Monarch: Legacy of Monsters enters its climax with the seventh episode, “Will The Real May Please Stand Up?” With the group split and tensions higher than ever, how will our heroes come back together? Will they come back together at all? What’s the real story of May Hewitt? And will Shaw’s true motivations be revealed?
All of these questions and more are about to be answered. Please bear in mind that there will be full spoilers for “Will The Real May Please Stand Up?” so tread lightly if you haven’t seen it yet. Without further ado, let’s begin.
Also Read: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 6 SPOILER Recap/Review – Terrifying Miracles
Monarch Episode 7 Plot
May, Cate, and Kentaro’s planned flight home is derailed when May is kidnapped at the airport by her old employers, Applied External Technologies or AET. Cate and Kentaro run into Joe Tippett’s Tim, whom I have mistakenly called Phil in previous recaps due to him largely being boring before, and the three agree to an alliance. Tim helps Cate and Kentaro find May and Cate and Kentaro help Tim find Shaw.
They track down May’s family to find answers and in the process discover that May Hewitt isn’t even her real name. She’s actually Corah Mateo, a programmer recruited by AET three years prior to the events of the series. Corah hoped to work on the company’s experimental neural interface program, but changed her mind and hacked into the system to shut it down after discovering the interface’s negative effects on test animals. Threatened by AET’s CEO, Corah soon fled to Japan and assumed the identity of May Hewitt before meeting Kentaro about a year later.
Back in the present day, Cate, Kentaro, and Tim track May/Corah to AET headquarters; using a prototype Titan alarm system as a distraction to sneak in. After learning that AET developed the neural interface specifically to study the nervous systems of Godzilla and other Titans, Corah is briefly reunited with the others before opting to leave herself at AET’s mercy to avoid anyone else having to pay for her mistakes.
However, Natalia, a Monarch agent and Tim’s partner, arranges a deal with AET that grants Corah’s freedom in exchange for as-yet unknown information. Corah reunites with her family before meeting up with Cate and Kentaro again, determined to help the pair find Shaw. In order to deal with the PR issues caused by the false Titan alarm, Natalia reveals Monarch’s presence to the world in a press conference and AET rebrands to Apex Cybernetics, the company that would go on to build Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong.
While all this has been happening, Shaw and his team have taken over an Alaskan Monarch outpost by force. They use the manpower and explosives onsite to punch a hole through a nearby rift in the Hollow Earth, letting loose a kaiju that I really hope is MonsterVerse Anguirus if only because I’m tired of being faked out. Shaw lets out a victorious “Yes!” as the Titan marches off, ending the episode.
Monarch Episode 6 Critique
There’s a lot to like about “Will The Real May Please Stand Up?” The backstory reveal gives May/Corah some much-welcome depth, Shaw’s late-season turn to a more antagonistic role is surprisingly effective, and Joe Tippett’s Tim finally feels like he has a purpose, showcasing solid improv skills and providing welcome comic relief; especially in the scene with Corah’s family.
The head of AET makes for a fairly effective one-off antagonist, Natalia’s final speech is very effective, the monster reveal at the end was cool, and I especially enjoy how the romantic tension between Cate and May has become more and more explicit as this series going on, with this episode ending with the two cuddling and holding hands while Kentaro sits in the back, staring into the distance.
However, for as much as I enjoyed the CEO as a villain, most of AET’s subplot feels way too vague and confusing. Them working on a neural interface prior to finalizing Mechagodzilla makes sense, but why would they be working on it before Godzilla was a known entity? How would they even know about Godzilla in order to work on something like this prior to him being a known entity?
The implication is that they knew about Godzilla and the Titans before G-Day because they had a close relationship with Monarch, but Apex and Monarch were very much on opposite sides in Godzilla vs. Kong and aren’t exactly on friendly terms here either; so why would they share data? It doesn’t make sense and makes the whole thing unnecessarily confusing.
This overarching issue does make “Will The Real May Please Stand Up?” one of the weaker episodes so far, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Far from it. The character dynamics are still very strong, the action scenes are good, and it sets up some intriguing story points for the final three episodes. Let’s just hope the story arc for those episodes is a bit more fleshed out than the story here.
8/10
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