Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 1
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 1 is out in full, and has brought its multi-timeline juggling act to a thrilling conclusion. Dr. Keiko Miura is alive and well in the show’s modern timeline, Lee Shaw has accomplished his mission (albeit at the cost of his life), and a last-second reveal of King Kong promises plenty more story to tell. Even as it set up relationships and Titans to explore moving forward, however, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters brought a sense of closure to the members of the Randa family in a way that allows the season to stand entirely on its own.
The show’s deft navigation of past, future, Titan, and human stories is thanks in large part to its creators and writers. Along with writer and developer Matt Fraction, showrunner Chris Black was responsible for crafting the show’s tone and identity, and setting it apart from the MonsterVerse films while still tying into those big-budget blockbusters in meaningful ways. Though Black has ideas for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2, the showrunner explored the timeline gaps in between the films to make the first season as impactful as possible.
Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters’ Randa Family Tree Explained
The Randa family is at the center of the Monsterverse series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, with multiple members across different time periods.
Screen Rant interviewed Chris Black about the biggest episode 10 reveals, his goals in developing the season as a whole, and what the future may hold.
Chris Black On Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters
Screen Rant: Honestly, I feel like I didn’t need Titans. You do such a wonderful job with the characters and the relationships. Obviously, it’s amazing to see Godzilla, but it’s so cool to see what you all did with them. I’m a fan.
Chris Black: Well, thank you for that. I mean, not everyone agrees. I think some of the fans of the big feature films and the fans of the franchise, a lot of them, were disappointed that there weren’t more Titans in it, and we don’t disagree. Look, if we could have Godzilla in every episode, who doesn’t love Godzilla?
There were two issues. One, just from a practical—I’m sure it’s understandable—budgetary point of view, we were trying to make 10 hours of television with a smaller budget than one of those feature films costs. We simply didn’t have the resources, and we knew there was a high bar in visual effects. The people who were used to those movies would not accept, and nor would we, the cheap TV version of the franchise. We knew the visual effects, the creatures, [and] the Titans had to be feature caliber, and to do that, we just had to be more judicious about where we saw them. That was one.
Two was [that] we just didn’t feel that you could sustain a series with that. As spectacular as the Titans are, I think people would get bored if every episode was a giant monster fight. We had to create a sustaining episodic series with a group of characters that people were going to want to follow week to week.
On the characters, something I love so much is the way in which so much of the show is about secrets; it’s like every single character has a secret. As you were breaking the season in the writers’ room, how did you go about determining what everyone was hiding? From May to Hiroshi, everybody has something.
Chris Black: Well, that’s just juicy television, isn’t it? If I took one takeaway from the two seasons I spent on Desperate Housewives, it’s [that] secrets are great engines for story. It’s just fun. It pulls you forward. It pulls you, as an audience, in. You want to know what’s going on, you want to know what those secrets are, [and] you want to know what characters are hiding. It’s such incredibly fertile ground for drama.
As Matt Fraction, my collaborator and partner on this, talks about, in the feature films you see Monarch as an established agency. You see a little bit of the backstory in Kong: Skull Island; you see Bill Randa come to Capitol Hill, hat in hand, begging for money. One of the pitches Matt had [was], “If, after the Lawton incident in 1945 and President Truman authorized this secretive government agency to go all in on monsters, how—less than 20 years later—did it end up [as] one guy with no money?” There are such big gaps in the film timeline. Even between—and we knew we wanted to do G-Day as our starting point—G-Day and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, there are five years. There was all of this room for us to play and build a story, and we wanted to tell a story that wasn’t from the inside of Monarch looking out.
[In] so much of those movies, you’re in the secret base, you’re in their submarine, you’re in their flying platform, [or] you’re in the room where their decisions are being made, and in disaster epics like this, 99.9% of the people involved are not going to have that insider knowledge. They’re going to be the people on the ground standing on the Golden Gate Bridge, looking up at a 300-foot-tall atomic dragon going, “What is going on?” That was the point of view we wanted to talk about, and then, by its very nature, things are secretive. You have people who don’t know what’s going on.
For the family secrets, we really wanted to parallel that story. If Monarch is an agency of secrets that was founded by the Randa family, then it felt just a natural fit that the Randa family would be a family with a legacy of secrets of their own. What kind of cracked it open for us when we were trying to break the pilot was this idea of Cate’s discovery that her father had a secret life and a secret family, and she had a sibling that she never knew. That is her entrée into the rabbit hole where it’s like, “How deep does this go?”
We keep joking in the writers’ room, “When are we going to find family number three?” I don’t think we want to go that far down the rabbit hole, but I think it does go to your point [that] secrets and lies are an almost endless font of great storytelling.
When you were putting the season together, how early on did you know you wanted to end it not only with King Kong, but with bringing Keiko back? That’s something I’m very excited about.
Chris Black: I think we knew fairly early on [with her] falling down that hole that she wasn’t gone forever. I can’t remember… it’s been a long time. I’ve been working on this project now for about three and a half years. Fraction’s been on it longer than I have, I think going on five years. It’s been through a lot of iterations, a lot of pitches, [and] a lot of revisions, but I think the idea that nothing is lost forever was something intriguing to us in the beginning.
We knew from the films that the entire realm of Hollow Earth was available. We did have to be careful in the process about making sure that we weren’t stepping on territory that the movies were exploring, so we had to create our own specific realm about where this takes place, but I think we knew pretty early on that that we wanted her to come back. And at the end of the day, Mari Yamamoto, who plays the character, is such an extraordinary actor, and is such a delight to work with. Her scenes with Wyatt and with Kurt were so good [that] I think if there was any doubt in our mind that we didn’t want to get rid of this character forever, it was erased pretty quickly.
I am fascinated by shared world storytelling in general. How much were you working with Legendary? Were they giving you the rules of the Hollow Earth, or were there things they wanted you to include, or stay away from?
Chris Black: They were great. They’re great supportive partners. They’re kind of everything you want a studio to be. It really felt like they had our backs. They didn’t see the feature franchise and the TV franchise as being in competition; they very much took a “rising tide lifts all boats” approach that anything we can do to expand and reinforce enthusiasm for the MonsterVerse is a good thing. I think they recognized very early on that a TV show had, by its very nature, to be different. We didn’t have two hours and $200 million to tell one story. It needed to distinguish itself from what the feature films were doing, which worked to our advantage.
They gave us a lot of leeway to play. We had the sandbox. Our canonical mythology does not encompass the Toho films. It’s only the four, soon to be five, Legendary features, so that was our timeline; that was our mythology that we had to work within. But, as I said before, within that world, there are huge gaps. It’s like, “What was Monarch doing between 1945 and 1973, and between 1973 and 2014, and between 2014 and 2019?” As long as we didn’t directly contradict anything that was specifically laid out in films, they were like, “Have at it. Have fun, here are our toys, just don’t break them.”
I wouldn’t say we came into conflict, but the only place where we definitely had some discussions was about the Hollow Earth of it all, because it is such an important storytelling arena in the feature films. We had to be careful what we were doing that we weren’t stepping on anything they want to do or giving any spoilers, because our show will have aired in its entirety before the new movie comes out. They wanted to make sure that we communicated with that.
We made some adjustments in what the world was going to be and what the world was going to look like. We created this specific realm that we’re calling Axis Mundi—Matt Fraction came up with that—that is a part of, but distinct from, the Hollow Earth. That was kind of our playground to play in that we felt separated us from the feature storytelling. But I think Hollow Earth, when you see the feature films, is a big enough [place]. If you look at, say, Middle Earth as an example, there’s the Shire, there’s Mordor. There are tons of different places within that world. So, I felt, and I think our partners on the feature site feel, that Hollow Earth is a big enough playground for everybody.
There’s this moment in episode 9 where you have Wyatt Russell, Lee Shaw, coming back and finding out all this time has passed. Then, [it switches to] Kurt, and it seems like he’s given up. It seems like the Lee Shaw story is open and closed; do you think there’s more to tell with the character played by either actor?
Chris Black: I always think there’s more to tell. You’ve now seen the final episode; I think it’s a very satisfying conclusion to his story. It feels like he started the season with a very specific mission that kind of haunted him over the decades. Then, at the end of the season, he gets an opportunity to go back and revisit what he considers to be the mistakes he made, and accomplish his mission. I think we all agree internally [that] it feels complete; that story feels complete.
That said, there’s always room. Those actors were so great. They’re so great to work with. They anchor the show in the two timelines. We do not have an official pickup for a second season, but we’re always thinking of ideas. We’d love to have as much of our original crew back to tell more stories as we could.
Presumably, in a future season, we would see more Bill Randa, probably his fall from Anders Holm’s version into John Goodman’s version. Was it hard to get John Goodman involved in this, and is there a possibility we’ll see him again?
Chris Black: Again, I can’t speak to what may or may not happen in future seasons, but we would love to have John again. He’s great. He’s a brilliant actor. He’s an iconic member of the MonsterVerse. It was not hard to get him. I think he was excited to do it. He was more concerned whether he could bring what we wanted, because obviously that movie was a few years ago. He’s gotten much healthier in his personal life in the interim, he’s lost quite a bit of weight, and so the main thing was [that] he was really concerned that he wasn’t going to be able to deliver the character that we needed for the show. In terms of getting him to agree to do it, we shot those scenes in Hawaii, and he came to Hawaii right before Christmas. He was a delight. If there’s any opportunity to work with him again, I think we would jump at it.
Same with Anders; Anders was just fantastic. I think he is mainly known as a comic actor from things like Workaholics, and I think he was so excited to show he had dramatic chops and could play a dramatic role. The chemistry between him and Wyatt and Mari [really clicked].
If this season had been 11 episodes instead of 10, is there anything you would have liked to explore more?
Chris Black: I think if this season had been 11 episodes, it might have killed me. I feel like we limped across the finish line with 10. It was such an exciting experience, but also, it was far and away the biggest, most challenging thing I’ve ever been involved with in my career. We wrapped up our season with the Hawaii shoot; I caught COVID and wound up being in quarantine in Hawaii for 10 days.
From a storytelling point of view, I don’t know. We talked about it before with the Shaw story; I really feel like everything ended right where we wanted it to. I mean, we could have gotten back in and re-broken the season for 11 episodes, but I feel like, for all of those characters, it just landed right where we wanted it. It did for me what I find the most satisfying about a season finale of television: it felt like it wrapped up the stories in a really satisfying way so you weren’t left with a, “Wait, what the hell?” but then it also platformed big questions for a potential season two. I think anything that we might necessarily have thought would be great to do in an episode 11 is stuff we want to do in a season two.
About Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters
Following the thunderous battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco and the shocking revelation that monsters are real, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” tracks two siblings following in their father’s footsteps to uncover their family’s connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch.
Check out our other Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode discussions:
- Anna Sawai (Episode 5)
- Anders Holm (Episode 6)
- Kiersey Clemons (Episode 7)
- Joe Tippett & Elisa Lasowski (Episode 8)
- Ren Watabe (Episode 9)
- Mari Yamamoto (Episode 10)
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
The Legendary MonsterVerse continues with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a sci-fi action series created for Apple TV+. Set after the events of Godzilla vs. Kong, the series follows two siblings retracing their father’s footsteps to uncover the truth behind their family legacy. What they find sets up a story over three decades and explores the foundations of the mysterious company.
