the Titan away from the coast, thereby saving Cate and, well, everyone else who lives there. After some hesitation, Hiroshi understands what Lee is saying, and he chooses to stay and partake in the operation to extract his device. This involves gaining access to the bag of an Apex employee, Kevin Burge, planting a bug in it, and then letting him take it to the Apex facility so that May can use it to trigger a false alarm and usher Hiroshi, Kentaro, Lee, and Keiko into the building while they are disguised as nuclear contamination experts. They find Burge hanging out at a bar, and, after performing some elaborate theatrics, our heroes plant the bug, and he unknowingly carries it all the way into the research facility the following day. While Kentaro, Hiroshi, Keiko, and Lee focus on stalling Brenda, May enters the research facility and, as planned, triggers the bug. The building is evacuated, and Kentaro, Hiroshi, Keiko, and Lee enter the monitoring room dressed as safety experts. This is kind of where they find out that Apex’s claims of coexisting with Titans are bogus, as they notice that they have kidnapped animals from Skull Island and put them in cages in that very facility. Lee says that that’s “another fight for another day” and compels everyone to concentrate on finding Hiroshi’s device.
Hiroshi’s Device Has Been Dismantled
May breaks into Brenda’s office and accesses the security network to help Keiko and Hiroshi get their hands on the device. That said, before they can pull off that part of the plan, Brenda reaches her office and ropes May into a conversation about the code that she had written. After that, she takes May to a lab to show her that her code has allowed Apex to control the monsters from Skull Island. Well, not entirely control, because the code’s effect wears off after a certain period of time. Hence, Brenda wants May to work with Apex to make the program so robust that they can control Titans, big or small, for as long as they want. As May deliberates on this, Brenda reveals that Apex did steal Hiroshi’s device so that May’s friends can’t use it to constantly keep the Titans away from mankind. Without the Titan dog whistle, Monarch will be pretty much useless, and Apex can swoop in with their Titan-controlling program and become the leading voice when it comes to dealing with Titans. Before May can give her opinion on this, Hiroshi and Lee free most of the monsters being held at the Apex facility. Since Brenda takes off to deal with her prized assets, May goes back to directing Keiko and Hiroshi to the location of the latter’s device. When the mother-son duo, along with Lee and Kentaro, does get to the machine, they see that it has been completely dismantled. Hence, they can’t put it back together and steer the El Gran Dios Del Mar away from San Francisco. This angers Hiroshi because he thinks that he should have gone to San Francisco to be with his daughter instead of listening to Lee and partaking in this wild-goose chase. That’s when Lee gets Tim’s text that the Titan alert was a false flag and everyone in San Francisco, including Cate, is safe.
May Stays at Apex; Cate Reunites With Her Family
In the ending of episode 4, as our heroes are about to exit the Apex facility, Kentaro turns everyone’s attention to an evidence board that’s filled with Bill’s old stuff (which was stolen from that Monarch storage unit in 2015). It’s not exactly clear why Apex has it. Keiko theorizes it’s to track the El Gran Dios Del Mar’s movements. That doesn’t exactly make sense, because how could they have predicted Titan’s arrival on Earth? Do they have some soothsaying abilities? Or were they just expecting that, one day, the El Gran Dios Del Mar will show up and that’s when they’ll use Bill’s study into its migratory route? Anyway, based on that data, Keiko surmises that the Titan is headed to Santa Soledad, so that’s where they should go as well. They gather all the stuff that they can carry out of that Apex basement and head to their van. They expect May to join them, but she decides to stay on at Apex and work with Brenda to fine-tune her coding, because she believes that that’s what will stop the El Gran Dios Del Mar from wreaking any more havoc. I think that’s a dead end, though, because if Apex cracked this code sometime in 2017, wouldn’t it have shown up in Godzilla vs. Kong or Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire? Is it going to make an appearance in Godzilla X Kong: Supernova? I doubt it, but I am willing to be proven wrong. Hiroshi, Keiko, Lee, and Kentaro head back to their motel without May, and they find Cate waiting there for them, ready to join them on their journey to Santa Soledad. She says that she can help. She doesn’t explain that she probably has superpowers, but, as mentioned before, I think the showrunners will take their merry time to ease viewers into this plot twist because it’s one thing to wrap your head around Titans and Titan-controlling coding and a whole other thing to digest superpowered individuals in the Monsterverse. In addition to all this over-the-top stuff, we’ll continue to get some good old drama because, during the closing moments of the episode, we see Hiroshi reading Keiko’s letter to Lee (which he had picked up while grabbing Bill’s stuff from that Apex facility). This means that the journey to Santa Soledad is going to be really awkward as Hiroshi will confront Keiko and Lee about their affair and how that possibly compelled Bill to abandon Hiroshi and keep his troubled mind occupied by going on his Titan-hunting journey. Will that make or break the crew and their mission to learn about Titans (without trying to control them, like Apex wants to)? Let me know in the comments section below.
