Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a 2023 sci-fi drama series in the MonsterVerse franchise featuring Godzilla and King Kong. It is created by Chris Black and developed by Black and Matt Fraction. Starring in the series are Kurt Russell, Wyatt Russell, Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe, Mari Yamamoto, Anders Holm, Joe Tippett, Elisa Lasowski, and John Goodman.
In the wake of the Battle of San Francisco, two half-siblings set out to uncover their father’s secret history with the Titans and the titular organization. The series premiered on Apple TV+ November 17, 2023. A second season premiered February 27, 2026 and an unknown number of MonsterVerse spinoffs are currently in the works
. One that has reportedly been greenlit is a spinoff prequel series about young Lee Shaw on a Titan-related mission in the Soviet Union in 1984.
Previews: Teaser, Trailer, Season 2 Date Announcement, Season 2 Teaser, Season 2 Trailer
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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters contains examples of:
#-M
- 20 Minutes into the Past: The "present day" story is set in 2015, while the series began airing in 2023.
- Abandoned Area:
- In 1959, Lee Shaw, Bill Randa and Keiko Miura-Randa investigate Titan activity at a remote, derelict nuclear power plant in Kazakhstan which went into a meltdown, discovering a clutch of glowing Endoswarmer eggs in the reactor site which have consumed the radiation — before the eggs promptly hatch and swarm after them. In 2015, the main cast and Monarch head to the still-abandoned plant decades later, discovering there's a rift to the Hollow Earth in the former reactor area, and that the Endoswarmers have long since molted into their giant adult form, the Endopede.
- The Randas, May and Lee discover Hiroshi's abandoned camp ruins on the Alaskan mountains in episode 3. In the next episode, Kentaro stumbles through a blizzard to a derelict cabin with a still-functioning radio, like something straight out of a horror movie.
- Midway through the season, the 2015 cast sneak into the post-apocalyptic ruins of San Francisco which have been abandoned in the aftermath of Godzilla (2014).
- Abandoned Camp Ruins: In Episode 3-4, the 2015 main cast come across Hiroshi's downed plane and his long-abandoned research tent in the remote Alaskan highlands where his plane went down.
- Accidental Hero:
- In the series' opening, set during the events of Kong: Skull Island, Old Bill Randa is saved from certain death when a Mother Longlegs corners him, because they happen to be in the territory of a Mantleclaw, which immediately awakens and fights the Mother Longlegs to defend its turf, completely oblivious to the human that its rival was chasing.
- Godzilla in the season finale. He's drawn to Axis Mundi by the gamma ray emitter's Titan-attracting signal, which distracts the Ion Dragon from slaughtering the human cast as it immediately sets its sights on trying to drive Godzilla out of its territory, to which Godzilla responds in kind.
- Acid-Trip Dimension: The Hollow Earth area called Axis Mundi is in some ways even more alien than the realm seen in Godzilla vs. Kong. Despite the Earth-like forestry and crags, which Keiko explains as being the result of pieces of the surface world falling into Axis Mundi over time; there are unearthly beams of faint, multicoloured light, the realm has a rippling alien sky; the portals into and out of this realm are far more akin to outright wormholes and teleportation, manifesting when active as gigantic pillars of light which just teleport anything that comes into contact with them; the portals' activation causes an unearthly electrical discharge where currents of visible lightning run through the ground to specific spots where deadly lightning then strikes; and, most strikingly, time runs much slower due to an intense gravitational distortion creating a time dilation akin to approaching a black hole, to the point where a day in Axis Mundi is roughly equivalent to a year or two on Earth. Lee Shaw even comments that Axis Mundi probably isn't really in the same dimension as Earth at all and might be located in another reality.
- Adaptational Backstory Change: The series' depiction of Monarch's early history and Lee Shaw's role in it are markedly different from, and thereby Retcon out of MonsterVerse canon, the original depiction in the Godzilla (2014) supplementary graphic novel Awakening (which was written as a prequel to Godzilla (2014) before the MonsterVerse was established).
- Instead of Monarch spending most of the years between 1946 and 1954 hunting Shinomura before the Castle Bravo nuclear test attempted to kill Shinomura and Godzilla, Monarch implicitly only really took off with military funding after the aforementioned nuclear test blasted Godzilla alone. Additionally, whereas the Awakening version of Monarch had at least nine founding operatives, the series implies that Lee, Keiko and Bill were the sole founders of Monarch in the early 1950s.
- Instead of being aware of Titans' existence and a member of Monarch since 1946, Shaw was an ordinary Army lieutenant who didn't encounter a Titan until 1952. And although Shaw is present at the attempt to kill Godzilla with the Castle Bravo atomic test in both versions, the specifics of his location and role at the time of the blast markedly don't line up with the Awakening version.
- Adaptational Friendship: Colonel Lee Shaw is adapted from the Godzilla (2014) tie-in graphic novel Godzilla: Awakening, which the series otherwise unambiguously renders Canon Discontinuity. Unlike Shaw's Awakening portrayal, who had no known connection to Bill Randa from Kong: Skull Island, Shaw and Randa in the show's version were explicitly close-knit friends who built up Monarch together.
- Admiring the Abomination: Monarch operatives and close scientist associates, as usual. Keiko is awed during her first ever encounter with a Titan in 1952, when the beast just tried to kill her as it had already killed several other people no less. In Episode 6, Keiko and Dr. Suzuki connect over their shared awe for the Titans, noting that miracles of nature like them should be terrifying by their very nature.
- Alien Sky: Axis Mundi has a rippling sky with unearthly lights.
- All for Nothing: May's laptop gets frozen by the Frost Vark after May had downloaded all of Bill Randa's files, and dumped all of the tapes that contained them into the Sea of Japan. May actually backed the files into her tablet.
- Alternate History: Courtesy of the source movie's events, and this direct sequel which was released nine years later in Real Life being set relatively 20 Minutes into the Past. In the 2015 depicted in this series, the existence of Godzilla who is still alive has been exposed to the world for the last year, and the effects on international politics and everyday life include the mounting of ballistic missiles in Tokyo, compulsory biohazard cleans on public aircraft, the integration of hard siren and cell network Titan warning sirens, and designated public evacuation routes in the event of a Titan attack.
- Anachronic Order: The flashback portions tend to take place during Monarch's early years from the '50s and '60s, but it doesn't go in any specific order.
- And Starring: Due to the nature of the part, Wyatt Russell is credited with an "And Wyatt Russell in the Role of Lee Shaw," with his name changing to Kurt Russell after a few seconds.
- Anti-Hero Substitute:
- Hiroshi Randa fills a very similar role in Cate's character arc in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to that which Joe Brody plays in Ford's arc in Godzilla (2014); as the protagonist's neglectful and absent workaholic father who's obsessed with tracking the monsters due to a previous family tragedy, puts his work ahead of his relationship with his remaining family, doesn't trust Monarch to help him, and is the source of the protagonist's daddy issues. However, Hiroshi is a lot more morally dubious than Joe ever was. Unlike Joe who accidentally pushed his son away with his obsessiveness over the years, Hiroshi consciously cut all contact with his daughter, when she was freshly and severely traumatized on G-Day no less, and he furthermore doesn't bother to inform her or any of his family in any way that he's been declared dead erroneously. Hiroshi also harbors a secret double life with two wives and children whom barely ever see him, he was responsible for cruelly dismissing his honorary uncle Lee and having him locked away in a Gilded Cage for 33 years, and he deliberately instigates a Titan awakening (albeit in an unpopulated area, but still not that far away from civilization at all) to try and vindicate a theory; all of which are lines that Joe Brody never crossed.
- Instead of Drs. Ishirō Serizawa or Vivienne Graham returning, Monarch's featured spearhead of operations throughout the series is their deputy director, Natalia Verdugo. Serizawa was a thoughtful, compassionate and spiritualistic soul with deep respect for the Titans, cared about all life, and he always listened to those under him and mutually respected them to the point of loyalty. Verdugo by contrast is a very cold, sour and sardonic woman with high ambitions of climbing the ladder, exhibits no opinion of the Titans either way, openly thinks about The Needs of the Many over the needs of the few; and her constant belittling, disrespect and failure to listen to those under her eventually drive both Duvall and Tim away from her and from Monarch.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Monarch is a secret government agency that investigates giant monsters who seem to appear and disappear at will. However, it is determined to dismiss any suggestions of the existence of Hollow Earth and that the monsters might be traveling through inter-dimensional portals. When their top experts like Lee Shaw or the Randas suggest the possibility, they are sidelined and eventually deemed crazy. In the present, this has caused many Monarch agents to become disillusioned and willing to go rogue.
- Armor-Piercing Question:
- When May says in "The Way Out" that she has a normal life to go back to, Kentaro snarkily reminds her that she previously said he destroyed her life in Tokyo. May is caught completely off-guard and stumbles over her own words trying to form a retort.
- In "Birthright", the Randa half-siblings are briefly rendered silent when asked what makes them think Shaw will listen to them if they confront him themselves, before Kentaro replies that Shaw won't turn away what he considers the only family he has left out of hand.
- In the opening of "Axis Mundi", Bill struggles to answer when a young Hiroshi asks him just before Operation Hourglass where his honorary uncle Lee is going.
- In "Beyond Logic", Verdugo pauses when Tim responds to her refusal to investigate the distress call amid the potential Titan crisis by asking her, "What if the three [sending the distress call] could save the seven billion?" However, it's not enough for her to change her mind about not getting Monarch involved.
- Armor-Piercing Response:
- In "Axis Mundi", when Kentaro confronts Hiroshi, the latter asks him what he means when saying it's too late to talk to Cate, prompting Kentaro to deliver the bombshell: "Cate died."
- Two in "Beyond Logic":
- Between Kentaro and Hiroshi when they argue in the beginning over the latter's actions:Hiroshi: Would you rather that I hadn’t fallen in love with your mother? That our family never existed?
Kentaro: Our family doesn’t exist. Not anymore. - And then again when Keiko insists on wiring the emitter up to the pod and argues with Lee when he tries to take over. Lee asks what's up, and her answer stuns him and everyone else listening:Shaw: Kei. Stop. Kei, what is wrong with-?
Keiko: I'M STAYING BEHIND!
- Between Kentaro and Hiroshi when they argue in the beginning over the latter's actions:
- Artistic License – Geography: Season 2 introduces one when Shaw returns to the Hollow Earth rift which brought him back to the surface in 1982 — in Season 1, it's stated that the rift is somewhere near Higashiizumo, while Season 2 specifies the rift is located in the mouth of Mount Osore. In Real Life, Osore and the Higashiizumo site are hundreds of miles apart.
- Asian and Nerdy: The protagonists are a half-Japanese, half-American former schoolteacher, and a Japanese intuitive former artist that are half-siblings through their father; Hiroshi Randa, who is secretly working for Monarch like his parents, including Dr. Keiko Miura-Randa, used to. There's also Dr. Suzuki, the reclusive Japanese scientist who invents a Titan-attracting gamma ray simulator in the 1950s plot.
- The Atoner:
- In the present storyline, Old Shaw admits more than once that he views his campaign to close all the Vile Vortices as atonement for him failing to do enough to save his friends Billy and Keiko and to prepare the world for another Titan emergence before G-Day.
- Hiroshi tells Kentaro that he's been trying to open a rift and find the Hollow Earth to prove his parents were right and that G-Day would never have happened if Monarch hadn't dismissed them as lunatics. Given that Hiroshi's conversation with Lee in 1982 shows he was firmly in the "they were lunatics" camp before, it gives his quest strong shades of this trope.
- Behemoth Battle:
- In the series' opening, a Mother Longlegs and a Mantleclaw on Skull Island do battle while Bill Randa is trying to avoid getting squashed underfoot.
- In episode 10, Godzilla battles the Ion Dragon. Needless to say, it's a very one-sided battle, as Godzilla tears apart the Ion Dragon very quickly.
- The Bermuda Triangle: The isolated Alaskan mountain range where the Frost Vark lurks is portrayed as a subarctic highly-elevated Bermuda Triangle. In addition to the resident hostile Titan cryptid, it appears to be shielded by an uncharted perpetual storm which threatens to bring down any planes that pass the wrong way over it, it's host to Hiroshi's abandoned camp ruins and a long-abandoned radio station straight out of a horror movie. It's also home to a glowing Vile Vortex which can be glimpsed from a distance as an unearthly light. When the cast end up Going in Circles in the mountains, they wonder if it's down to their lack of navigation or if something in the area is screwing with spacetime.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: There are new Titan and sub-titan species of insects that begin crawling out of the wetwork since Godzilla's appearance in 2014.
- Big Damn Heroes:
- In Shaw, Keiko and Bill's chronological first appearance in the 1952 flashbacks of "Departure"; Shaw ditches Keiko and Bill when the former teams up with the latter despite his complaints, but he comes back in time to dramatically save the pair amid the Ion Dragon attacking them.
- In "Parallels and Interiors", after Kentaro snaps out of his hallucination, half-hypothermic in a derelict cabin with a radio; the very next time we see him is when he slides open the door on one of the helicopters that are coming to his friends' rescue to reveal himself already onboard, having successfully called in help using the cabin's radio.
- At the end of "Axis Mundi", Keiko in the 2015 storyline makes a Dynamic Entry saving Cate when the latter is being attacked by a Brambleboar.
- Once again, Godzilla arrives in Axis Mundi just as Lee, Cate, Keiko, and May are being threaten by the Ion Dragon. It seems he won't not do this again.
- Big Damn Hug:
- Cate's mother Caroline hugs her both before and after Cate makes a risky venture into the Forbidden Zone in "The Way Out".
- In "Will the Real May Please Stand Up?", May's sister Lyra glomps her upon seeing her again, out of trouble, after May went on the run in her backstory.
- The first season finale has three big damn hugs. Two to go with the Big Damn Reunion once Cate sees her brother and father again after two years of separation, while the other is when Cate and May see each-other alive in Axis Mundi.
- Big Damn Reunion:
- Subverted in the sixth episode. Lee, Cate and Kentaro are elated when they see Hiroshi again from a distance, alive, in the Algerian Desert and wave to catch his attention. Hiroshi, however, responds to their presence with an Oh, Crap! and urgently waves at them to get away before Godzilla emerges.
- The season finale has three of them. Keiko and Old Shaw reunite, as do Cate and May with Kentaro (who hasn't seen them for two years) and Hiroshi, and Hiroshi himself with Keiko.
- Big "NO!":
- In the series premiere's flashbacks, Cate screams several no's at the top of her voice when the majority of her schoolkids fall to their deaths on the Golden Gate Bridge. She screams an even more desperate no in her father's face when she learns the latter is going to leave her and her mother behind while Cate is freshly traumatized.
- In the season finale, Keiko screams "No" when Shaw makes a Heroic Sacrifice enabling her and the others to escape Axis Mundi alive.
- Big "YES!":
- In "Secrets and Lies", Bill Randa shouts out a loud yes in joy when the 1950s trio believe that they've gotten the U.S. military's support to bait Godzilla out with uranium for study.
- In "Will the Real May Please Stand Up?", Shaw shouts yes at the top of his lungs when he sees that his explosives have successfully destroyed the Vile Vortex in Alaska.
- Bioluminescence Is Cool: In a series where Titans have biological light, this is to be expected. On top of Godzilla as usual when he charges up his atomic powers, there's also the heat-seeking, thermovorous Frost Vark, which has a "nose" made of tendrils with blue-glowing tips.
- Blindfolded Trip: In "Departure", Tim and Duvall try to give Cate such a trip in the back of their car after abducting her off the street, but unfortunately for them, the moment Tim puts a bag over Cate's head so that she can't see the route they'll be taking her on to a Monarch location, it triggers a PTSD episode and she causes the car to crash before the trip reaches its end. In "Terrifying Miracles", Duvall and another Monarch goon exaggerate the trope by putting a bag over Shaw's head while he's bundled in the back of a windowless van.
- Blue Is Heroic: Godzilla, as per usual, is the Anti-Hero maintaining the world's balance in mankind's favor. Downplayed with Verdugo, who wears dark blues in episode 5 and is ultimately a smug, unpleasant Failure Hero.
- Blue Means Cold: Not so much the daytime scenes, but the nighttime scenes in Alaska have a deep blue tint to them, befitting the icy and dangerous landscape.
- Bookends:
- The first scene in Season 1 is a flashback years before the main story on Skull Island with a shot of Kong, and the last scene in Season 1 is again on Skull Island, with a Time Skip two years after the main story and with a shot of Kong.
- The penultimate two episodes see Shaw and the 2015 cast go to the same abandoned Kazakhstan power plant where the 1950s Monarch trio lost Keiko at the end of the first episode. At the end of Episode 8, history rhymes when Cate ends up dangling over the plant's Hollow Earth portal with Old Shaw trying to grab her hand, much like what happened between her grandmother and Young Shaw in that same place in the first episode.
- The first episode ends with Keiko falling into the Hollow Earth in 1959. The first season finale ends with Keiko returning to the surface world after a 56-year absence inside the time dilation.
- Furthermore, whereas the first episode ended with Shaw trying to grab Keiko's hand to save her before she's seemingly killed, the season finale ends with the same happening between them again but with the roles swapped.
- Season 2 starts and ends on Skull Island, with Kong turning up; after the main cast and Co-Cai leave the island and Kong by the second episode's end, they all return there during the last two episodes of the season and face Kong once more.
- Broad Strokes:
- Bill Randa in the 1950s in this series is a Wide-Eyed Idealist who is awed by Godzilla, a contrast to how his original Kong: Skull Island portrayal believed all the Titans to be mindless forces of mass destruction until he started seeing Kong's intelligence. Whilst it's not impossible that Bill losing both Keiko and Lee could have caused a change in perspective on the Titans, the series doesn't really address why he switched from one view on the Titans to another diametric view before Kong: Skull Island.
- Although the series explicitly states multiple times that Monarch was still founded in the 1940s, per earlier MonsterVerse supplementary materials stating it was founded in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing (which is itself a Broad Stroke to the original Godzilla (2014) which claimed Monarch was founded in 1954), it comes across as an Informed Attribute. No other Monarch operatives outside of Lee, Bill and Keiko (who join in 1952) are seen or referenced, and they're not shown joining a pre-existing Monarch: in 1952, they meet each-other and have their first Titan encounter, and then in 1954, they're the sole three members of a Project Monarch which is still getting off the ground.
- Although Word of God claims that the events of the Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) tie-in graphic novel Aftershock are still canon, the sole reference to those events (which occurred in 2014) is that Godzilla's dorsal spines in this series have switched from their distinctive 2014 design (which is reused in the series' 1950s and 2014 flashbacks), to their traditional maple leaf-shaped design from King of the Monsters onwards by the series' 2015 time framenote . Apart from that, it's entirely as if Godzilla's re-emergence alongside Jinshin-Mushi didn't happen at all, with Monarch not making any reference to Godzilla's post-G-Day reappearance in Aftershock and speaking as if G-Day was the last time before 2015 that Godzilla or any Titan was seen.
- Once again, the pocket of the Hollow Earth portrayed in this series is completely different from the regions which have previously been portrayed. Unlike in Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, the Axis Mundi in this series is located inside a black hole-like time dilation, and instead of being accessed through indirect passages which threaten to damage or rip apart any human craft, surface portals to the Axis Mundi (which Monarch are aware of) can transport unprotected humans fully intact without killing them (the difficulty of sending humans into the Hollow Earth in Godzilla vs. Kong without them being ripped apart despite past efforts by Monarch was a key plot-point in that movie).
- Broken Tears:
- Downplayed in "Aftermath", when Cate's eyes are brimming with tears as she recalls the painful last time that she saw Hiroshi alive on G-Day.
- Played straight in the penultimate episode when Hiroshi believes that his daughter Cate has died.
- Played very straight in the finale when Old Shaw reunites with Keiko in Axis Mundi, the former realizing that she was alive down there all along and the latter realizing how much time has really passed her by as well as learning the fate of her husband.
- The Bus Came Back:
- Lee Shaw, a character who first appeared in the Godzilla (2014) prequel graphic novel Awakening, reappears as a major character nine years and several MonsterVerse installments after his debut.
- Bill Randa returns as a major character in the 1950s plot-line, marking his first appearance in the franchise since Kong: Skull Island in 2017.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Cate is briefly furious to learn from her mom that the latter suspected the truth of Hiroshi being unfaithful, but she sent Cate to check out his alleged Tokyo workplace instead of confronting the ugly truth herself. Kentaro has some choice words to get off his chest for his father, after his Parental Neglect and after Kentaro has found out about his half-sister.
- Canon Discontinuity: U.S. Army officer and mid-20th century Monarch operative Lee Shaw first debuted in the Godzilla: Awakening prequel graphic novel, which was published in 2014 to tie into the Godzilla movie's release before Kong: Skull Island officially established a MonsterVerse. Although Monarch: Legacy of Monsters establishes Shaw as a canon character, his background doesn't line up with the graphic novel's story — instead of being part of Monarch when it was first founded in 1945, and being involved in tracking Shinomura and Godzilla and recruiting Dr. Serizawa's father; the show's version of Shaw appears to have been an ordinary military officer who wasn't aware of Titans' existence until his Philippines Titan encounter in 1952. Indeed, we're shown the actual nuking of Godzilla in greater detail and the events leading up to it; aside from Lee Shaw's existence, basically no part of Awakening is still canon.
- Central Theme: In Season 2, it's that you can't change the past and you have to move forward.
- Character Tic: Similar to his father Bill, Hiroshi would sharpen his pencils down to its nubs, and leaves the shavings behind. This tic tips Cate and Kentaro off that he's alive, and had been visiting outposts.
- Cliffhanger:
- Episode 3 ends with the heroes stranded on a remote Alaskan mountain range, far from help, at the mercy of the violent Frost Vark which has just killed Du-Ho.
- The eighth episode ends with May, Cate, and Shaw falling into a collapsing pit as the Kazakh power plant violently collapses around them.
- The Complainer Is Always Wrong: In 2015, Shaw has been locked away in a Gilded Cage by Monarch, and Hiroshi was fired from the organization years prior. Shaw believes that this was the result of him and later Hiroshi calling Monarch out for being too idle to the threat of Titans throughout the later 20th century. In truth, whilst this was most likely a major part of why Monarch made Shaw and Hiroshi outcasts, it wasn't the only reason in either case.
- Connected All Along:
- In their original appearances in Kong: Skull Island and the graphic novel Godzilla: Awakening respectively, Lee Shaw and Bill Randa had absolutely no known connection to each-other beyond that they both worked for Monarch during the 20th century. This series' take on them, however, portrays them as old friends who worked closely together in the 1950s, they got the fledgling Monarch off the ground together with Keiko, and Bill incorrectly believing Shaw dead was a major factor in Bill's tragic transformation into the cynical Manipulative Bastard that he was in Kong: Skull Island.
- Duvall reveals in Episode 6 that events depicted in Godzilla (2014) played a major role in her backstory. She's in fact the sister of Sandra Brody who died at Janjira in 1999, which also makes her Joe Brody's sister-in-law, and the 2014 movie protagonist Ford Brody's aunt.
- Episode 7 reveals that May's past has a major connection to Godzilla vs. Kong. The corrupt tech corporation she worked for under Brenda Holland, whom she subsequently went on the run to escape from after she'd crashed their database, is in fact the Apex Cybernetics precursor, and May's research before she sabotaged them was being used to develop the Brain–Computer Interface technology that will eventually be used to control Mechagodzilla.
- Episode 9 reveals that Emiko, though a civilian in the present day, was previously a nurse working for Monarch in 1982, and she was one of the staff tending to Lee Shaw after he emerged from Axis Mundi.
- Continuity Nod:
- In the opening of the first episode, Bill Randa is seen running for his life on Skull Island from Mother Longlegs.
- Bill mentions having been the Sole Survivor of his ship when it was unexpectedly attacked by an unknown monster. We actually see the remains of the ship, and Bill shows Keiko his Monarchs cap.
- We get a flashback scene of Godzilla in 1954, and many of the military personnel using the first H-Bomb to kill him with it. As the audience knows, he survives the blast.
- We get a grim flashback on the Golden Gate Bridge where the navy, out of panic, starts attacking Godzilla, and it caused him to accidentally break through it, and Cate was there as a school teacher when it happens.
- When calling out Monarch's poor handling of the events leading up to the attack on San Francisco, Lee recites Serizawa's "Let them fight" remark.
- Continuity Snarl:
- The promotional timeline for Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) establishes that Monarch was formed in 1946. Here, the series shows that it's been formed in 1954 when the US military tried to kill Godzilla with the Castle Bravo H-Bomb.
- Because the series can't make up its mind with Godzilla's appearance before and after 2014, the 1954-55 and 2014 film's flashback segments shows Godzilla's dorsal spines with their jagged appearance from Godzilla while the 2015 segments shows his spines as the original 1954 Godzilla's spines like in King of the Monsters. Problem is, Godzilla's appearance was already changed in King of the Monsters' opening prologue flashback sequence, which used the updated model rather than recycling the 2014 design for one minor scene. It doesn't help that Godzilla: Aftershock isn't referenced at all in this show, since the comic explained that he fought Muto Prime, and she destroys his original dorsal plates, and Emma Russel surmises that his spines will eventually grow back with new shapes.
- The series introduces the idea that Hollow Earth portals involve time distortion with time moving much slower in Axis Mundi than it does on the surface. While it introduces a fun idea into the Monsterverse, the issue is that in Godzilla vs. Kong the portals have no time element, with events in the Hollow Earth moving at the same pace as above. It might be explainable by saying that the distortion only occurs in Axis Mundi, a mid-point between the surface and the main Hollow Earth and the H.E.A.V's are designed to repel the effects, but it raises an unnecessary continuity issue.
- Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: The "Anti-Monarch" organization and its members contrast Apex Cybernetics from the MonsterVerse's previous live-action instalment Godzilla vs. Kong, and the mercenary faction from the previous overall MonsterVerse instalment Skull Island (2023):
- Compared to the hi-techy, corporate Apex whom have a wealth of resources and a cushy pair of leaders, Anti-Monarch are a small, militant Renegade Splinter Faction with limited resources, more akin in basic design to pre-Apex Alan Jonah's eco-terrorists. Apex expressly wanted to kill and usurp Godzilla because they pridefully believed humanity should be actively dominating all the Titans instead of coexisting symbiotically with the benevolent ones like Godzilla, trying to breach the Hollow Earth to that end, and they only prioritized human life on paper; whereas Anti-Monarch's leader Shaw expressly respects Godzilla and recognizes him as humanity's ally, and instead he wants to cut off the Hollow Earth and the majority of Titans from the surface forever, believing that he's helping Godzilla to keep the world in balance, with Anti-Monarch generally being motivated by averting as many human deaths as possible and sticking to those principles. Although Apex and Anti-Monarch both use the main casts of their respective debuts for their own ends, Anti-Monarch's members, unlike Apex, genuinely care about those people. The Dragon of Anti-Monarch, Michelle Duvall, contrasts Apex's Dragon Ren Serizawa in that she's personally motivated by honorable love for her late sister compared to Ren's selfish spite against his late father.
- The mercenaries of Skull Island had no connection to nor base awareness of Monarch, their only interest was the smaller picture of getting a single Missing Child back home to the states, and their leader and her number two were close personal friends. Anti-Monarch consists mainly if not exclusively of disgruntled ex-Monarch operatives who've become disillusioned or even outraged at Monarch's ineffectual way of running things in relation to the damage Titans cause, so they want to permanently mitigate the harm that Titans can cause in the bigger picture, and their leader and his number two only come together almost exclusively because of common goals.
- Crowd Panic:
- A relatively (emphasis on relatively) orderly one occurs in the premiere when the new Titan warning system goes off in Tokyo and everyone starts rushing off the streets into the designated subway shelter.
- In "Will the Real May Please Stand Up?", the Bavarian Fire Drill of the Titan warning system, triggered by Tim, sends a crowd of civilians fleeing in the streets of Seattle to the Titan shelters.
- In "Operation Hourglass", when the titular Monarch project begins to malfunction, it triggers a justified panic and rush for safety among the crowd of spectators.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: Bill Randa and Lee Shaw, two of the earliest members of Monarch who got it off the ground in the 1950s, were dismissed by their own organization and peers in the later years as nutjobs for purporting that a Hollow Earth filled with Titans exists under their feet despite being completely right.
- Cunning Linguist:
- Keiko, one of Monarch's earliest scientists, is a Japanese woman who is fluent in her mother tongue, English and Russian.
- It's revealed in "Terrifying Miracles" that Shaw understands French, and he's an intelligent and capable military man even in his old age who manages to outsmart and stay one step ahead of Monarch.
- Curb-Stomp Cushion: In the final episode, though the Ion Dragon gets a few good hits in against Godzilla - attacking his head and biting his neck, spraying acid in his face - once the Big G gets his claws on it the battle is over in seconds.
- Curiosity Is a Crapshoot: Surely you didn't expect that a Creature-Hunter Organization poking around at monsters would be smooth sailing. In the premiere, Lee, Keiko and Bill investigating a Kazakh power plant infested with Big Creepy-Crawlies' eggs triggers them to hatch and swarm, leading to Keiko being dragged away. A much less negative form of this trope also occurs in May's backstory, which reveals that her nosiness while she was working for AET led her to discover that they were secretly pouring her research into cruel experiments on primates' brains to develop the Apex Cybernetics Brain–Computer Interface, much to her horror, leading her to crash the database out of principle and delaying Mechagodzilla's creation.
- Darker and Edgier: Than the MonsterVerse's preceding Godzilla vs. Kong and to a milder extent Skull Island (2023). Whereas Godzilla vs. Kong was a Lighter and Softer, semi-slapstick adventure, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a return to form with much more character-driven drama, a lot of angst, death and tragedy, a Bittersweet Ending, and the human characters' encounters with the monsters are played a lot more for horror, nightmare fuel and a sense of helplessness. As for Skull Island, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters has notably fewer jokes, comedic beats and moments of campiness than that show did while multiplying the angst and tragedy several-fold across the cast.
- Death of a Child: After Godzilla accidentally broke through the Golden Gate Bridge on G-Day Minus One, Cate, in one second of distraction, tried to get her schoolkids out of her school bus as fast as she could. Only three made it out, and the bus plummeted to its doom, sealing the fate of the rest of the kids in the bus. This event traumatized Cate badly: the children's deaths are a significant part of her G-Day PTSD, and Episode 5 reveals that the deaths of Cate's students caused her to shut down for a year until she went to Japan.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: In the 1950s storyline, the male military characters are often surprised by meeting Keiko for the first time and learning she's a woman with a doctorate, and she often gets subtly addressed last after her two male colleagues. She also faces anti-Japanese racism, with General Puckett's best attempt at defending her against Lieutenant Hatch being to call her "one of the good ones".
- Determinator:
- It seems to be a Randa-Miura family trait:
- Half-siblings Cate and Kentaro refuse to give up their search for Hiroshi even when they run afoul of Monarch and the Frost Vark, which is enough to convince Monarch to "put them on a long leash".
- Keiko's friends and family describe her as someone who goes after what she wants and never gives up, and it's stated multiple times that Hiroshi takes after her in that way.
- Hiroshi zig-zags between this and Detrimental Determination. His loved ones comment more than once that he never gives up on his work. He broke apart from Monarch to prove that his parents were right about the Hollow Earth on his own, and he deliberately rouses a Titan that turns out to be Godzilla in the Algerian Desert in an attempt to find a Vile Vortex to that end. However, his prioritization of his work above all else like this has severely impacted his relations with both his families, and it indirectly puts both his children in mortal danger when they go looking for him because he never even bothered to reveal that he wasn't really killed in Alaska.
- Puckett comments that Young Shaw (who's also the Honorary Uncle to the aforementioned Cate, Kentaro and Hiroshi for bonus points) doesn't give up in "Birthright", when Shaw approaches him trying to convince him not to take Hatch's scathing report on Monarch at face value.
- It seems to be a Randa-Miura family trait:
- Didn't Think This Through: Tim's cowboying halfway across the world to try and get Bill Randa's files, and his ham-fisted methods when confronting the Randas, only alienate the Randas from Monarch and scupper any chance Monarch had of getting the files quietly and efficiently, something which Verdugo makes sure Tim is well-aware of afterwards. Later on, Shaw disparages Serizawa's "let them fight" preaching from Godzilla (2014), pointing out that if Serizawa had had his way of no human intervention and Godzilla had lost to the MUTOs, then the entire world would've been FUBAR.
- Distress Call:
- Dr. Barnes gets a call for help out to Verdugo's Monarch mission control after the anti-Monarch Renegade Splinter Faction seizes control of Outpost 88 where Barnes was working.
- Towards the series' end, it's revealed that the gamma rays emitting from Hollow Earth contain a coded message. This is actually a distress call being transmitted from in Axis Mundi by Keiko, using the gamma ray simulator.
- Doesn't Trust Those Guys: Old Lee has clearly lost whatever trust and faith he once had in the organization that he helped Keiko and Randa to create back in the 1950s, and Cate is reluctant to trust even a renegade ex-Monarch goon after her introduction to Monarch in the second episode consisted of Tim trying to kidnap her.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Isabel's partnership with Kentaro eerily evokes an abusive relationship. She tells him whatever will get him on her side whenever she needs to, acts sweet around him when she's happy, switches in a flash to verbally venting her anger towards him the second things aren't going her way whether he's part of it or not, and takes pleasure in turning him against his other connections including his family so that she can have him all to herself.
- Dramatic Irony:
- Though she had no way of knowing Godzilla would survive it, Keiko reacts very badly that the US military intends to use the H-Bomb on Godzilla in 1954. This is the only instance of a Godzilla story where a character realizes Godzilla is a victim of nuclear weapons. Toho films such as Godzilla (1954) has the film's doctor, Dr. Yamane, heavily implied it was the case. Here, it's shown in great detail, and Keiko's reaction has understandable complications. Everyone in the 1950s believes Godzilla has been killed when the nuclear bomb goes off, but the audience knows that's not the case.
- The Randa siblings being completely unaware of their father's double life as a family man and a Monarch agent. As much as they begin to learn more about him, they begin to resent him despite their father deeply caring about them. The series opening already showed the audience that this is exactly the kind of relationship Hiroshi has with his own father, Bill, and Bill was sadly aware of it during his final days on Skull Island.
- In episode 8, Tim clearly has no idea, but the audience already knows from a previous 1950s scene in this episode, that the crater punched into his office's wall was inflicted by none other than one of his idols, Bill Randa himself.
- The penultimate episode has several instances.
- In 1962, General Puckett quips that it'll take at least another decade, two if America is careful, to put a man on the moon.
- While the audience are shown that Cate, Shaw and May survived the passage into Hollow Earth, the rest of the cast on the surface spend the whole of this episode and part of the next episode believing they're dead.
- It's revealed that after Shaw disappeared into Axis Mundi for 20 years when Operation Hourglass went wrong, Bill spent the rest of his life up to his established death during Kong: Skull Island believing that Shaw had died in the malfunction and that he was the last of the Monarch trio.
- Due to the Dead:
- Played With in "Parallels and Interiors". Lee burns his fallen friend Du-Ho's body, but beyond giving him a decent send-off after he was killed by the Frost Vark, the fire primarily serves to attract a Monarch helicopter's attention for rescue.
- In "Axis Mundi", one of the Operation Hourglass team who dies on arrival in the titular realm is buried there by the survivors with a Headgear Headstone, which is later destroyed by a Vile Vortex's suction.
- Dynamic Entry:
- The Frost Vark. In Episode 3, it debuts bursting up from under the snowpack to attack Du-Ho’s plane. At the climax of Episode 4, Lee is preparing a funeral pyre for Du-Ho which will hopefully also serve the group's purposes when the Frost Vark explodes up from the snowpack with zero warning, throwing Lee back mid-sentence.
- In "Axis Mundi", the very first sign of Cate's rescuer's presence in the episode's final scene in an arrow firing into the Brambleboar's eye when it's menacing Cate.
- Empty Promise:
- On G-Day Minus One, Cate told the schoolkids on her evacuating bus that it would be okay when they got stuck in the midst of the military firing on Godzilla. Moments later, all but a couple of the kids died right in front of Cate.
- Hiroshi is bitter that his parents and his uncle Lee Shaw all promised him that they would come back to him, before their respective deaths and disappearances across 1959, 1962 and 1973. Lee made it back to Hiroshi twenty years late after he was caught up in Axis Mundi, while Keiko is revealed to be alive and returns to Hiroshi decades later. Bill Randa, however, really is dead, and so can never fulfil his promise to Hiroshi.
- Energetic and Soft-Spoken Duo: Partnered Monarch operatives Tim and Duvall have this dynamic. Tim is enthusiastic, kind of silly, goofy, a little loud when he's trying to make a scene, and wants to get out of the office to a fault. Duvall is much more calm, cold, quiet, professional and pragmatic, focusing on getting the job done, and it wouldn't be too inaccurate to compare her to a Terminator with a silver tongue.
- Et Tu, Brute?:
- Neither of Hiroshi Randa's surviving children nor (one of his) widows Emiko are feeling particularly happy with him when they find out about his double family life. For Cate, this goes back even further to her father always being away throughout her life, and, most painfully of all, only contacting her to say goodbye to her the last time she saw him alive when freshly traumatized by G-Day.
- Cate, who spends the sixth episode speaking the highest of May, is furious when May confesses that she spied on her and Kentaro for Duvall.
- "Eureka!" Moment:
- In "Parallels and Interiors", Shaw realizes that the Frost Vark is attracted to the warmest sources of heat around when he sees it resurge to absorb the campfire, later expositing that it originally attacked Du-Ho's plane because it was drawn by the fire from the plane's engine.
- "Birthright" shows Bill having his realization that the Titans are able to move about the world undetected because they're using the Hollow Earth, when he sees an ant crawling through a hole in his world map in his office.
- In "Axis Mundi", Dr. Barnes has a sudden realization while examining the gamma rays emitting from the Vile Vortices; throwing up her arms and shouting "It's a signal", as she realizes the rays are actually an artificial signal which someone stranded in Hollow Earth must be broadcasting.
- Evil Wears Black: In the present, there's a lot of black and dark clothing among Monarch — whom are portrayed less positively than their other MonsterVerse appearances and function as (at best) hero antagonists for a chunk of the series — and also among Anti-Monarch, whom are well-intentioned but are risking blowing up the world with their reckless actions.
- Fatal Flaw:
- Lee Shaw's passion and impulsiveness has been a lifelong source of problems for him. It drives Young Lee to make a stupid decision when he's offered control of Monarch at the price of not getting to spend so much time with Bill and Keiko, the latter of whom he's fallen in love with. Old Lee's lingering grief and guilt over Keiko and Billy's deaths are a significant motivating factor in his present day self's mission as a Well-Intentioned Extremist to take control of the Titan situation from Monarch — that, combined with Shaw's impulsive hatred of what Monarch has become since his and his friends' days, all cause him to outright ignore a very clear warning based on clinical data that his actions if he sees them through are likely to destroy the world instead of saving it, and if it wasn't for chance and circumstances after that, Shaw probably would've succeeded in becoming a full Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds.
- Deputy Director Verdugo ends the first season as virtually a Failure Hero, because her stubborness in the face of criticism against her questionable leadership decisions which she could have taken constructively, coupled with her generally unpleasant Mean Boss tendencies, drive people including both Tim and Duvall (at separate times no less) away from Monarch and towards their rivals' sides.
- Fire-Forged Friends: At the start, biological half-siblings Cate and Kentaro reasonably aren't keen on having anything to do with each-other after they become aware of each-other's existence, and their distant shared father's deep double life is exposed — likewise, May is bitter at Kentaro and is mostly just out for herself in the long-term when she joins them. After the group endures going on the run from Monarch, trekking around the world together, and several Titan-related life-or-death situations together, they become a lot closer-knit. By the last few episodes, May is unwilling to do anything to betray the Randa siblings again, and she has some significant Ship Tease with Cate; while Cate and Kentaro have become close friends and they're comfortable referring to each-other as their respective sibling.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Old Lee Shaw, having been stuck in a Gilded Cage where Monarch keeps their retired operatives locked up for the past 33 years, isn't completely up-to-date with the modern outside world, being confounded by a keyless car. The trope becomes slightly more literal when it's revealed that Lee is so spritely for a man in his 90s is because he spent 20 years in Earth's relative time trapped inside the Axis Mundi effect with his aging slowed. And then it's revealed that Keiko has also survived all the way to 2015 through the same effect.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing:
- In "Terrifying Miracles", the presence of a thrumming gamma ray emitter in the back of Hiroshi's pickup, much like the one Dr. Suzuki uses as a Titan magnet in the same episode's earlier 1950s scenes, and Hiroshi pacing and looking around the desert anxiously; all foreshadow exactly why he's there and what he's trying to do, moments before his Oh, Crap! at the sight of his children and Lee in the area as Godzilla starts emerging.
- In "Beyond Logic", there's a reason why the Vile Vortex-monitoring facility at the end has purple light filling its hangar. It's not a Monarch facility, but an Apex Cybernetics facility.
- Flat-Earth Atheist: Some conspiracy theorists are insisting a year after G-Day that the disaster and the kaiju were all faked using CGI as part of an elaborate conspiracy to fuel the military-industrial complex. This includes a taxi driver in Tokyo, who drives by anti-Titan ballistic rocket launchers that are being installed all across his city's urban areas. Kentaro expresses incredulity to this when he's seeing the ruins of San Francisco in person and the extent of the devastation.
- Foreshadowing:
- In "The Way Out", the camera focuses on Duvall staring with narrowed eyes after Shaw's speech about how Monarch is broken and is wasting time not focusing on the Titan threat. This foreshadows her Hazy-Feel Turn over to Shaw's side in the following episode.
- Kentaro's Face–Heel Turn in Season 2 over Hiroshi's death gets some set-up:
- In "Furusato", when Hiroshi dies, Kentaro, unlike Cate and Keiko, doesn't shed a single tear — he arrives after Hiroshi has already passed, too late to say goodbye with him, and he just glares angrily at Shaw and then looks numb; foreshadowing that Kentaro is not going to cope with his grief in a healthy way.
- One episode later, Kentaro and May discuss Back to the Future at a bar, and how Kentaro did a terrible impersonation of the movie's time travel-inventing scientist, while Kentaro says he'd do anything to have Hiroshi back. Foreshadowing Kentaro's later decision to join Isabel Simmons' plot to use Axis Mundi to achieve time travel, so that he can try and prevent his father's death from ever happening.
- Futile Hand Reach:
- Cate in the first episode, when the Bus Full of Innocents falls to its doom in front of her.
- In the season finale, Keiko's arms are outstretched towards Lee as he sacrifices himself.
- Gilded Cage: It's revealed that Monarch has a "retirement home" for high-risk retired personnel. It looks on the surface like a completely mundane and comfortable retirement home, but it's dotted with veiled surveillance that monitors the residents' every step for every minute of every day, and the residents are even forced to wear electronic tracker anklets, essentially acting as a cushy badass can. In the 2015 storyline, Lee Shaw has been stuck in this retirement home for 33 years after he was forcibly retired from Monarch.
- Good Lips, Evil Jaws: Conversely to the ultimately-defensive Titans Godzilla and Kong reappearing for this series, there isn't a single hostile creature in the series who doesn't have exposed, lipless sharp teeth: the Endoswarmers and Endopede, the Ion Dragon, the Frost Vark and the Brambleboar.
- Good Versus Good: The Randas and May want to find out the truth about Hiroshi, and they perceive Monarch, whom are hunting and trying to capture them, as a sinister conspiracy, while Monarch are just trying to contain the security breach that the Randas' possession of Monarch files represents. Lee Shaw disagrees with Monarch's non-active stance on Titan events so much that he establishes a Renegade Splinter Faction with the aim of attempting to seal off Hollow Earth by force.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Monarch truly mean well, and there are lines they won't cross, but they're still portrayed in a shady light in this series: having initially continued to keep the world in the dark about their own existence despite G-Day, and overall their head honchos come across as hyper-focusing on human security breaches and controlling secrecy at the expense of being dangerously passive to the Titan threats which they're supposed to be countering, causing many of the main characters in 2015 to lose faith in Monarch if they had any to begin with. The human antagonists of a significant chunk of the 2015 storyline are a Renegade Splinter Faction formed by Lee Shaw in response to Monarch's perceived shortcomings — they never stoop so low as consciously endangering innocent human lives, but they instead resort to criminal and much more radical actions to try and head off a future Titan disaster from happening, hijacking and raiding Monarch outposts with the threat (keyword) of armed assault.
- Hair-Contrast Duo: Played With. In the 50s Monarch trio, the light-haired Lee's belligerent and weary personality contrasts the dark-haired Bill and Keiko's more personable and scientifically-awed personalities.
- Halfway Plot Switch: Twofold across both the time periods in the first season. The first six episodes are focused on (a) Monarch in the 1950s getting itself off the ground, and (b) the main characters in 2015 searching for Hiroshi Randa and Cate grappling with her PTSD. The events of Episode 6 cause the whole season's plot to switch from there to (a) Monarch facing early challenges to its survival and the lead-up to Bill Randa's tragic transformation into the old Manipulative Bastard he'll be by the 1970s, and (b) Shaw's unresolved pain over losing Keiko coming to a head while the other main characters try to stop Anti-Monarch.
- Happy Flashback: Given how angsty this show is, there are a few of these, which often morph into the Troubled Backstory Flashback. We have Old Shaw recalling the days when his two best friends were alive and they were all happy before Bill and Keiko seemingly died and before Shaw got locked in Monarch's retirement home. We have Cate recalling her seemingly happy life with her partner in San Francisco just before she was traumatized by the events of G-Day. And we have May remembering her dinner date with Brenda Holland before she discovered that the latter was a gruesome Corrupt Corporate Executive and she had to go on the run to Tokyo.
- Hates Their Parent:
- At the 2015 storyline's start, Cate Randa has... issues with her presumed-dead father for his absence and neglect, and for abandoning her and her mother when they were traumatized. Finding out about Hiroshi's other wife and her half-brother by said wife over at Hiroshi's Tokyo workplace only lowers Cate's opinion of him even further.
- Tragically, Hiroshi himself previously had the same attitude to his own father (stepfather), Bill Randa, after the latter neglected him throughout his childhood, before Hiro ended up taking after him in that respect with his own children.
- Hazmat Suit: In the first episode, Cate sees authorities dressed head-to-toe in hazmat suits spraying the interior of the plane she's on for any Titan radiation contamination. In the eighth episode, after Young Shaw comes back from the failure of Operation Hourglass, Monarch personnel in hazmat suits keep him under quarantine inside a domed tent.
- Hazy-Feel Turn:
- Duvall defects from the morally light-gray Monarch, over to the morally light but misguided and ultimately criminal Lee Shaw, persuaded by his arguments that Monarch is too passive and ineffectual to prevent more tragedies like the death of her sister and G-Day from occurring again.
- At the end of the first season, Tim follows his aforementioned partner's lead by quitting Monarch in outrage, and he joins up with the Randas looking to find another way to rescue their MIA loved ones, which leads Tim to get them into some kind of alliance with Apex Cybernetics to gain the corporation's help.
- Head-in-the-Sand Management: Discussed regarding Monarch in the 2015 plot. Old Lee Shaw is completely disillusioned with Monarch's modern iteration, feeling that they sat on their asses twiddling pencils for decades in the lead-up to G-Day despite all the resources and knowledge they had at their fingertips which could have stopped it, and he feels they still haven't changed a year after the disaster. Slowly, over the course of the first season, multiple characters come to agree with Shaw, not helped by them watching the modern Monarch deputy-directed by Verdugo seeming to constantly prioritize the Titans second and human problems first.
- Held Gaze:
- In the "Parallels and Interiors" flashback, Kentaro and May hold each-other's gazes for a few moments just before they engage their first kiss.
- In "The Way Out", Cate and her partner in the flashbacks to before G-Day share two Romantic gazes with each-other. First is in the latter character's introductory scene where she meets up with Cate outside a coffeehouse, the second is when they last see each-other just before the doomed schoolbus Cate is on departs for the Golden Gate Bridge.
- Several in "Terrifying Miracles":
- Shaw and Keiko share a Romantic gaze during their Dance of Romance at the gala.
- In the 2015 storyline, Shaw and Duvall are holding each-other's gazes squarely throughout their discussion when Duvall is cementing her Hazy-Feel Turn over to Shaw's side.
- At the climax, Godzilla's eye stares directly at Shaw, Duvall, May and the Randa half-siblings by his resting site, and Cate looks right back at him. This marks a turning point where Cate fully realizes that Godzilla is an intelligent creature rather than a pure engine of destruction, and she starts to understand what her grandmother and Lee see in him.
- In "Birthright", Shaw and Cate hold each-other's gazes when arguing.
- Such a look passes in the opening of "Axis Mundi" when a young Hiroshi in the 1960s asks Bill where Lee is about to go and Bill is unsure how to answer. Later in the same episode, Hiroshi and Lee hold each-other's gazes when they meet again in 1982.
- "Beyond Logic" has several. Tim and Verdugo glare each-other down during their falling-out. Old Shaw and Keiko hold each-other's gazes when they finally see each-other in person, before breaking down. Keiko and Hiroshi stare into each-other's faces during the Big Damn Reunion.
- "Hell, Yes!" Moment:
- Old Shaw has several during the series. He's grinning when Duvall makes a Hazy-Feel Turn and frees him from being carted off by Monarch again. He's giddy when he finds Outpost 88's explosives cache, planning to use them to destroy the Alaskan Vile Vortex, and he screams a Big "YES!" to the heavens when he succeeds. Lastly, he's pretty pleased when he and his friends reach the abandoned Hourglass pod in the Hollow Earth and discover it's still working, hoping to use it to get back to the surface.
- Several others in "Terrifying Miracles":
- Tim is laughing like a maniac and shouts "Columbo, baby!" when he realizes that he and the Monarch goons he's with have tracked Shaw and the Randas down.
- Keiko is grinning and looks on the verge of tearing up when she realizes Godzilla is alive after believing him to have been killed by an atom bomb, in contrast to Young Shaw's reaction.
- Hero Antagonist: Tim and Duvall, while well-meaning, are being aggressive towards Cate, Kentaro, and Emiko when they meet them. They're only in Japan to ask about Bill Randa's files, but their methods doesn't help their case in the slightest, and Tim gets reprimanded for it by his boss, who even pointed out he was Secretly Selfish, and should had contacted the higher-ups, such as Ishiro Serizawa, first before bullrushing to Japan to get the files.
- Heroic Lineage: The Randa half-siblings are descended from Keiko Miura and Bill Randa, the two key scientists of Monarch, and their mutual friend Lee Shaw was a US army soldier who often accompanies them.
- Heroic Neutral: The Randa half-siblings, Emiko Randa and May Olowe-Hewitt aren't out to save the world: they're at first just looking into Hiroshi's secrets because it's a very personal family matter (the Randas) and out of scientific curiosity (May). Discovering that the Randa ancestors were involved with Monarch, combined with Monarch — whom the group think are a sinister conspiracy — coming after all of them to contain the security breach and forcing them on the run, just drives the group even further down the rabbit hole.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier:
- In "Aftermath", Kentaro assumes that his American half-sister doesn't speak Japanese and insults her in his mother-tongue while she's in the room — which backfires when Cate subsequently casually reveals that she does speak Japanese. On the other hand, Kentaro's mother Emiko apparently doesn't speak English, which Cate uses to make a few rude comments in her presence without her realizing during the episode.
- Implied in May and Kentaro's first meeting when May remarks in English that the name of Kentaro's art show "sounds pretentious", before Kentaro reveals that he speaks English.
- In Episode 6, Duvall speaks at Shaw in French while pretending to be speaking over the phone, knowing from Shaw's dossier that he speaks the language, so that Duvall's Monarch co-worker won't understand what they're saying.
- Holding Hands:
- Cate and May grab and hold each-other's hands a lot as they grow close, emphasizing the Ship Tease occurring between them. The flashbacks in "The Way Out" to before G-Day also feature Cate and her then-girlfriend in San Francisco doing a lot of hand-holding.
- In the 50s segments of "Birthright", Bill and Keiko hold each-other's hands atop Bill's knee after Bill learns about her son, and when Bill confesses his feelings to Keiko, leading into them becoming married by 1959.
- In "Beyond Logic", Shaw and Keiko hold each-other's hands when they're preparing to escape the Hollow Earth. At the episode's climax, Cate grips Keiko and May's hands on either side of her as their pod is hurtling towards the Hollow Earth rift in their last-ditch effort to escape.
- Hollywood Darkness: The Alaskan highlands and the present day ruins of San Francisco are bathed in blue illumination at night, and everything is quite visible to the camera.
- Hourglass Plot: At the series' start, Cate is the Randa sibling who thinks the worst of Hiroshi's actions, and Kentaro's the one who wants to be more optimistic and defensive of their father. After the series' midway point, starting in "Will the Real May Please Stand Up?", their stances on their father have completely reversed in light of the events in Algeria.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Ultimately, the Titan who initially appeared to be Season 2's Big Bad is revealed to actually be a benevolent creature with no ill intentions, and all the conflict throughout the season is driven by humans from Apex Cybernetics and Isabel's organization trying to ruthlessly exploit or abuse Co-Cai for their own self-serving ends. The physical and mental torment which Co-Cai endures when the human antagonists torture her with neural implants and steal her beloved egg are emphasized in excruciating detail.
- Hypocrite:
- Tim is appalled in "The Way Out" that Monarch are giving the late, great Bill Randa's grandchildren and heirs worsening first impressions of the organization by locking them up, which prompts Verdugo to bitingly chide Tim that he kick-started the whole thing when he tried to kidnap a terrified Cate off the street in Tokyo.
- Verdugo herself has no problem giving her subordinates (Tim in particular) a scathing earful, but the moment Tim bites back at her with even a fraction of the same attitude, Verdugo suspends him on the spot; in "Will the Real May Please Stand Up?".
- May has some Hypocritical Humor when her sister Lyra reveals that she thinks vinyl-collecting is for losers, even though she herself otherwise has a thing for most things retraux.
- Ice Queen:
- May is the defrosting type. When the Randas first approach May with Bill Randa's files, she's very cold, aloof and reluctant to help out beyond scientific curiosity. She later gets angry and blames Kentaro for getting her involved and putting her on the run from the life she made in Tokyo. After nearly dying during the encounter with the Frost Vark and being nursed by Cate and Lee, she warms up a lot more to Cate and Kentaro. The latter initially isn't enough to stop May from agreeing to become Duvall's mole amongst the Randas in exchange for getting her life back, but she later comes clean to them out of guilt. From the seventh episode onwards, she's a lot more openly protective and affectionate towards Cate.
- Although Hiroshi loves his family, he is not very good at showing it. He's a distant workaholic who constantly puts his work ahead of having relationships with either of his children (to the point where he didn't bother staying around to comfort a traumatized Cate on G-Day when she'd just watched her beloved students die, nor did he bother to in any way inform his family that he wasn't dead for a whole year, and even when he saw his son again for the first time after that mess, pretty much the first things he did consisted of him coldly making excuses for himself and trying to persuade his son to join him). In "Axis Mundi", it's revealed that Hiroshi was responsible for throwing his Honorary Uncle Lee Shaw into his Gilded Cage in the Monarch retirement home, and he did so in a downright cruel manner. The first season finale however implies that Hiroshi is moving past this after his actions almost cost him Cate's life and a relationship with his son and did cost him his marriage to Emiko.
- If I Do Not Return:
- Hiroshi's last exchange with Cate on G-Day saw him ask her to tell Caroline that he loved them both before he left on Monarch work, and he was presumed killed in a plane crash not long after he left.
- In Episode 4, May, suffering from hypothermia while the group are stranded in the Frost Vark's subarctic territory, tries to tell Cate to contact her sister if May doesn't survive.
- Ignored Expert: In a twist of irony, Lee became this despite being part of the military, and tried to warn Monarch for years. His warnings ends up being ignored until 2014. When Duvall asks, he states "because I'm crazy".
- Internal Reveal:
- "The Way Out": Cate's mother Caroline meets Kentaro and finds out about Hiroshi's Secret Other Family.
- "Terrifying Miracles":
- In the 1950s, Shaw and Keiko discover that Godzilla survived the nuclear bomb that was believed to have killed him.
- In the 2010s, May confesses making a deal with Duvall to the Randas.
- "Birthright": General Puckett discovers from Shaw that Godzilla survived the nuclear bomb.
- "Axis Mundi": Hiroshi learns that Cate and Kentaro have spent the series looking around the world for him, and that's why he saw them in Algeria three episodes prior when Godzilla awoke.
- "Beyond Logic": Several. Keiko discovers the truth about how she's been stuck in a Year Outside, Hour Inside effect for more than half a century in Earth time, her husband Bill is long dead after having gone to a Titan Isle of Giant Horrors, Lee is still alive due to a briefer stint in the same effect as her but he's now an old man who spent decades missing her, Cate is her granddaughter, and she has another grandchild in Kentaro. Back on Earth; Tim, Kentaro and Hiroshi begin to work out that Cate, May and Lee are alive in the Hollow Earth, and they discover in the final scene that Keiko is alive and still as young as the day she disappeared.
- Interquel: The series takes place between the movies Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). It also takes place a year after Godzilla's fight with the MUTOs in San Francisco, with the year taking place in 2015. The flashback segments also take place between the 1950's to 1960's when Bill Randa is on an expedition in Kong: Skull Island. Flashbacks show Godzilla with the spinier dorsal plates of the 2014 movie, while his appearance in the present day has him with the craggier plates of the 2019 movie.
- Inter-Service Rivalry: As a US Army officer and direct subordinate to Puckett, Shaw's presence means Monarch falls under the Army's jurisdiction initially. The Navy's attempts to gain control over Monarch provide much drama in the later episodes.
- Played for laughs when an exasperated Puckett laments that Shaw couldn't have picked a Marine or sailor on an island full of them for his big bar brawl.
- I Need a Freaking Drink:
- Humorously subverted in Episode 3. When Du-Ho's plane hits a turbulent storm, Lee has Cate fish out a clear bottle which Du-Ho keeps "in case of emergencies", and he tells her to take a "big" swig out of it, telling her that she'll need it. Except it isn't alcohol, it's just water, and Lee only needed the bottle half-empty so that he can use it on the dashboard as a makeshift altitude indicator.
- Twice for May. She finds herself longing for whiskey over coffee when she's delirious with hypothermia while stranded on the Alaskan mountains. In Episode 5, her traumatic ordeal in Alaska with the Frost Vark, nearly dying of hypothermia and then being apprehended by Monarch is enough that the first thing she does at the airport when leaving is to crankily demand to be pointed to the nearest bar, then get pissy when she's told that it's closed.
- At the 1955 gala, Keiko downs a drink out of annoyance at having to attend, enduring wearing a dress and the casual racism and sexism of American officers that's standard for the time period.
- Ironic Echo:
- When Shaw expresses displeasure at General Puckett building a nuclear bomb behind his and his team's backs to kill Godzilla instead of just luring him out for study, Puckett justifies his actions by throwing back in Shaw's face the same words that Shaw originally used to convince Pucket that (scientifically) investigating Godzilla was worth redirecting 150 pounds of the country's uranium supply in the first place: Godzilla being "an existential threat to global security."
- In "The Way Out", May comforts Cate through a PTSD episode with the words, "The only way out is through". In "Terrifying Miracles", Cate bitterly throws the words back in May's face when she realizes May was spying on the rest of the group.
- It's All My Fault:
- In episode 6, May blames herself for her, Cate and Kentaro getting stranded in the Algerian Desert without Shaw's continued support or Hiroshi's map.
- The penultimate episode reveals that Young Bill blamed himself for Operation Hourglass malfunctioning, believing that it killed Shaw.
- When Kentaro believes Cate and May and Lee to be dead, he blames himself as much as Hiroshi and suffers Survivor Guilt.
- I Will Find You: When Cate and Kentaro realizes their father disappeared somewhere in Alaska, they went with Lee Shaw who could help find him. To their surprise their Disappeared Dad is still alive.
- I Will Only Slow You Down: When May is injured and hypothermic while the gang are stranded in the Frost Vark's territory, she tries to tell the others to leave her, but they're naturally not having it. In the first season's finale, Shaw sacrifices himself to get his friends out of Axis Mundi before the rift closes, because he knows his weight outside the pod will either drag Keiko out with him if she doesn't let go of him or it will drag the pod down before it reaches the rift.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Shaw is pretty abrasive with Monarch while in their custody but he does make a good point in saying that the “Let them fight” option was a dangerously risky move that could have resulted in disaster if the MUTOs had actually managed to kill Godzilla (which they did come close to if not for Ford intervening).
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
- Younger Shaw in the 50s segments is shown to be sardonic and somewhat aggressive, and he doesn't get off to a good start with Bill or Keiko in '52, plus he initially has some deliberate values dissonance when he first meets Keiko; but he's still a good and loyal man who cares a lot about his two colleagues' lives. Before meeting Keiko and Bill, Lee in '52 got into a nasty bar fight with a pair of soldiers because he was outraged that they were drunkenly sexually harassing a Filipino barmaid, describing them as "bullies" for their behavior when he's explaining himself to a superior officer.
- May is a Defrosting Ice Queen, and according to her loved ones, she generally looks down on most other people but will still help them if she sees they need it even when she has nothing to gain from her doing so. May starts out cold and self-interested towards the Randas, but the turning point where she warms up to Cate is when she tenderly helps the latter through a PTSD attack.
- Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: In the 2015 setting, Cate Randa is a traumatized ex-schoolteacher coming to grips with her experiences on G-Day and her presumed-dead father's actions, and she wears either light clothing, or clothes which mix colors (Light Feminine). Duvall is a cold, iron-hard Monarch operative dressed all in black, and she projects the air of a spook and attempts to effectively kidnap Cate (Dark Feminine).
- Little "No":
- In "Parallels and Interiors", Lee lets out a couple small, panicked "no's" when the Frost Vark is chasing Cate and May at night, and he realizes he's lost the fuse he needed to light a fire amid the creature's initial Dynamic Entry. Later, Lee lets out an even softer no when he realizes that all the data on May's laptop including the Randa files (the physical copies of which were burnt earlier) are lost, setting the cast's quest to find Hiroshi back massively.
- In "Axis Mundi", a time-displaced Young Lee mumbles one when an adult Hiroshi shows him the pocket knife that Lee gave him in 1962, confirming that the man in front of Lee is the same person as the little boy Lee thought he saw only about ten days ago.
- In the first season's finale, this is Keiko's reaction when she realizes she's been stuck in a Year Outside, Hour Inside effect all the time she's been stranded. Followed by a Rapid-Fire "No!" when she realizes Billy is long dead. Cate defiantly gives Keiko a little no when the latter intends to stay behind out of despair.
- Long-Lost Relative: Half-siblings Cate and Kentaro are mutually surprised (and hurt) that their shared father's dual families double life went this deep, remarking on how he was cucking one of their mothers massively. Cate at first wants nothing more to do with Kentaro or Emiko at the revelation, although circumstances force the half-siblings together when their paternal forefathers' secrets put them on the run from Monarch.
- The Lost Lenore: It's implied that his wife Keiko's death at the chronological end of the 50s plot contributed to the once-sweet and idealistic Bill Randa when he was younger turning into the cynical and ruthless Manipulative Bastard that he was by the time of Kong: Skull Island. Lee Shaw was also in love with Keiko before she died, and he never got over her death even into the 21st century. In a twist of irony, Bill becomes the Lost Lenore to Keiko once it's revealed during the last two episodes that she's still alive into the present day.
- Love Triangle:
- It's heavily implied that Keiko, Bill, and Shaw have this going on. While the first episode shows Keiko ending up with Bill and Hiroshi is their son, Lee himself has developed feelings for Keiko and she reciprocates on the sixth episode. However, his choice to ditch the military conference that would have secured funding for Monarch so he can keep her safe in Japan causes a rift between them, as it ends up ceding control of Monarch to the military and raising the spectre of using nukes on Titans again, and even getting Monarch shut down. Bill and Keiko grow closer after this, with Lee accepting it as stoically as he can.
- A similar situation occurs with the 2015 trio. Kentaro and May dated for an unknown length of time after May first moved to Tokyo two years earlier, but by the time Cate meets them May has become a little sour about the relationship. Then, over the course of their travels Cate and May get closer, eventually holding hands frequently and at one point Cate casually spending an entire car ride sitting in May's lap. All of this more or less right in front of Kentaro, who seems a fair bit less stoic about it than Shaw had been.
- Manly Tears: Gender-Inverted with the calm and iron Duvall when the death of her sister which motivated her to join Monarch comes up — she doesn't lose her physical composure, except for her eyes, which start tearing up at the memory of her loss. Played Straight by Hiroshi when he tears up but keeps his physical composure during the Randa family's Big Damn Reunion at the end of Season 1.
- Meaningful Name:
- Episode 2 introduces a Titan called the Ion Dragon, so-called because it's a dragon-like Giant Flyer which is recorded in local Philippine legends, and ultimately traced by Bill Randa and Lee Shaw, because of the visible trails of ionizing radiation that it leaves in the sky.
- Applied Experimental Technologies is a company conducting secret experiments with neural implant technology, the same technology which will eventually be used in Mechagodzilla, before they rebrand themselves as Apex Cybernetics.
- It certainly wasn't intentional In-Universe, but Operation Hourglass's name becomes something of foreshadowing after the unexpected end result of the project is time displacement which causes the sole survivor to skip by years' worth of outside time on Earth's surface.
- Monumental Damage: Episodes 1 and 5 have shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, still split in half from Godzilla tearing through it as he arrived.
- Mythology Gag:
- Dr. Suzuki, a scientist on Hateruma Island whose experiment ends up attracting Godzilla, references a major location from the Showa series where Godzilla and other kaiju were sometimes based, when he nicknames Hateruma as Monster Island.
- In Season 1, Godzilla emerges from the desert floor, casting sand off of himself, referencing Godzilla Vs Mothra.
- In Season 2, Kentaro has a nightmare of Godzilla and Titan X (Co-Cai) trashing Tokyo. Godzilla has never trashed Japan in the MonsterVerse continuity outside of this dream sequence, yet it references Godzilla's original stomping ground in the original movies from the 1950s.
- In Season 2, Kentaro's apartment number is 504, referencing the year in which Godzilla appeared on the big screen for the first time ever.
N-Y
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
- Young Shaw, Keiko Miura and Bill Randa, the latter two especially, are horrified when them bringing Godzilla's existence to the U.S. military's attention, and subsequently requesting 150 pounds of uranium which they intend to use to bait Godzilla out of hiding for study, leads the military to build the Castle Bravo atomic bomb in an attempt to kill Godzilla first and ask questions about him later. Subverted, as the audience knows that the bomb will at most fail to kill Godzilla or at least will end up making him even stronger with its radiation, plus General Puckett is persuaded by fear of creatures like Godzilla existing to give the fledgling Monarch a blank cheque in government funding.
- Later in the series, Young Shaw blows off an important meeting so that he can join Bill and Keiko in the field, much to Keiko's consternation. This poor decision prevents General Puckett from giving Shaw full jurisdiction over Monarch to run it as he sees fit, and instead, Puckett is forced to put Lieutenant Hatch in charge. Hatch proceeds to gut Monarch's funding and tries to get it shut down for his own ends.
- Shaw doesn't realize that his sealing off the Vile Vortices on Earth's surface in an attempt to prevent future Titan emergences is increasing the radioactive pressure on the remaining rifts, meaning that if he seals enough vortices, he'll likely at best trigger a global wave of Titan incursions from the Hollow Earth or will at worst cause an outright Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
- In Episode 8, Kentaro when conversing with Cate argues that they and May are responsible for kicking off the entire above crisis in the first place when they busted Lee Shaw out of the Monarch retirement home.
- Nice, Mean, and In-Between: The Monarch trio in the 50s plot. Bill Randa, despite what he will later become, was ironically the sweetest and friendliest member of the bunch (Nice); Lee Shaw was a sardonic and confrontational Jerk with a Heart of Gold (Mean); and Dr. Keiko was more of a people person than Lee, but more standoffish and passive-aggressive than Bill, particularly where feelings that she was being judged on her gender were concerned (Inbetween).
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
- May is ultimately revealed to be a case of this. The reason why she had to abandon her old life and identity in the States is because she discovered that a tech company she was working for was conducting barbaric experiments on chimps with experimental neural implants using her own research, and she crashed their database, which in turn meant she had to run to avoid their legal wrath.
- Emiko in the past. When she's working as a nurse at Monarch's Japanese branch in the 1980s, she alone sneaks a cookie in to a captive Lee Shaw, who (apologetically) takes the opportunity to take Emiko captive and demand an explanation for why he's being held in quarantine, where his friend is and what the hell is going on. This event was the catalyst which indirectly led to Emiko and Hiroshi falling in love, which on one hand gave Emiko her son Kentaro, but on the other hand gave her Hiroshi for a husband during the next three decades.
- Non-Malicious Monster:
- Godzilla, unsurprisingly. His emergence in the desert causes a lot of life-endangering havoc and kills numerous people due to his sheer size relative to his surroundings, but he isn't trying to hurt anyone in the slightest.
- The Ion Dragon is more aggressive than Godzilla, and confirmed to be a man-eater preying on humans, but it's still seemingly just an animal which attacks Young Shaw, Bill and Keiko because they're invading its nest, and it doesn't seem interested in antagonizing them further once it's driven them out. In Young Shaw's second encounter with the creature, it seems a lot more aggressive, attacking him and his team out of nowhere for seemingly no reason. It becomes a threat again in the final episode, but it seems more interested in the gamma-ray emitter that accidentally drew it in than hurting the humans, before turning its attention to fighting Godzilla as a threat when he arrives.
- Not So Stoic:
- For the first two episodes, May presents herself as monotonous, cold and un-emotive to everything, but after going on the run as a result of Monarch coming after her and the Randas, she snaps at Kentaro for getting her involved in this and making her a fugitive.
- Michelle Duvall is in complete control of her emotions, except when her deceased sister Sandra Brody, whose death made her join Monarch, comes up. Duvall never really loses her composure, but when it comes to her sister and her desire to make sure that Titan attacks like the one that killed her never happen again, her eyes are absolutely screaming.
- Nuke 'Em: We actually see the Castle Bravo nuclear strike on the younger Godzilla. In 1954, Godzilla arrives at the Bikini Atoll, and sees a hydrogen bomb out of curiosity before it literally blows up on his face. Anyone who knows their Godzilla would know the 15 megaton H-Bomb didn't kill him, but made him stronger.
- Oh, Crap!:
- In the 1950s trio's very first meeting, shown in episode 2, Keiko and Bill, exploring the Saharan Shipwreck, are alarmed when they see oozing slime dripping from a hatchway that hadn't been there when they entered — indicating that whatever creature made its home in the wreck has returned.
- In the 1950s story, General Puckett is terrified when he is brought to the imprint of Godzilla's footprint. When he later learns that Godzilla survived the subsequent attempt to kill him with the Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb, Puckett is horrified enough to do a U-turn on his initial intentions to shut Monarch down.
- In episode 3, Du-Ho freaks out and immediately makes a beeline back for his plane the moment he sees the Frost Vark's claw-marks in the destroyed other plane's derelict fuselage, realizing that there's a giant, plane-downing monster up on the Alaskan mountain with him.
- In episode 4, Lee panics and lets out a couple little "no's" when he realizes that he's lost the fuse he needed to trigger a fire that'll distract the Frost Vark, just after the Frost Vark has started attacking again and is chasing his allies. At the episode's end, Cate and Kentaro stare with looks on their faces that just say "we are screwed" when Tim and Duvall greet them at their aerial rescue's landing zone.
- In episode 5, James and Caroline share an anxious look when the military checkpoint guard who they usually meet (who implicitly wouldn't have bothered to check the inside of their truck) is off-duty and a stranger is filling in for him, because they know that the guard currently on-shift is liable to check the inside of their truck and see that they're illegally trying to smuggle Cate, Kentaro and May into the Forbidden Zone.
- Episode 6 has a couple:
- Past Shaw looks horrified when he and Keiko see with their own eyes that Godzilla actually survived the Castle Bravo detonation, repeatedly muttering, "We didn't kill it." Later on, Shaw, Keiko and Bill are horrified in 1955 when they come home to discover Lieutenant Hatch is now in charge of Monarch thanks to Shaw's selfish decision.
- Godzilla's presence in the episode's 2015 scenes trigger a cascade of "oh crap"'s. Hiroshi realizes that his children and Lee are in the area moments before his gamma-ray emitter awakens Godzilla and he frantically waves at them to get away. Shaw twigs that something is wrong and realizes Hiroshi has been using the gamma-ray emitter to summon a Titan at their location, just before Godzilla stirs under Lee's and his friends' feet. And when Godzilla rises, Tim, in a nearby helicopter, can only frantically yell at the pilot to get them clear before Godzilla's dorsal spines collide with the chopper.
- "Axis Mundi" has a couple:
- Billy begins freaking out a little ahead of everyone else when Operation Hourglass starts to malfunction, turning into an ultra-magnetic and destruction suction.
- May freaks out the moment it hits her that Cate followed her back into the power plant during the previous episode, and has therefore fallen into Axis Mundi with her and Lee.
- In the season finale, Shaw attempts to lure a Titan from Earth's surface to Axis Mundi with the gamma-ray emitter in order to activate the rift that'll let him and his friends escape, only to groan an "oh, shit" when he sees that the emitter has instead drawn the attention of the Ion Dagon that was already inside Axis Mundi.
- Older Than They Look: It's noted several times in-universe that Lee Shaw looks younger than his age of 93 (actor Kurt Russel is only 72), with Tim mentioning rumors that a classified past mission has something to do with it. Turns out that in a mission to the Hollow Earth gone wrong, Shaw was missing for twenty years and returned having not aged a fortnight due to the nature of the Hollow Earth. It's also revealed in the last two episodes that the same phenomenon has enabled Keiko, chronologically close to a hundred years old by 2015, to remain alive without having aged herself.
- Once a Season:
- Dr. Suzuki shows up for the first time per season in the sixth episode, in a plot-relevant way.
- May gets kidnapped by two men in black in the beginning of both seasons' seventh episodes.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted by a few characters. Tim and Dr. Barnes both share their respective given names with two characters — coincidentally also Monarch operatives — in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019).
- Oppose What You Suffered:
- Duvall notes that some of Monarch's staff including herself joined the organization because they lost loved ones to the Titans and thought Monarch was going to stop it from happening ever again. Duvall herself and several others make a Hazy-Feel Turn over to Shaw's Anti-Monarch faction because they're disillusioned by seeing how passive, reactionary and non-proactive Monarch really is.
- In "Beyond Logic", Hiroshi encourages Kentaro to take this path in the fallout of Cate's seeming death, trying to use it to convince Kentaro to help him prove the Hollow Earth is real, but a crushed Kentaro is having none of it.
- Origins Episode: The 50s storyline describes Monarch's early history, and Lee Shaw and Bill Randa's introductions to the organization and Titans, in detail.
- Parental Neglect: To say that Hiroshi wasn't the most present and attentive father to his two children is an understatement. Tragically, this is a chain of harm in the Randa family, as Bill Randa himself was extremely neglectful and inattentive to Hiroshi as he was growing up, a fact which Bill was well-aware of and quite sorrowful about in his final days.
- Pillar of Light: The Vile Vortex in Alaska produces a rainbow-coloured skyway beam of light, which is distantly sighted by Lee Shaw, May and the Randa half-siblings after their landing.
- Planimal: The bamboo-spider Mother Longlegs of Skull Island returns in the series' Distant Prologue, chasing Bill Randa. In the first season's penultimate episode, Cate has a frightful encounter with a "Bramble-boar" which nearly gores her.
- Please, Don't Leave Me:
- In the fourth episode, a hallucinating Kentaro begs his missing father not to leave him behind.
- In "Axis Mundi", Lee all but begs Hiroshi to work together with him to work things out instead of letting Monarch cart Lee off to isolation in the retirement home indefinitely.
- Plot Armor: The main and supporting characters in the 2015 story survive violent disasters and Titan encounters which kill any and all red shirts and mooks surrounding them. Probably the most egregious example is Godzilla's emergence in Algeria, which kills the main cast's and Duvall's unnamed ex-Monarch escorts but leaves the prominent characters unharmed, and which leaves Tim the sole survivor of a helicopter crash which kills a group of armed and trained Monarch personnel.
- Plot Parallel: The 50s Monarch trio's story chronologically has an analogous beginning and progression to that of the 2015 main cast, wherein a group of three young people who at first want little to do with each-other and don't get along grow closer, travel around the world looking for Titan-related subjects, and implicitly end up forming a love triangle. Both plotlines also end with the group getting forcibly divided when some of them (including Lee in both plotlines) are sucked alive into Axis Mundi, and those left behind are left thinking they've died.
- Plucky Comic Relief:
- Tim is a source of humor for most of the series with his goofy and nerdy personality, his initial buffoonish antics, and his run of bad luck which gets him into a car crash, a helicopter crash, and being the "me" in a Not Me This Time directly after he's had a miles-long hike across the Algerian Desert without water or protective clothing. Towards the end of the first season, however, Tim becomes a more serious character Played for Drama as the stakes ramp up.
- Downplayed with Young Bill. He is Played for Drama as the future husband of Keiko who watches her apparently die, and as the man who is destined to one day become the cynical old Manipulative Bastard we saw him as in Kong: Skull Island and in the TV series' very first scene, but Young Bill before Keiko's death is the most goofy, nerdy and silly member of the Monarch trio formed by him, Keiko and Shaw.
- Pointy-Haired Boss:
- Shaw blatantly considers Monarch's Deputy Director Verdugo to be one, and he's not wrong that she's part of Monarch's condemned tendency to focus more on human problems than on pre-emptively preparing the world for future Titan problems, even in the wake of the devastation wrought during G-Day. At the end of the series, Tim comes around to Shaw's view, and he tells Verdugo to her face that Shaw was right about her.
- Downplayed in "Will the Real May Please Stand Up?". Brenda Holland quips that she feels she's holding her superior's Walter Simmons' hand during the AET company's rebranding to Apex Cybernetics.
- Pride:
- General Puckett. Not only is he certain that an atomic bomb can and will obliterate Godzilla (which is a lot more justifiable in his case than it was in Stenz', since in his time it's never been attempted on a Titan before); but his reaction to Godzilla's seeming death in the blast is to grin and shout to his men, "Magnificent!", clearly taking pride in the destructive power of man trumping nature's perceived horrors. Of course, the audience is fully aware that his attempt on Godzilla's life has completely failed to kill him, and if anything it's probably made him even stronger in the long run.
- Like many of the MonsterVerse's other human antagonists, Anti-Monarch led by Shaw make the deadly mistake of assuming nature will do just what they want it to if they try to force it with their plan to seal all the gateways to the Hollow Earth on the planet. They think they're saving the world from future hostile Titan incursions, unaware that each vortex they shut proportionately increases pressure on the remaining rifts, and could potentially explode the planet's crust if they seal too many vortexes.
- Apex Cybernetics, as per their chronologically-later appearance in Godzilla vs. Kong, are led by visionary villains wanting to replicate Godzilla's nervous system so they can create their own purely-mechanical Titan in the Titans' image and change the world on their own terms. The somewhat ham-fisted methodology of The Men in Black that they send after May even hints at Apex's Powerful, but Incompetent methodology which secures their future downfall.
- The Promise: Apparently, Lee, Keiko and Bill all promised Hiroshi when he was a child that they would come back for him... before the Endoswarmers got Keiko one day, before Bill became neglectful towards Hiroshi and died on Skull Island, and before Shaw himself disappeared for 20 years due to Axis Mundi. Shaw, and eventually Keiko, both technically keep their promises to Hiroshi, they're just a matter of decades late due to Axis Mundi's effects on them, but Bill, being dead for real, can never fulfil his promise now.
- Purple Is Powerful: Apex Cybernetics, as per Godzilla vs. Kong, are a powerful, sinister and ambitious corporate entity with a fetish for the color purple, from their executive Brenda Holland's attire in episode 7 to their hangar's lighting in episode 10, both of which serve as visual foreshadowing before the corporation's presence in the scene is revealed to the audience. Axis Mundi, a new realm of the Hollow Earth where intense gravitational distortion warps spacetime to the point of creating a Year Outside, Hour Inside effect, has a bright-violet Alien Sky and purple, alien giant bugs.
- Rage Breaking Point:
- As soft and sweet as Tim seems underneath his less-than-stellar initial efforts to look tough, his patience has limits, and when it reaches its end, the shock of his resulting outbursts tend to be enough to shut up everyone interacting with him. He snaps at Cate, May and Kentaro after they give him one too many barbs despite his vouching for them, giving them a blistering dressing-down that cows them... except he planned and rehearsed his entire outburst with Duvall in advance. He later loses it, quite understandably, when he's just been in a Godzilla-caused helicopter crash in the Sahara which left him the sole survivor, hiked across miles of desert without any protection from the sun nor any water, and the first human contact he has when he gets back to civilization, before he's even had the chance to grab any water, is the Randa half-siblings getting pissed at him again, this time for something he didn't do. Finally, in the first season finale, Tim furiously snaps at Verdugo and stuns several of their onlooking co-workers over Verdugo's refusal to respond to the distress call even on the chance it could help Monarch and the world massively, and it's at this point that Tim is ready to tell Verdugo "Take This Job and Shove It".
- In "Axis Mundi", Kentaro, incorrectly believing his friends are dead, tries to keep his anger in check until Emiko's doting gives him an outlet and he snaps at her.
- Ragnarök-Proofing: Bill Randa's rucksack and the Monarch files inside them (which were built in the 70s) were lost at sea for precisely four decades, and after they're dredged up in 2013 and brought to the Randa half-siblings' attention in 2015, not only are the casings still intact and the files still wholly readable to a computer, but the only real damage the rucksack has sustained from all that time in seawater is that it permanently "smells like fish", with even the Monarch logo emblazoned on the rucksack still clearly visible and undamaged.
- Rapid-Fire "No!": Lee lets out a frantic string of no's when he sees the Frost Vark has destroyed the laptop which had Bill Randa's files preserved on it. In the season finale, Keiko is reduced to a Madness Mantra of no's by the overwhelming realization of her situation.
- Reasonable Authority Figure:
- General Puckett hears Monarch out, but he doesn't just follow their lead blindly. When he first finds out about Godzilla's existence, he's understandably horrified that such a thing exists and could encroach on the U.S. at any time, and he heeds the young Monarch's request for uranium to lure Godzilla out for study... Albeit by pouring all the uranium into trying to build a Godzilla-killing bomb behind Monarch's backs instead of simply drawing Godzilla into the open. Despite Monarch's dismay with Puckett's attempt to kill Godzilla, Puckett still gives them a blank check in government funding to find any other Titans that could threaten humanity. In 1955, Puckett is personally rooting for Lee Shaw to be put in charge of Monarch, but after Shaw doesn't heed Puckett's personal warning against making a Passed-Over Promotion, Puckett reluctantly puts Lieutenant Hatch in charge of Monarch instead. Puckett is initially furious when he thinks Monarch has been wasting government resources, but once Shaw informs him that Godzilla survived being nuked at Bikini Atoll, Puckett makes a U-turn and resumes supporting Monarch's cause. When Monarch's funding is cut in 1962, Puckett is clearly dismayed by the news, but rejects Bill's suggestions of taking extreme measures to show the government that it's a mistake because it could spiral out of control.
- In the eighth episode, Verdugo is a lot more willing to hear the Randas out and defer to them in this episode than she spends most of the rest of the show being.
- Red Shirt:
- Lee's friend Du-Ho joins the team in "Secrets and Lies" and dies in the episode's cliffhanger ending to introduce the Frost Vark.
- In "Terrifying Miracles", the speechless ex-Monarch friend of Lee's who's helping the main heroes ends up going the same way as Du-Ho did when Godzilla awakens, as do all the Monarch mooks aboard Tim's chopper.
- Renegade Splinter Faction: In 2015, Shaw and Duvall organize a group of likeminded Monarch operatives into going rogue against what they see as the organization's Head-in-the-Sand Management, taking the proactive step of bombing the portals to Hollow Earth in order to keep any more Titans from emerging, but ignoring the fact that doing so risks provoking another attack regardless.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated:
- Hiroshi is presumed dead after his plane vanished in a storm over Alaska and no wreckage was ever found, a year before the main 2015 time frame. In Episode 6, the main cast conclusively discover that Hiroshi has been alive the whole time since his plane vanished, tracking Hollow Earth portals around the world.
- Per previously-established MonsterVerse canon, Godzilla is presumed in Dramatic Irony by the U.S. military and Monarch to have been killed after they detonate a nuclear bomb in his face at Bikini Atoll and he doesn't reappear. It isn't until 1955 that Shaw and Keiko find out that Godzilla survived the blast none worse for wear when they see him with their own eyes.
- It's revealed that Lee Shaw was at one point presumed dead after he disappeared into a violently-collapsing Vile Vortex, without a trace of him to be recovered. Except Lee survived the passage into the Hollow Earth's Axis Mundi, and thanks to the time dilation effect, he hadn't aged a fortnight when he returned to Earth's surface.
- Cate, May and Lee are all presumed dead by Kentaro, Tim and Monarch after they've fallen into the collapsing Vile Vortex in Kazakhstan, initially unaware that the trio have passed into the Axis Mundi in one piece.
- Keiko is revealed at the series' end to have similarly passed into the Axis Mundi and been alive down there the entire time after falling to her presumed death in 1959.
- Rescue Romance: It's implied that Bill Randa first started falling in love with Keiko when she saved his life from the Ion Dragon during their first meeting in 1952. Episode 9 reveals that Kentaro's parents Emiko and Hiroshi first met and started falling in love when Emiko was being held hostage by a distressed Lee Shaw in 1982, and Hiroshi helped to defuse the situation.
- Rewatch Bonus:
- Watching the first episode after seeing the rest of the first season makes it much easier to see that Keiko Randa's death is surprisingly bloodless.
- Look carefully at the name "Applied Experimental Tech". You'll probably realize on a rewatch that the first two letters of "Applied" and "Experimental" respectively spell "Apex", as in Apex Cybernetics.
- Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Gender-Inverted by Monarch operative duo Tim and Duvall. Tim is an eccentric, socially-awkward passionate and impulsive but big-hearted man, who goes cowboying to Tokyo without authorization at the series' start, and quits Monarch in angry protest over Verdugo's leadership at the series' end. Michelle Duvall is a cold, calculating, quieter professional Monarch spook, who saves Tim from facing worse repercussions for his cowboying via smooth talking and cunning, is much more analytical when she deduces May is using a fake identity, but Duvall is just ruthless enough to side with Lee Shaw's faction in essentially committing terrorism against Monarch when persuaded that they can save more people.
- Scientist vs. Soldier: In the 1950s storyline, the Monarch scientists (Keiko and Bill) tend to be more wide-eyed and idealistic than the military (Shaw, Puckett and Hatch), especially when it comes to the Titans. When Godzilla's existence is first discovered in 1954, the military is horrified and, instead of simply trying to lure Godzilla out for study as Monarch requested, they try to kill Godzilla with the Castle Bravo bomb, despite Bill being disgusted and despite Keiko being so distressed that she tries unsuccessfully to sabotage the detonation. Young Shaw, being a military man who's inside Monarch, is much more on the fence about Godzilla and the Titans, but he gives his colleagues the benefit of the doubt. Lieutenant Hatch is dismissive of the threat that Titans pose because he, having never seen one and unaware of Godzilla's survival, thinks his "great nation" can just nuke them all to kingdom come if any more do turn up. Later, the Internal Reveal of Godzilla's survival is precisely what persuades General Puckett to renew government support for Monarch and implicitly throw Hatch out of the organization on his face, because he's that terrified of the threat Titans can pose to humanity, although he reasonably never tries killing a Titan with a WMD again after the military's first attempt fails.
- Secret Other Family: The story in 2015 is kicked off when Cate travels to Tokyo to her late father's Japanese apartment, only to discover he was cheating on her mother and had another wife and a son close to Cate's age in Japan, who were equally clueless to his trans-Pacific double life.
- Series Continuity Error:
- Season 1, Episode 3 establishes several towards Godzilla (2014):
- A mild one: Dr. Graham's wording back in the 2014 movie indicated that most if not all of the atomic bomb tests in the early 1950s were geared towards trying to kill Godzilla. This episode, however, implies that the iconic Bikini Atoll test in 1954 was the first if not sole attempt geared towards ending a Titan's life.
- Graham also notes that the military first became aware of Godzilla thanks to an incident with a nuclear submarine. Here, no mention of this is made, and the first evidence discovered of his existence is a footprint.
- Another mild example, the scene where the military attempts to blow up Godzilla differs from the opening of the 2014 movie, which showed the bomb going off just as Godzilla is rising out of the water while in the episode Godzilla rises fully out of the water and has time to roar and curiously observe the bomb before it detonates.
- Season 2, Episode 3 shows that by 2017, San Francisco has been almost fully rebuilt from the 2014 movie's events, except for a walled-off inner cordon of the city which remains abandoned and overgrown with vegetation — the Golden Gate Bridge which Godzilla broke is notably not in this cordoned-off section, and is in the middle of being rebuilt. This seems to contradict Emma Russell's footage of San Francisco's abandoned state in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), where the Golden Gate bridge is visibly still broken while San Francisco has been overrun by much more vegetation than had grown over the city inside a year back during Season 1 — it's doubtful that the growth rate could have dramatically increased in-between 2015 and 2017 before most of the city ruins were retaken and rebuilt.
- In Season 1, it's stated that young Shaw emerged from Axis Mundi in Higashiizumo — but in Season 2, Shaw says that he emerged at Mount Osore and tracks the rift he came out of there, even though Osore is hundreds of miles away from the Higashiizumo site.
- Later in Season 2, young Shaw after losing the rest of his team in Axis Mundi reacts with confusion and no sense of danger to seeing the static build-up on Axis Mundi's ground which indicates a lightning discharge is about to occur. This is despite that Season 1 established that one of these lightning strikes already killed one of his lost teammates in front of the others.
- Season 1, Episode 3 establishes several towards Godzilla (2014):
- Shared Family Quirks:
- The Randa family contains several. Shaw remarks that Kentaro and Cate are like their dad Hiroshi and Hiroshi's mother Keiko, whom were both impeccable in their pursuits. A version that's Played for Laughs is when Kentaro protests letting Shaw drive, and Shaw responds with "God, you are your father's son". Shaw also observes that Cate has Keiko's gutsiness. It turns out that Hiroshi picked up his habit of sharpening his pencils down to stubs with a knife and keeping the shavings around from his father (actually his stepfather), Bill. For a less pleasant shared family quirk, it turns out that Cate and her father both committed infidelity on their loving partners before Cate had any idea about her father's brand.
- According to General Puckett, Shaw's alcoholic father used to get into fights much like him when they were young.
- May's sister Lyra says in episode 7 that her tendency to think most people are idiots but help them when they need her is a family trait.
- Ship Tease: Two of the main characters, Cate and May, get increasingly tender, touchy-feely and protective of each-other as the series goes on, particularly after episode 4, which even Kentaro seems to silently take notice of in episode 7.
- Shout-Out:
- The scene of the bat-fish Titan flying over the trees, as seen from below through a gap in the canopy, is heavily reminiscent of the Gyaos’s reveal in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe.
- "Secrets and Lies" has one to We Need to Talk About Kevin, when Shaw jokingly reassures Kentaro that there was no Troubling Unchildlike Behavior to indicate Hiroshi was a budding monster when Shaw watched him growing up, listing things that the titular child sociopath of the movie did: "He didn't torture small animals, no issues potty training."
- "No Way Out" dubs the day before G-Day "G-Day Minus One".
- Sibling Team: Cate and Kentaro are half-siblings who band together to find out their father's secret history with Monarch.
- Single Tear: Young Shaw sheds a single tear in "Axis Mundi" when he's recounting the deaths of his teammates in Operation Hourglass. In "Beyond Logic", Cate sheds a single tear when she's introducing herself to a still-alive Keiko.
- Slimeball:
- In the 1950s storyline, Lieutenant Hatch is a smug bigot who oozes condescension, he quite crudely insults the female Japanese doctor Keiko to her face, and upon being granted control of Project Monarch by General Puckett, he actively tries to sabotage the organization and get it shut down with a negatively-biased and damning report to Puckett so that he can repurpose its funding toward his own Red Scare tactics. His attitude and behavior leads to the Monarch trio not telling him anything of value and ultimately leads to Shaw pulling out all stops to get him ousted.
- In the 2015 storyline, Brenda Holland is a Rare Female Example. She's a corrupt corporate executive in Walter Simmons' employ, who sounds like she's talking down at you even when she's pretending to be your friend, she's smug, and she spends her entire debut attempting to manipulate others to her company's benefit.
- Small Role, Big Impact:
- Godzilla has less than ten minutes of screentime between the past and present, but Lee uses his surviving the nuke to regain a semblance of control over Monarch in the past, Cate's severe PTSD and Monarch's/Shaw's fear of another monster attack and their varied responses to it all stem from his actions in the 2014 film, and his arrival in Axis Mundi is what allows Cate,May and Keiko to get back to our world.
- Dr. Suzuki only has a couple minor appearances, but: he's indirectly responsible for Monarch and the U.S. government realizing that Godzilla survived the Castle Bravo detonation, which in turn is the reason why Monarch survives to the 21st century instead of being shut down in the mid-1950s. In his second appearance, he's responsible for discovering the Vile Vortex which Operation Hourglass uses, indirectly setting off the entire plot of Kong: Skull Island after the project malfunctions, as well as setting off Lee's entire major role in the 2015 storyline of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters after the malfunction gets Lee trapped in Axis Mundi's Year Outside, Hour Inside effect for 20 Earth years.
- Lieutenant Hatch's attempts to shut Monarch down in the 50s indirectly trigger Bill Randa's realization that the Titans get around via Hollow Earth as well as his belief that proving it is the key to keeping Monarch afloat, triggering all the events of Kong: Skull Island and their impact on the wider MonsterVerse timeline.
- Snow Means Death: Hiroshi Randa is presumed dead after his plane crashed in the Alaskan mountains between Barrow and Nome, although it's ultimately revealed that he survived the crash. When the main cast of the 2015 storyline find the crash site high in the snow-capped mountains, they're attacked by the local Frost Vark, which proceeds to kill Du-Ho.
- Sole Survivor: One has to wonder if Ford Brody somehow dispersed his own penchant for it into the setting. Aside from Bill Randa's established backstory from Kong: Skull Island as the sole survivor of the USS Lawton's destruction by a Titan; Tim of all people is the only survivor when a helicopter holding him and a team of Monarch mooks violently crashes due to Godzilla, and Lee Shaw in the past was the only survivor of the Operation Hourglass team who made it back out of Axis Mundi alive.
- So Proud of You:
- In Episode 4, a hypothermic Kentaro hallucinates his father telling him he's proud of him.
- Puckett, who is implied to be something of a father figure to Shaw in the past storyline, expresses pride in him when he's running Monarch in 1955, and when he's about to lead the first manned expedition into Hollow Earth in the 1960s. The latter is implied to be the last time they ever see each-other due to Shaw's entrapment in Axis Mundi.
- Spotting the Thread:
- Duvall appears to be a Monarch-trained professional at this. In Episode 5, Duvall can tell from the manner in which May previously swept her Tokyo apartment before going on the run that it's not the first time May has had to disappear and that she's good at it.
- In Episode 5, after it turns out that the canvas in Hiroshi's San Francisco office isn't a concealing canvas hiding a wall safe like the one at his Tokyo office was, Cate notices that the squiggly lines on the canvas itself are similar to lines that she previously saw Hiroshi mapping, and she realizes that the canvas itself is holding his secret data in this case.
- In Episode 6, although May, the Randas and the canvas are long gone by the time Tim and Verdugo have followed their trail to the office, Tim is still able to piece together almost exactly what it is they took by how Hiroshi's chair in the office is facing away from the view of the city skyline, towards a now-blank stretch of wall where there are several tac-holes that once held up a canvas on the wall and which also correspond to the locations of Monarch interest on a world map. Even Verdugo is impressed enough to give Tim a very small praise.
- Stepford Smiler: Du-Ho and Caroline Randa both put on cheery and upbeat exteriors for others, and while Du-Ho is a lot more refined and accomplished at it than Caroline, it's eventually made clear with both of them that they're hiding a lot of old pain underneath it: watching many people including his own father and multiple loves die for Du-Ho, the trauma of G-Day and watching her own daughter waste away for a year (and later finding out about her presumed-dead husband's Secret Other Family) for Caroline.
- Stock Footage: Footage from Godzilla (2014) is reused for a couple shots of Cate's flashbacks to the Golden Gate Bridge disaster, and also for circulating videos of Godzilla and Hokmuto's encounter at Hawaii.
- A Storm Is Coming: In the 2015 story, Old Shaw is fully convinced that a second Titan emergence on par with G-Day is coming, and that Monarch aren't going to do anything about it. Others including Duvall come to agree with him, and the audience knows from the events of MonsterVerse movies set later on the timeline like Godzilla: King of the Monsters that Shaw is very right about how an even worse Titan emergence is on the horizon.
- Swirly Energy Thingy: The pillar-shaped portals out of Axis Mundi form swirling vortexes on their surface when something is about to be sucked into them, at which point they're teleported back to Earth's surface through the ground.
- Take My Hand!:
- In the series premiere, Shaw in 1959 tries to take Keiko's hand and pull her to safety when she's hanging by a tether over an underground pit with a human ladder of Endoswarmers crawling towards her. Keiko falls before she can reach his hand and apparently dies, haunting Shaw for decades.
- His Story Repeats Itself when Cate nearly falls in the exact same spot as her grandmother in 2015, and Shaw manages to grab her hand just in time where he failed to grab Keiko's.
- Then in the season finale, Shaw and Keiko's roles are reversed in the Hollow Earth when Keiko reaches out to take Shaw's hand as the pod she's in is being pulled towards the exit back to Earth. Shaw manages to take her hand, but he deliberately pries his hand loose in a Heroic Sacrifice when he realizes his weight will stop the pod making it out of the Hollow Earth.
- Take That!: The show really has it out for conspiracists who deny when a disaster happens and think everything is a hoax created by governments and secret societies for profit and to brainwash the people.
- In the first episode, Cate Randa meets a Japanese taxi driver who thinks that the battle of San Francisco is a hoax created with CGI by the American government for profit, which makes Cate roll her eyes, given that she saw everything with her own eyes.
- In episode 5, Kentaro sees the ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time and comments how can anyone deny what happened in San Francisco. Cate responds that those people often suffer from Selective Obliviousness because it's easier to deny they could be next one day. Cate herself originally dismissed recorded footage of the battle of Honolulu as made up with CGI before the San Francisco attack, since it's such an outlandish occurrence at that point in the story, until it becomes clear to her that the authorities do believe it's real.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
- Although Monarch in the 1950s works with General Puckett, Keiko personally despises the man. This sentiment seems to be mostly one-sided.
- Starting in Episode 7, the main characters in 2015 call a truce with Tim so they can find out who kidnapped May, although Cate and Kentaro make it clear at first that they still don't trust him after their less-than-stellar first encounters with him and with Monarch.
- That's No Moon:
- The Mantleclaw in the series opening appears to be part of the trope specialist Skull Island's rocky shoreline, until it stirs in response to the Mother Longlegs' entrance chasing Bill Randa.
- In "Terrifying Miracles", the main characters, and a nearby Monarch helicopter, all discover the hard way when Godzilla wakes up and starts moving that the small mountain range the main characters were standing on is actually Godzilla's half-buried, rock- and dust-encrusted back including his dorsal spines after he burrowed into the ground to hibernate.
- This Cannot Be!:
- One of the Monarch officials at Verdugo's briefing in episode 4 exclaims it's impossible when Verdugo reveals that a gamma signature matching that from the G-Day Titan emergences has been detected in Alaska.
- Hiroshi's first reaction when told Cate is (supposedly) dead is denial, before the words sink in.
- When Tim alerts Hiroshi that there's a coded message in the gamma ray emissions from Hollow Earth, Hiro, understandably unwilling to get his hopes up only to have them crushed when told based on flimsy evidence that his daughter might still be alive, tells Tim it's impossible.
- This Is Gonna Suck:
- When asked how high up Hiroshi's old American office which the crew need to get to, inside a high-rise building is, Cate replies, "Dad loved a view."
- May's response to being cornered by The Men in Black in a restroom after the Randas have seemingly turned their backs on her is to ask them with bitter blitheness what she can expect being kidnapped to be like.
- Tick Tock Tune: There is an ominous ticking underlying the score for the trailer.
-
Time-Shifted Actor: Lee Shaw is played by Kurt Russell in the modern day — in flashbacks, he is played by Kurt's real son Wyatt Russell. Likewise, John Goodman returns to the role of Bill Randa in the 1973 opening, while Anders Holm plays a younger and more idealistic Bill Randa in the 50s storyline. Unlike the other two, Mari Yamamoto gets to play Keiko in both. - Time Skip: Due to the time-warping effects of the Axis Mundi, when Cate, May, and Keiko manage to escape back to the surface in the last episode, they discover that two years have passed, even though they were only there for a few hours.
- Too Dumb to Live: You'd think that after all their experiences, Keiko and Bill would know better than to approach a nest of monsters especially after an earthquake just destabilized the ground they were on.
- Tracking Device: May unlocking Bill Randa's old tape files via her computer causes markers in the file to ping the present day Monarch via the internet, remotely alerting Tim to the data breach and its location. At the Monarch retirement home where the 2015 cast find Old Shaw, him and the other residents are forced to wear electronic anklets which keep track of them at all times.
- Tranquil Fury:
- Kentaro's mother Emiko doesn't seem angry about finding out about her husband's considerable secrets at first, until Kentaro prods, at which point she starts tearing up family photos featuring Hiroshi and calmly asks Kentaro if this is what he wants to be seeing her doing, showing that she's not taking it well at all. After Emiko and Hiroshi finally reunite, she, at the end of it, acknowledges that their son deserves a relationship with his father whatever the latter's faults... before she instructs him to tell Kentaro, and only Kentaro, where he's staying once he finds a new residence, Returning the Wedding Ring while she says it.
- Deputy Director Verdugo almost never raises her voice above a whisper nor does she physically lash out, even when she's simmering with anger (which is very often), such as when she realizes Tim has triggered a citywide Titan evacuation drill as a fire alarm distraction, or when Tim tells her to her face that she's lived down to everything Shaw said Monarch was.
- Brenda Holland barely raises her voice and doesn't lose her composure at all even when she's pissed. The text message she sends May in the latter's Troubled Backstory Flashback after realizing she's responsible for destroying the Cybernetic Neuro-Interface Unit data simply says "I know this was you", full-stop.
- General Puckett in "Birthright". He doesn't raise his voice in the slightest, but it's clear by his tone and word-choice that he's disappointed by Shaw flaking on that meeting about his promotion, and he's pissed after he took Lieutenant Hatch's damning report on Project Monarch at face value. That changes once Shaw tells him that Godzilla is alive and convinces him that Hatch is responsible for keeping this secret.
- Trauma Conga Line:
- Cate had a very bad couple of days during G-Day. Her relationship with her loving girlfriend ended amid the panic and chaos of the attack (though by Cate's own admission, that was her own fault); she was at ground zero when Godzilla's clash with the U.S. military destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge, which also caused all but two of her beloved school students whose safety she was charged with to fall screaming to their deaths right in front of her; and the following morning, Cate's distant and estranged father approached her at the refugee camp for no other reason than to hand her tickets that would get her and her mother out of the quarantine zone, before he left her there, and that was the last time Cate saw Hiroshi before he was reported killed in a plane crash.
- Cate's grandmother Keiko too. She spends two months from her perspective trapped, alone and fighting for survival in the Hollow Earth against the local wildlife, waiting for rescue. When more humans finally come, Keiko discovers that half a century has passed her by on Earth's surface due to the Year Outside, Hour Inside effect she didn't know about, her husband is long dead, Lee is an old man, and her son has grown up without her and is physically older than she is, and then Lee sacrifices his life in front of her; all in the span of less than 48 hours. Ouch.
- Troubled Backstory Flashback:
- Over the course of the series, Cate has several flashbacks to G-Day Minus One, G-Day, and the events leading up to them which establish the several sources of her present day attitude and PTSD. Most of these flashbacks occur when Cate is having a PTSD episode.
- May's grim backstory with AET which led her to running away from her family to Tokyo is revealed in a series of flashbacks over the course of "Will the Real May Please Stand Up?".
- Old Shaw has one in "Birthright". When asked what he expects to find in the abandoned Kazakh plant, Shaw flashes back to Keiko's fall in 1959.
- Two Guys and a Girl: Lee Shaw, Bill Randa and Keiko in the 50s flashbacks.
- Uncertain Doom:
- It's unknown if either the Mantleclaw or the Mother Longlegs survive their battle in the distant prologue after they fall into the ocean together and neither creature resurfaces.
- It's unclear if the Frost Vark survives being violently hurled high through the air (bear in mind that this creature is neither small nor light) and sucked into the collapsing Vile Vortex. Then again, tiny, squishy humans survived passing through the same kind of Vortices.
- The season finale has two.
- Godzilla rips off the Ion Dragon's tail spikes, and moreso he rips its entire wing and arm off before throwing it into the Axis Mundi rift. It's unknown whether or not the Ion Dragon would survive such a grievous injury after being teleported away by the rift.
- Shaw apparently commits a Heroic Sacrifice in Axis Mundi, by prying his hand out of Keiko's and falling behind the Hourglass pod as the rift sucks the pod in. Shaw's death after falling behind is uncomfirmed. On one hand, everyone who's fallen into the Vile Vortices to Axis Mundi, Old Shaw included, has by default survived a greater fall unscathed; on the other hand, the terrain surrounding Shaw and the pod is being violently ripped apart by the activated rift's powerful suction.
- The Unmasqued World: In the 2015 time frame, the world is naturally aware of the existence of Godzilla and the MUTOs that he fought after the events of Godzilla (2014), with Tokyo paying to have anti-Godzilla rocket launchers mounted across their infrastructure, with a Titan cellphone warning system being implemented in Japan and the U.S., and with the ruins of San Francisco remaining cordoned off by the military and left derelict. However, Monarch remains unknown to the public until 2/3 through the series.
- Urban Ruins: San Francisco is shown during and after Godzilla's battle with the MUTOs, having been deemed a quarantine zone thanks to the vast structural damage leaving it unsuitable for human habitation, and soldiers roaming through what's left to prevent looting.
- Villainous Rescue: Played With when the Randas, May and Lee are rescued from the Frost Vark by Monarch, who the former three still don't see as the good guys at all; and when Apex Cybernetics are revealed to be Kentaro, Hiroshi and Tim's new backers who've picked up Cate, May and Keiko after their escape from Hollow Earth.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Anti-Monarch faction are attacking and raiding Monarch's outposts and stealing their ammunitions — albeit without fatalities — because they're trying to stop any more Titan incursions on Earth's surface from claiming human lives by using the explosives to seal every known portal to the Hollow Earth. Unbeknownst to them, it turns out that their actions are causing the pressure underneath Earth's surface to build up with each portal they close since the gamma radiation has fewer outlets with each destroyed portal, and the likely end result if they seal one portal too many will be an Earth-Shattering Kaboom for the surface.
- Wham Shot:
- At the end of Episode 7, after a ton of Foreshadowing throughout the episode which includes mentions of a rebranding and studies in cybernetically replicating a Titan's nervous system, the episode ends with mid-rebranding AET's logo on Brenda Holland's computer transitioning to the new Apex Cybernetics logo from Godzilla vs. Kong, just as Brenda name-drops Walter Simmons as her boss.
- The silhouetted figure who saves Cate in the penultimate episode revealing her face: it's a very much alive and un-aged Keiko Randa.
- The end of the last episode of Season 1 has Cate, May, and Keiko emerging to the surface again, reuniting with Kentaro and Hiroshi. Then they hear something stomping off in the distance, and the camera pans over to the logo on the side of a nearby building: "APEX Skull Island Research Station" - just as Kong himself arrives.
- What Is Going On?:
- In "Terrifying Miracles", Cate asks Shaw this word-for-word when she realizes Scottie is an (ex) Monarch goon. Later, one of the crew on the Monarch chopper exclaims over the radio, "What the hell is that?" When the ground begins crumbling due to Godzilla being buried under it.
- In "Axis Mundi", a nurse asks this when Young Lee breaks free in the hospital where he's being held.
- What the Hell, Hero?:
- The 21st century iteration of Monarch, led by Deputy Director Verdugo, get a lot of flack from other characters over the course of the series for constantly being the Revolutionaries Who Don't Do Anything in regards to all the Titan threats after G-Day, focusing on human problems instead and twiddling their thumbs. Old Shaw in particular is very unhappy with what the organization he and his old friends spent the 50s building has become, to the point where he starts a more radical Anti-Monarch faction to do what Monarch will not in preventing any more Titan incursions from happening. By the series' end, nearly all of the 21st century plot's main characters have more or less lost faith in Monarch one-by-one, even Tim and Duvall both.
- In "Terrifying Miracles", Keiko is none too happy at Lee when she sees he's blown off the crucial military meeting that would've seen him put in charge of Monarch so that he could selfishly be by her side on a Titan hunt, because this action will likely force General Puckett to put someone else in charge of Monarch. Sure enough, they come home to find Lieutenant Hatch is now in charge of their organization, and a distraught Keiko reminds Lee of his screw-up by rhetorically asking him what the hell he's done.
- The penultimate episode has a couple:
- When Bill Randa angrily suggests summoning another Titan to give the government a new "enemy" to feel threatened by, General Puckett sternly retorts that even if Randa could do that, there's no guarantee the Titan would be as passive as Godzilla — it could turn out to be actively malicious, and impossible to stop.
- When reuniting with Hiroshi, Kentaro angrily calls him out for his Secret Other Family, for having disappeared without sending word that he was OK, and that his secrecy has seemingly gotten Cate killed.
- Where It All Began:
- It occurs midway through the series instead of at the end, but a major stepping stone in Cate working through her unresolved PTSD from G-Day occurs while she's returning to the abandoned ruins of San Francisco for the first time since G-Day.
- In-Universe, Young Bill Randa ends his pre-Monarch journey as a solo cryptozoologist at the same place he began it: the USS Lawton, which he was the sole survivor of when it was lost at sea amid a Titan attack, triggering his pursuit of cryptids as a cryptozoologist. Bill reunites with the Lawton as a Saharan Shipwreck in the Philippines, finding other people who know for a fact that kaiju exist and share his passion for them, which marks his entry into the fledgling Monarch.
- Lampshaded by the heroes in the 2015 storyline when they deduce that Shaw is returning to the Kazakh power plant where Keiko fell to her apparent death in 1959 at the first episode's end, and the heroes confront him there, leading to Lee's entrapment in the Hollow Earth after His Story Repeats Itself with Cate, and leading to his seeming death.
- World of Snark: Virtually every English-speaking characters' dialogue consists of full snark. Even Shaw's dialogues comprises of this.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: The precise time difference between Axis Mundi and the Earth's surface seems to be inconsistent. When Lee Shaw is caught in Axis Mundi the first time for an estimated 10 days, it translated to 20 years in Earth time, making one day in Axis Mundi equivalent to two years on Earth. This calculation is further supported by how Cate, May and Shaw's later stint in Axis Mundi appears to last for roughly a day or less, and two years have passed them by on Earth's surface when they escape. However, Keiko's own time in Axis Mundi, which also encapsulated Shaw's entire first stint down there, is estimated partway into the Cate-May stint to have covered 57 days from her POV, yet only 58 years (including the following, final day approx after her 57-day estimation that she spends escaping with Cate, May and Shaw) have passed Keiko by on Earth's surface instead of the 114 years that the 1 day=2 years calculation based on both of Shaw's stints would indicate a 57-day stint should cover.
- The Xenophile: Monarch, as usual, has several people whom are awed by the Titans in their midst. Keiko and Dr. Suzuki both connect over a shared awe and respect for Titans and a belief that miracles of nature like them should be terrifying as well as beautiful. In 2015, Tim also speaks of the reality that humanity is nothing more than the insect kingdom on the Titans' planet with awe. It also turns out that Bill Randa himself viewed the Titans a lot more idealistically in his youth than he did in his old age.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: Lee's expedition into Axis Mundi lasted only about a week, but once he's sucked back to the surface, he finds out that twenty years have passed. For Keiko, it's even worse; she's been in Axis Mundi for 57 days, which equates to 58 years.
- You Remind Me of X:
- Cate reminds Old Shaw a lot of her grandmother Keiko, something he briefly admits to her in the Algerian Desert. Which becomes a plot-point when they confront each-other in Kazakhstan.
- Downplayed in "The Way Out". When Kentaro attempts to calm Cate while she's having a PTSD episode, he accidentally triggers her memory of the last time she saw their father, when Hiroshi said the exact same words to her right before abandoning her, causing Cate to reflexively snap at Kentaro like he's Hiroshi.