The Ending Of Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters Season 1 Explained

Contains spoilers for "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters"

In just 10 episodes, "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" has elevated the MonsterVerse from a fun, campy kaiju fight fest to something much richer and more complex. Yes, there are still big CGI monsters, there's still a lot of expository dialogue and pointing at screens, and the camp remains. But within the retro sci-fi shell of "Monarch" lies a beating heart — a story about generational family trauma, institutional corruption, and the things we give up in the name of good intentions.

"Monarch" isn't exactly "Andor." Far from it, in fact. But it's done something similar for the MonsterVerse to what Tony Gilroy's space thriller did for "Star Wars." It injects a level of self-respect and human drama into a franchise that's mostly been just spectacle until now, and Season 1 ends with a bang. The contemporary "Monarch" timeline and the 1950s arc properly intersect, bringing tearful reunions, noble sacrifices, and some interesting questions left hanging.

In its final moments, "Monarch" Season 1 is lifted by the strength of its cast and the connections between its characters. And of course, it wouldn't be a MonsterVerse project without a big Godzilla moment at the end and a glimpse of Kong. With "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" on the way and a second season possibly on the horizon, let's dive into the ending of "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" Season 1, what it means, and what could be coming next.

"Monarch" covers a lot of ground in its first season, but the story starts simply, with a focus on Cate Randa (Anna Sawai) and Kentaro Randa (Ren Watabe) searching for their father, Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira). After discovering that he had two separate families in Tokyo and San Francisco, the newly discovered half-siblings set out with former Monarch member Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) and mutual love interest May (Kiersey Clemons) to find him.

In the past, we see how a young Lee (Wyatt Russell), Bill Randa (Anders Holm), and Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) founded Monarch, and how Keiko vanished in a tragic Hollow Earth portal investigation. That tragedy informs everything that follows — Bill and Lee's respective obsessions, Hiroshi's orphaned upbringing, and the modern state of Monarch.

In the penultimate episode of Season 1, May, Cate, and Lee are pulled down to a midway point between the surface and the Hollow Earth known as Axis Mundi. There Cate discovers Keiko still alive and well, having only been in the wilderness for about two months. Due to the time dilation effects of the portals, she's oblivious that more than 50 years have passed overhead, and that she's missed what would have been most of her life.

The reunion between Keiko and Lee in the "Monarch" Season 1 finale is heartbreaking. Cate refrains from telling her grandmother her true identity or how much time has passed, but when they run into May and Lee, it all comes out. Hiding behind a tree to conceal his aged face, Lee explains through tears the tragedy they've both fallen into. Keiko breaks down as well, but she quickly accepts the truth.

Fortunately, the group is able to devise a plan of escape. Keiko was already using Lee's old Titan signal device to send a message to the surface. Together, they carry it to the old pod he used in 1962 to travel to Axis Mundi himself. They hook the device up and get it going, hoping that a titan will open up the portal above them and carry them home. But when the nearest titan ends up being both much closer and more aggressive than anticipated, things start to go south.

Lee leaves the pod to fix the signal by hand, only to be caught in the crossfire when Godzilla appears. Amidst the titan duel, he activates the device again. The pod is pulled into the portal, and Lee chases after it, but he isn't quite quick enough. In a tragic mirror of Keiko's 1959 disappearance, he lets go of her hand, happy in his sacrifice after finally being able to keep his promise and bring her home.

While May, Cate, Lee, and Keiko are fighting to escape from Axis Mundi, Kentaro is left on the surface to pick up the pieces. He gets kicked out of Monarch after his leg heals and is told to go back to his old life, accepting that his friends and family are dead. But after returning to Tokyo, he bumps into his father — the man he's been searching for since the beginning of the show.

The reunion doesn't exactly go great. Kentaro berates Hiroshi for being a liar and an absent father, but it isn't until he says that Cate is dead that his father truly hears him. Hiroshi breaks down, devastated that his efforts to keep his children out of his business only led to their endangerment.

When Tim (Joe Tippett) shows up with evidence of Cate's survival, though, father and son agree to work together in an effort to bring her home. We learn in the final moments of Season 1 that they end up working with Apex, the same shady tech corporation that will later create Mechagodzilla and endanger the planet. Cate, Keiko, and May emerge two years after the incident in Kazakhstan, only to find themselves in an Apex facility on Skull Island. As Kong roars in the distance, May's old boss Brenda Holland (Dominique Tipper) emerges from the shadows. It seems that Monarch's repeated inaction prompted some, including Tim, to leave the organization and join Apex, thus setting up the company's immense global power at the beginning of "Godzilla vs. Kong."

At the core of "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" are a couple of different love stories, and they come to the surface in the Season 1 finale. Down in Axis Mundi, Lee reunites with his beloved Keiko, but it's 50 years too late. He's so grieved by the time he's lost and ashamed of his aging face that he's scared to even look at her when they meet. At the same time, May and Cate find each other, brought closer by yet another wild adventure. Though they don't get to consummate their burgeoning love story with a kiss by the end of the season, it's clear that their feelings for each other have grown strong.

Back on the surface, Hiroshi faces the consequences of his lies and infidelity. Kentaro's mother Emiko (Qyoko Kudo) makes it clear that she no longer wants anything to do with him, but she emphasizes that he must maintain a relationship with their son. We also learn that Hiroshi is finalizing a divorce with Cate's mother Caroline (Tamlyn Tomita) in San Francisco.

Were his scientific discoveries worth all the betrayals he made along the way? Looking at his face, it's hard to imagine he'd answer yes. Like his parents and Lee before him, Hiroshi fell into the trap of obsession, always assuming he'd have more time. At least for him, he still has a chance to make things right with his children and show how much he's always loved them.

It's easy to put off the things that really matter in life, "Monarch" seems to say. Our work, our trauma, and at times, our own self-loathing all work to keep us away from the relationships that make life worth living. Lee returns from his first Axis Mundi venture and finds the world has passed him by. Out of guilt for losing Keiko and shame for missing Bill's death, he believes he deserves the imprisonment Monarch sentences.

Meanwhile, Hiroshi has every opportunity to be present for his families and tell them the truth, but he avoids doing so. Perhaps he thinks himself unworthy of forgiveness, or of a happy life. As we're told in one of the flashback scenes of Episode 9, "Lonely, scared people in pain can do terrible things." It's a fact that's shown repeatedly over the course of "Monarch" Season 1.

When Keiko realizes that she, too, has lost so much time, she grieves the life she might have lived. She grieves her son's childhood and young adulthood, the death of Bill, and the many others she knew who lived and died in the 57 days she's been in Axis Mundi. For her, the choice would have been easy. Given the chance, she would have given up all her scientific ventures if it just meant being there with Hiroshi as he grew up. As Lee tells her, the world has changed, but not so dramatically. People are still the same, and it's the people who actually matter.

Family secrets can do more than cause divisions, as shown in "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters." In some cases, unresolved issues can cause generational trauma, leaving people decades down the line to pick up the pieces. Keiko, Bill, and Lee's obsession with their investigations left Hiroshi without a family. When it came time for him to make his own, he was scared the same thing would happen again. You can read his double life as a kind of desperate safety net. If anything were to happen to one family, at least he wouldn't lose everything. Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe he stayed distant from everyone because he feared the pain of losing them, which is why he was never around for long.

The final scene of "Monarch" Season 1 brings all of this complicated history to a head. After escaping Axis Mundi, Cate finally reunites with her father, who she's been searching for the entire show. At last, he's used his brilliant mind to help his family, rather than distance himself from them. When he sees his mother alive and well, looking exactly as she did when he was a boy, he collapses into her arms.

Keiko had no control over the harm she indirectly brought to her son. But it's still enlightening to see how her return washes away decades of pain. It's as if all of the baggage Hiroshi has been carrying around with him is suddenly lifted off of his shoulders. In that moment, life doesn't have to be painful anymore. Healing can finally begin.

In addition to the human themes of family, grief, and regret, "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" has a larger message about the natural world and our relationship to it. The titans may be fictional, but they still represent the planet — a place that humans have assumed dominion over, but which is far stranger and more awe-inspiring than most people realize.

Kaiju have always been a metaphor for the environment in cinema. They show what happens when we destroy or pollute it with war. They embody the response of nature — the self-preservational instinct of the planet to heal and build anew. That metaphor has been present in the MonsterVerse since the start, but it feels more impactful in "Monarch." When Cate, Lee, Keiko, and May are stranded on Axis Mundi, they can't help but acknowledge their powerlessness. They feel out of place, knowing that this isn't a world built for them.

Nature isn't a thing humans can ever truly control, "Monarch" seems to say. We are a piece of it, and no more. The power-hungry maneuvers of Apex Cybernetics stand in opposition to this idea. The company represents mankind's urge to subdue and assimilate nature, and its robotic advancements eventually challenge the natural order itself in "Godzilla vs. Kong," leading to widespread destruction and death.

Lee Shaw gets a pretty complete arc throughout "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" Season 1. He starts as a cocky, sexist American soldier, meets Keiko, unlearns his biases, starts to believe in the mission of protecting the innocent, experiences great loss, lives decades in shame and guilt, and then finally has a chance to make some of his mistakes right. When he makes Keiko let him go so she can escape back to the surface at the end of Season 1, he's almost laughing. When she asks him what he's doing as he climbs out of the pod to fix the signal, he responds simply, "My job." Even now, 60 years later, he hasn't forgotten his promise to keep her safe.

Lee is happy to make the sacrifice, but that doesn't mean he's dead. If Keiko could survive in Axis Mundi for so long, and if numerous characters have all endured the trips back and forth, he might still be alive. We know now that years of surface time are just a matter of days there, so he wouldn't even need to hold out long before a rescue from the future might come through. Who knows? Maybe by the time he gets back, Keiko will have aged up too, putting them back on the same temporal playing field for a long-awaited happily ever after.

For now, we can only speculate, but it would be great to see Kurt Russell back in the MonsterVerse again sometime soon.

The other big question at the end of "Monarch" Season 1 besides the fate of Lee Shaw concerns Axis Mundi itself. We're told by Keiko that it isn't truly the Hollow Earth, but rather a middle point between the realm of the titans and the surface. But how does that work, exactly? In "Godzilla vs. Kong," a team of Monarch and Apex operatives follows Kong down a portal into the Hollow Earth, and there isn't exactly a convenient spot for a pitstop in the spooky lightning forest.

The natural answer is simply that the portal network beneath the Earth's crust is far more complicated than we previously thought. It's not just a subway line between the surface and the Hollow Earth, but a confusing web of ever-changing tunnels with multiple exit points. Keiko notes that the ecosystem of Axis Mundi is a blend of surface flora and Hollow Earth life. Since it seems easier to access from both places, that makes sense.

It's also worth noting that Axis Mundi has some key characteristics that separate it from the Hollow Earth. As far as we know, there's no temporal distortion in the Hollow Earth, as the humans in "Godzilla vs. Kong" journey between the two realms in real-time. Also, the gravity inversion of the Hollow Earth — the thing that prohibits humans from reaching it for so long — doesn't occur in Axis Mundi. For now, there are still a lot of questions about how these different places connect and relate to one another. With luck, "Monarch" will get a Season 2 to explore those ideas further.

It's no coincidence that "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" Season 1 ends with a big family reunion. For co-creator Matt Fraction, the complex theme of inheritance was a guiding principle from the start. "There's a recurring theme in the work I do that I like stories about people deciding to accept their inheritance or reject it," Fraction told Men's Health in 2023. "Children being the parents of adults, and all that kind of stuff." Director Matt Shakman echoed the sentiment in an interview with The Verge, saying the project appealed to him because it was a "multigenerational family story."

Because MonsterVerse fans know what happens later in movies like "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" and "Godzilla vs. Kong," the story of "Monarch" had to stay grounded in the human characters to keep the drama alive. In the end, that's what makes the emotional payoffs of Season 1 so satisfying.

Thematically, the show's creators were also tuned into the historical significance of kaiju cinema. "Godzilla and the kaiju of the MonsterVerse have always been sort of existential allegories for whatever the threat is," co-creator Chris Black told MovieWeb. "And then, if you're looking at our modern age, I think you could pick. Obviously climate change and global warming is a very real and current issue." Kurt Russell was also interested in the project because of its larger thematic implications. "I was probably, I don't know, maybe 8 years old when I first saw Godzilla, and that was an image that I never forgot," the star told Entertainment Tonight. "What I love about ... great sci-fi is an opportunity to examine some huge [philosophical] questions."

In some ways, the ending of "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" Season 1 might not have too big of an impact on the rest of the MonsterVerse. Since it's set at an earlier point in the timeline than the most recent movies, we already know a lot of the big beats that come next. But the stories of the Randa family, Keiko, May, and Lee Shaw are mostly new, and they could tie into future projects in interesting ways.

Maybe Lee could escape from Axis Mundi and make a cameo appearance in "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire." The film could also shed some light on what happens to the Randa clan during the interim years. In all likelihood, though, the next MonsterVerse movie won't lean too hard on "Monarch,' as plenty of casual moviegoers won't have seen it before buying a theater ticket.

What's easier to hope for is a "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" Season 2, which seems primed after the events of the Season 1 finale. There are more secrets to uncover, more relationships to heal, and more titans to face. Hopefully, Legendary and Apple TV+ will continue the story, which is already one of the highlights of the entire franchise.