Christopher L. Bennett: Written Worlds

I discovered a while back that Disney+ was showing the 1957 Zorro series starring Guy Williams, and as someone who grew up with Lost in Space and always found Williams an extremely charismatic lead, I couldn’t resist the chance to see him in something where he got to stay the lead throughout, rather than being marginalized. I’ll get to talking about that show, but watching it inspired me to seek out other versions of Zorro, and over the past couple of years, I’ve managed to see essentially every English-language Zorro production I’m aware of, so that I could do a thorough survey (and I’ll include a few select foreign productions I’ve managed to see). Since this will be mostly broad overviews, I’m posting them here on my free blog instead of my Patreon (though of course, if you enjoy these free reviews, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to my Patreon reviews as well, since that helps me make a living). This will be a 9-part series, organized by category and only broadly by chronology.

I’ve been hesitant to post this now, as it might be bad timing given the recent investigations into the late Jeffrey Epstein’s “Zorro Ranch” for evidence of sex crimes committed there. I feared that if some story were to break about that in the near future, the association might taint any discussion of Zorro, or make it in poor taste to bring him up. But I’ve decided to go ahead anyway, as I’ve been working on this for years and don’t want it to go to waste. Zorro is a character with over a century of history, and I think he’s still well enough known as a hero (albeit with some problematical aspects of his own) that one infamous criminal’s appropriation of the name shouldn’t overshadow his cultural legacy.

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The original Zorro novel was a 1919 magazine serial called The Curse of Capistrano, written by Johnston McCulley. It was very much inspired by Robin Hood and by The Scarlet Pimpernel, the novel that pioneered the genre of the dual-identity hero, and Zorro, by donning a mask and costume, would in turn be the prototype for the superhero genre. The serialized novel was adapted a year later as a silent movie under the title The Mark of Zorro, and was subsequently reprinted under that title.

The Curse of Capistrano/The Mark of Zorro and its 1922 sequel The Further Adventures of Zorro arein public domain and available on Project Gutenberg as well as the Hoopla online library and elsewhere. Hoopla also has bare-bones audiobook editions of those two plus the other two McCulley serial novels, Zorro Rides Again (1931) and The Sign of Zorro (1941). McCulley published 58 more short stories about Zorro from 1932-59, overlapping the early films, the Republic serials, and the Disney TV series. They’ve been reprinted in a 6-part series called Zorro: The Complete Pulp Adventures in 2015-16, but I haven’t been able to find a library copy, so I can only cover the four novels. (It’s interesting that the Zorro canon includes four serialized novels and 58 stories, similar to the Sherlock Holmes canon’s four novels and 56 stories, and both series were contemporary with multiple screen adaptations of their characters.)

The Curse of Capistrano tells two parallel stories set in Spanish California, sometime in the early decades of Los Angeles’s existence (probably the 1790s, though McCulley’s version conflates elements of Spanish California, when the missions were dominant, and the later Mexican California, when ranches and caballeros became more important). One is a tale of the Robin Hood-like highwayman “Señor Zorro” (“Mister Fox”) leading a one-man insurrection against the corruption and cruelty of the colonial military under Captain Ramón and his hulking Sergeant Gonzales, as well as the equally corrupt governor. The other is the tale of the lazy, dissolute Don Diego Vega (it wouldn’t become “de la Vega” until the Disney series), a wealthy caballero (nobleman/landowner) whose father Don Alejandro wants him to marry Lolita Pulido, daughter of a once-proud family that’s been impoverished by the corrupt officials and wants to marry back into good standing. It’s as much or more a tale of courtly romance and manners as an adventure story, and involves a love triangle where Lolita is in love with the compelling Señor Zorro and lukewarm toward Don Diego.

It isn’t until Zorro finally kills Ramón in a duel and compels a pardon from the governor (with the backing of the caballeros) that he reveals to the readers and characters that he was Don Diego all along; he adopted the foppish persona as a cover, and was such a method actor that he feigned disinterest toward Lolita as Diego while courting her smolderingly as Zorro.

It’s a pretty well-written and entertaining story, but the action is sometimes implausible, as when Zorro crashes his horse into a group of charging lancers and somehow knocks them aside with no injury to his own horse. Some of it is hard to stomach, like how the Franciscan friars Zorro defends lament how badly they’re treated by the new regime after their great and noble achievement of conquering California and creating an empire. It’s plausible that colonialists would see it that way, but it makes them hard to empathize with.

Really, there’s a common thread throughout the various incarnations that’s distasteful in retrospect. Zorro adaptations are unusual among Westerns in showing Native Americans (including Diego’s deaf/mute servant Bernardo in the novel and some adaptations) as sympathetic characters whom the hero defends, but only because they’re subordinate “peons,” living in indentured servitude to “repay” their education and conversion to Christianity in mission schools. It’s just a step above slavery, but it’s portrayed as intrinsically benevolent except when corrupted by greedy individuals. As a landowner and colonizer, Diego is part of the oppressive system, but he’s portrayed as a champion of the oppressed. It hasn’t aged well, but for its day, I guess it could have been worse, since at least the hero is protecting Native Americans rather than slaughtering them like so many Western “heroes.”

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The Further Adventures of Zorro picks up the night before Diego’s wedding to Lolita. Captain Ramón (who it turns out was only “left for dead”) seeks vengeance on Diego/Zorro by hiring a pirate crew led by Captain Barbados to raid Los Angeles, attempt to kill Diego, and abduct Lolita to deliver unharmed to Ramón. Even though Diego’s identity as Señor Zorro is now public knowledge, he resumes the mask to pursue the pirates. The story establishes that his lazy, dissolute Diego persona isn’t just an act, but virtually an alternate personality, as he needs a challenge to get his blood flowing and engage his swashbuckling side. (Evidently romancing Lolita was not enough of a challenge by itself to get the job done.) He’s backed up by his fellow caballeros, who pursue the pirate ship in a trading schooner after Zorro manages to board it and harry the pirates from hiding until he’s discovered and thrown overboard. He makes it to shore and is rescued by a native peon whose father he once saved, and who directs him to the pirates’ stronghold.

But Ramón is playing both sides, conniving to betray the pirates and redeem his reputation by defeating them, and attempts various ploys to convince or compel Lolita to marry him. The caballeros are captured but eventually aid in the climactic battle, assisted by Sergeant Gonzales, who’s redeemed as their ally, becoming the template for the sympathetic comic-relief sergeant characters in later screen adaptations. Zorro finally confronts Ramón in a climactic duel, but Barbados stabs Ramón in the back before Zorro can stab him in the front.

Overall, it’s less interesting than the original, a straightforward narrative of chases and fights and reversals, relying too heavily on the stock melodrama trope of Lolita facing implied sexual threat from the villains and being ready to kill herself first. The most surprising thing is that the story doesn’t retcon away the exposure of Zorro’s identity, and indeed is catalyzed by his enemies directly targeting Diego’s loved ones for revenge. Even Ramón’s return from death is easy to reconcile with the original story, since he was still “twitching” at the end of his presumed death scene in Curse.

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Zorro Rides Again picks up three years later, establishing that Lolita fell ill after her abduction and has just returned from recuperating in Spain, so Don Diego is conveniently still unmarried. The story is initially coy about whether Diego has resumed being Zorro, and I briefly wondered if McCulley was restoring Zorro’s secret identity by having Diego claim someone else had taken over the role. But it soon becomes clear that an impostor Zorro is attacking innocent people to besmirch Zorro’s reputation, and Diego must go on the run from the new garrison commander Captain Valentino Rocha until he can find the impostor and clear his name. There were two suspects for the impostor, Rocha and an obnoxious trader named Sanchez, and I wrongly guessed it was Sanchez, as I was hoping McCulley wouldn’t just repeat himself with another evil captain.

But no, Rocha turns out to be the corrupt governor’s nephew and is seeking revenge on Zorro—since the novel retcons the previous one by having Diego claim to have killed Ramón himself. It could just be boasting, but the narrative goes on quite a bit about how a caballero’s word is unimpeachable. Inevitably, Rocha has designs on Lolita and attempts to persuade her to marry him, but much less is done with it this time around.

Diego spends the last half plotting to expose Rocha’s imposture publicly, but complications ensue and the way he eventually defeats Rocha shouldn’t really prove the case conclusively, though the story assumes it does. McCulley tacks on an additional villain, Don Estevan Garcia, asserted to be the governor’s right hand and the secret power behind the throne, but not much is done with him, so it’s unclear why he was added to the story. The novel is decent, but some of the plotting and writing feels sloppy, like McCulley was just trying to fill pages.

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McCulley published four short Zorro stories from 1932-35, three of which are summarized at https://www.zorrolegend.com/origin/mcculleystories.html. The summaries indicate that they treat Zorro’s identity as secret except to close associates, but I don’t know whether they attempt to justify the retcon. I don’t think they can take place during the original novel, since they feature characters introduced later. The subsequent 54 short stories published from 1944-59 were evidently in a similar vein.

McCulley returned to the character after a six-year hiatus with the 1941 serial novel The Sign of Zorro, a year after the sound remake of The Mark of Zorro (which I’ll cover in part 2). The novel is set around 1800 and Diego has retired from being Zorro for several years. He had married Lolita, but she died of fever, and Diego has regressed to his foppish, dissolute ways, so that the public no longer believes he was actually Zorro, a belief encouraged by the Vega family’s misinformation campaign. It’s a moderately plausible retcon, and at least Diego’s closest confidantes are still in the loop (including a reformed pirate named Bardoso who was a supporting character in Rides Again and is now one of Zorro’s main allies), though Sgt. Gonzales is back to seeing Zorro as an enemy of unknown identity, which is hard to reconcile with the previous two novels. Another major retcon is that Diego’s servant Bernardo has been cured of being mute, and his deafness is forgotten.

It takes surprisingly little to bring Zorro out of retirement, when Señorita Panchita Conchola requests his help in saving her brother Vicente, the new head of the household after their parents’ recent demise, from being manipulated by the devious Don Pedro Morelos, who’s convinced Vicente to accept his suit for Panchita’s hand and plans to steal the family’s wealth and disgrace Vicente in revenge for how their father treated him. Zorro resumes his outlaw ways to investigate, while Diego repeats his shtick from the original novel of languidly courting Panchita in a way that alienates her even though he genuinely is interested in her, which makes no more sense than it did the first time.

It turns out that Morelos and his associates have an evil plan to monopolize commerce in Alta California and rob the people blind, and Zorro offers his aid to the governor, a more honest successor to the previous evil governor. (There’s a fun scene where Zorro is prevented from sneaking out of the governor’s bedroom because people keep showing up on his patio, so Zorro has to hide under his bed like a paramour in a screwball comedy.) But the main focus remains on Diego/Zorro’s dual courtship of Panchita and his efforts to keep the hotheaded Vicente out of trouble. Although, like James Bond, Zorro is given a secondary love interest this time, a bad girl named Carmen who’s an accomplice of Morelos and whom Zorro seduces into helping him by leading her on to think he loves her, then gets rid of her by sending her to Monterey and lying that he’ll follow her, which makes him come off as rather a cad.

The governor pardons Zorro for exposing Morelos, and Diego challenges Morelos to a duel and dramatically reveals himself by marking Morelos with a Z. I’d thought this novel would explain why Zorro’s identity was a secret again in the later stories, but I guess not, since it ends the same way the first one did, with Diego revealed as Zorro, pardoned, and retiring to get married. Morelos even impersonates Zorro, rehashing a plot point from the third novel. Ultimately it’s an underwhelming tale, mostly a rehash of its predecessors. Perhaps McCulley wanted to go back to basics and retell a version of the original story for the benefit of fans of the recent movie, but it comes off as rather redundant.

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Next, I cover the early film adaptations, including the three (yes, three) different versions of The Mark of Zorro.

Back in 2014, I posted a review here of Gene Roddenberry’s 1974 pilot movie The Questor Tapes, including a discussion of D.C. Fontana’s novelization, which told an expanded, differently structured version of the latter half of the story with a subplot that wasn’t in the film. I just discovered a fan site for the Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth” (basically an earlier version of the same concept of Questor, a cool, intellectual superhuman sent by aliens to gently and clandestinely guide humanity), and it turns out to have PDFs of script drafts for three of Roddenberry’s 1970s pilots, Genesis II, The Questor Tapes, and Spectre.

The G2 script looks pretty similar to the final pilot, and I’ve only seen Spectre once and can’t really compare. But the Questor second draft, dated December 12, 1972, has some interesting differences. For one thing, it’s credited entirely to Gene L. Coon, with Roddenberry only credited for the “Story and Series Concept,” even though the final movie credits them both with the teleplay. (However, the PDF is apparently a transcription of the draft rather than an actual scan, so I can’t swear to its accuracy.) This suggests that Roddenberry did the final rewrite, although the majority of the script is essentially the same as the finished film, with some minor changes; for instance, it sets Project Questor at the University of Geneva instead of Cal Tech, and has Questor take Jerry Robinson to Rome instead of London. The influential socialite is Contessa Ignacia Calassi instead of Lady Helena Trimble. In the draft script, it’s Jerry’s idea to seduce the contessa for information about Dr. Vaslovik, though his boasts of extensive experience with women prove to be empty bluster and he strikes out. I prefer the final version where Questor, clueless about human relationships, pushes Jerry to attempt seduction over his reluctance, and Jerry can’t go through with it because he respects Lady Helena too much to use her that way. I would have expected it to be Roddenberry that wrote the womanizing version of Jerry and Coon who toned him down to be more enlightened and respectful, but it seems it may have been the other way around — or else Coon had second thoughts and refined it in a later draft. Perhaps it was after they cast Mike Farrell that they realized he’d be a better fit for a sensitive, vulnerable Jerry than the blustering, overconfident version in the draft script.

It turns out that the Fontana novelization’s expanded and restructured version of the latter half of the story, with Questor playing the stock market to build a fortune and using it to mount an operation to search for Vaslovik, comes from this script draft and possibly others, although the novel is otherwise faithful to the final screen version. But the sequence where Lady Helena reveals the high-tech surveillance center behind her wine cellar has no counterpart in the second draft; the Contessa is merely a more conventional information broker who provides a list of Vaslovik’s past contacts. Thus, we don’t begin to get a sense of Questor’s actual purpose until the climax. The addition of the surveillance center improves the story structure, and the enlargement of Lady Helena’s role serves the character better, implying that she would have been a recurring character had the series gone ahead.

Contrastingly, the second draft gives a larger role to Allison Sample, Vaslovik’s former secretary and the first human Questor interacted with when he broke into the university library. She only appears briefly in the movie and novelization, but in the script, her early scenes are longer, and she returns in the third act to assist Questor in searching for Vaslovik, bonding romantically with Jerry. It feels like she was being set up as a potential female lead, though it’s hard to see how she could’ve had a regular role given that the draft script’s ending is the same as the final film’s. Besides, network execs in that era didn’t care for regular love interests, wanting series leads to be free to have romances-of-the-week.

Anyway, I’ve been a fan of The Questor Tapes for decades, having seen the movie and read the novelization many times, so it was a nice surprise to get to learn something new about it.

Continuing my overview of season 2 of the Apple TV+ series set in the Legendary MonsterVerse.

• Season 1 Part 1
• Season 1 Part 2
• Season 2 Part 1

Episode 6: “Requiem” opens with a flashback to 2 weeks before the series present, shortly before last season’s final scene. Kentaro Randa (Ren Watabe), in between working on Skull Island to retrieve his half-sister Cate (Anna Sawai) from Axis Mundi, has been sneaking out into the wilds of Skull Island to sketch Kong (appearing for the first time since the start of episode 2). He’s met on his return by his father Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira), who for some reason has waited two years to tell Kentaro about the time dilation in the Axis Mundi dimension between the surface and the movies’ Hollow Earth, which is the reason Hiroshi was missing for a year; while investigating the rift to Axis Mundi in Alaska (where he went missing as depicted in season 1), he was sucked in and emerged a year later in North Africa, after what for him was no more than a day. Apparently he didn’t want to talk about it before (even though it seems like something Kentaro would’ve needed to know from the beginning to consider a rescue feasible at all), but he tells Kentaro that their past two years working to retrieve Cate have given him back the year he missed with his son (not sure how that adds up).

In the present, in the wake of Hiroshi’s death at Titan X’s tentacles in episode 5, the family (not counting Cate’s mother Caroline) attend Hiroshi’s Buddhist funeral and the placement of his ashes in the family plot in one of Tokyo’s compact cemeteries. Kentaro blames Cate for their father’s death (because Hiroshi was trying to get to her when she was mysteriously drawn to Titan X) and storms off.

Leland Lafayette Shaw III (Kurt Russell) is watching from outside the cemetery and is surprised by the arrival of the elderly Dr. Suzuki (Leo Ashizawa), inventor of the Suzuki device a.k.a. gamma simulator a.k.a. “Titan phone,” whom Shaw first met in 1955 and who must be at least 90 in the series present of 2017. (He’ll claim to be 100 in episode 7, though he doesn’t look it.) Suzuki is even more surprised to discover that Keiko Randa (Mari Yamamoto), a member of his age cohort, is still barely older than she was when she fell into Axis Mundi in 1959. Inviting them to where he still lives on Hateruma Island, he concludes that the slower time flow in Axis Mundi must explain why the 1962 Hollow Earth probe attempt that trapped Shaw there must have gone catastrophically wrong, because their math didn’t account for the time dilation. This gives him the idea to refine his newer model of a Titan phone based on that new insight, and Shaw wants to use it to lure Godzilla to a suitable place to do battle with Titan X, since Godzilla is Shaw’s solution to everything.

Keiko is not happy with this plan, and when she learns about Cate’s mysterious connection to Titan X (manifested by inward ripples converging on Cate’s feet when she dangles them in the water), she rigs up some gear to track the signal as a way of locating Titan X before Shaw sics Godzilla on it. When Cate hears the recorded call of the Titan, she senses that it’s lost and afraid.

Meanwhile, May Olowe-Hewitt (Kiersey Clemons) has come to Kentaro, who’s willing to put their disagreement over her work with Apex Cybernetics behind him and takes her out for a drink, though he rebuffs her offer to talk about his loss. After some drinks, he misreads her appreciation for his friendship and tries to kiss her, and when she pulls away, he snarks that she’s more interested in his sister, which we know is true but that she apparently hasn’t admitted to herself yet, so she walks away. Kentaro is approached by Isabel (Amber Midthunder, star of Prey and my current leading candidate for “Most Awesome Name Ever”), who seems like just a cute girl trying to pick him up, but lets slip that she knows who he is and admits that she’s the daughter of Apex’s boss Walter Simmons (though a different daughter than Eiza González’s Maia from Godzilla vs. Kong) and is trying to coax Kentaro to work with her, an offer he rejects.

Later, Kentaro witnesses Godzilla storming through Tokyo to confront Titan X as the population flees, but since none of the later-set movies mentioned a 2017 Godzilla rampage in Tokyo, it’s pretty obvious that Kentaro is having a nightmare and the whole thing is a fakeout. (This is Godzilla’s first appearance this season outside of flashbacks, and technically he still hasn’t appeared.) Afterward, Kentaro reaches out to Isabel, deciding to give her a chance.

In flashbacks to 1958, the younger Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) leaves Monarch in the wake of his and Keiko’s brief infidelity, though they both hide the real reason from her husband Billy Randa (Anders Holm). Shaw transfers to the staff of General Puckett (played in season 1 by Christopher Heyerdahl but only mentioned here) and reconnects with his father, Leland Lafayette Shaw II (Bill Sage), who convinces him to get drunk with him (and we learn in passing that the 2017 Shaw is a recovering alcoholic, which will have no further relevance) and transfers him to a Vietnam post without asking, so that Shaw can get some combat experience to advance his career. Shaw insists that he’s already done important work with Monarch, and after a brief experience with the lousy conditions in his new office, he comes back to Keiko at Monarch and says he’s willing to put his feelings aside for the sake of the work and their friendship. (The military is surprisingly obliging about letting him transfer at will.) She’s happy to welcome him back, and tells him about Billy’s plan to investigate reports of a possible Titan in Kazakhstan, bringing us full circle by setting up the series-premiere flashback where Keiko was sucked into Axis Mundi.

Back in 2017, Shaw and Suzuki go to the site of the rift where Shaw emerged from Axis Mundi in 1982, to test whether Suzuki’s new device can probe the rift and detect Godzilla. The rift site, fittingly, is in the crater of Mount Osore, a pilgrimage site regarded in real-life folklore as a gate to the underworld (although this is a retcon from season 1, where his emergence was stated to be in a different part of Japan). The rift opens further than they intended and almost sucks Shaw in, and Suzuki detects something that isn’t Godzilla before he shuts it down. But the glow from the rift lingers, and Shaw picks up a radio signal—his own distress call from the 1962 mission! Are we heading for a time-loopy explanation for the mystery of how Shaw got out of Axis Mundi the first time?

Well, yes and no. In episode 7: “String Theory” (whose plot has nothing to do with string theory), 2017 Shaw takes advantage of the time distortion to attempt to change his past, pretending to be part of 1962 Shaw’s command team giving him instructions to seek out the dormant Titan X and plant a tracking beacon inside its flesh, tweaking the timeline so that they’ll have a trackable signal for Titan X in the present. (The passage of time within the Axis would only be a couple of months, not 55 years, so I suppose its possible the batteries could still be good. Although old Shaw and young Shaw communicate in real time.) Yet because old Shaw sends young Shaw off his original course, young Shaw discovers that Keiko is alive in Axis Mundi, and old Shaw has to convince him not to seek her out. Young Shaw eventually figures out he’s talking to his future self, and old Shaw convinces him that intervening with Keiko might prevent her future rescue or alter the past so that her grandkids are never born. Young Shaw plants the beacon in the past before following old Shaw’s instructions back to the site where “Billy’s dragon” would somehow take him back to Earth, an event that still hasn’t been depicted. And by the nonsense logic of fictional time travel, planting the beacon on Titan X in the past causes the signal to suddenly appear in the present, showing it heading for Australia.

Meanwhile, Tim has May dragged back to Monarch so she can help figure out how her code in Apex’s device caused Titan X to lose track of its migratory route, preventing Monarch from finding it (an effort that will be rendered moot when Shaw’s plan pays off at the end). Tim tells May that Brenda didn’t implicate her in the Titan X debacle, for reasons unclear to May.

Kentaro visits Isabel’s home in Thailand, where he finds out that she isn’t working for Apex as he (and I) thought. An adopted daughter whom Simmons cast aside when Maia was born, Isabel resents Simmons and Apex and sees a kindred spirit in Kentaro, who also had a sister suddenly appear in his life and reduce him to a fifth wheel. She tries to bring him onboard her scheme, and though she only drops hints, it sounds like she intends to use Axis Mundi’s temporal weirdness to change the past so Godzilla’s “G-Day” attack never happened.

Cate and Keiko find references in Billy’s old notes to women in rural Japan who could communicate with a yokai (demon) resembling Titan X. Heading to the site, they find a well that Cate believes could let her connect to X again and communicate with it. Keiko quails at lowering Cate on a rope, since it reminds her of how she was lost in Kazakhstan. But Cate convinces her that wasn’t a mistake, since she had to pursue answers, and so does Cate. Naturally, by the laws of TV physics, the rope inevitably breaks, but Cate finds a network of tunnels and gets out on her own, after gaining a clearer sense of connection to Titan X, whom she’s convinced is benign in intent and needs their help.

(Aside from the brief mention of yokai, this is probably the only episode set partly in Japan in which there’s no Japanese dialogue.)

Episode 8 is called “Separate Ways,” paradoxically, as it brings the gang back together on the Monarch research ship Outpost 18, where Tim convinces Director Barris (Curtiss Cook) to let Cate and Keiko try to lure Titan X back onto its migratory route, since it didn’t hurt anyone until Apex messed with its sense of direction. (Oddly, Tim doesn’t remind them that it killed Director Verdugo well before that in the season premiere, not to mention that it almost killed Shaw and Keiko on Santa Soledad in 1957.) They have to do this before Shaw lures in Godzilla with the Suzuki device, and before a US fleet attacks Titan X with tactical nukes, because that worked so well on Goji back in 1954. Meanwhile, May is suspicious when Kentaro tells her about meeting Isabel Simmons, which he insists was no big deal, so she goes to question Brenda Holland at a Monarch “Asset Management” site in an Undisclosed Location that’s conveniently less than an hour’s chopper ride from the ship, assuming the scenes are in chronological order. But Brenda is still protecting her boss Walter Simmons by claiming to be solely responsible for her actions, and leaves May with nothing beyond a hint about not assuming she understands the company.

The three surviving Randas chopper in to try to stop Shaw, but the chopper is brought down by birds that are swarming around Titan X for no clear reason. They’re unharmed, but have lost their ride. Keiko and Cate fail to talk Shaw out of his “Let them fight” plan, which he insists is the nature of Titans, though Keiko counters that they don’t understand their nature yet. Cate discovers that Titan X came onto the beach to lay an egg, like a sea turtle, but Kentaro tips off Isabel, who sends in a team led by Jason Trissop to steal the egg while Titan X is distracted by the attack of Godzilla, who took Shaw’s gamma-ray bait and finally appears for real. Cate and Kentaro are cut off from the others and have to go with Trissop’s team as the Titans duke it out, though X breaks away to chase after the chopper stealing her egg, and Goji pursues. (Presumably the personnel on the ground were the reason the military didn’t try nuking both Titans when they had the chance, but if so, it’s never explained. The nuclear option is just forgotten after all that setup.)

In episode 9, “Ends of the Earth,” the chopper (with the Randa siblings aboard, Cate more grudgingly than Kentaro) lures Titan X to Skull Island, with Godzilla following—but it’s too early in MonsterVerse continuity for a Godzilla/Kong showdown, so Goji is satisfied to escort X back to Skull Island, the proper endpoint of her migration, and then depart from the story. Accepting Godzilla’s judgment, Shaw unhesitatingly pivots his plan from killing Titan X to helping her get safely back to Axis Mundi, and he, Keiko, Tim, and May lead a Monarch team ashore to achieve that by means to be improvised later. Half the team gets eaten by predators called Vinestranglers, but Tim manages to save May because she has plot armor.

Meanwhile, Isabel takes the siblings to an abandoned Monarch base where her nameless splinter group has set up shop, explaining that they took the egg to lure Titan X so she could open a rift to Axis Mundi, which Isabel says she intends to use to allow people to take shortcuts to the future, perhaps to a time when there’s a cure for their terminal diseases or the like. In a bit of clumsy writing or editing, Cate tries to convince Kentaro they can’t change the past, even though Isabel has said nothing to this point about backward time travel. Isabel pretends to be reasonable and offers Cate and Kentaro the chance to leave of their own free will, but then has Cate forcibly escorted to a helicopter. Except the people who force her into the chopper neglect to guard her while they ready for takeoff, yet are somehow surprised when she escapes back into the base, conveniently finding a radio to tip off the Monarch team to her location just after Isabel’s team finds and shuts down the tracking beacon the team has been following.

Shaw and Keiko get separated from the others during the attack, and try to find the dimensional rift using Billy Randa’s old maps, tying into Kong: Skull Island, where Randa’s expedition to the island was an attempt to locate the Hollow Earth exit point he believed to be there. Keiko wonders why he was so driven to find it, especially after she and Shaw find his abandoned camera at the spot where he was killed in K:SI. In flashback, we see Billy and Keiko impulsively getting married in Papua New Guinea in 1958, so impulsively that Billy can’t think of any vows. Later, on the way back from the Kazakhstan debacle in 1959, Billy refuses to accept Shaw’s insistence that Keiko is dead. In 1968, a bearded Billy (still not looking that much like John Goodman) is lecturing a college class on his Hollow Earth theory—which would have been the perfect opportunity to bring in K:SI’s Houston Brooks, who came to Randa’s attention after publishing a college paper on the Hollow Earth theory. Instead, the scene focuses on Dr. Suzuki delivering a probe to Billy and telling him he’s not going to make any more, since Billy’s neglecting his remaining family to search for the ones he lost.

In 2017, Shaw and Keiko find numerous such probes littered around a faintly glowing lake, with different dates and locations printed on them. This is the “Grand Central” emergence point Billy died searching for. Opening the probes, they find they all contained letters to Keiko, relating the vows Billy hadn’t been able to think of when they married. All that time, he was searching for her. Aww.

Kentaro is disturbed to learn that Isabel’s plan entails using the Apex mind-control tech to ramp up Titan X’s aggression and make her fight and kill Kong after opening the rift, to eliminate an obstacle. Still, he remains on board with the plan. When he finds Cate and she tries to convince him to help Titan X return home with her egg, he tells her that Isabel’s plan is a way to go back and save their father’s life.

In episode 10: “Where We Belong,” Kentaro turns Cate in and she’s locked in a room, while Isabel’s team lures Kong toward the aggression-amped Titan X by emitting monster calls from speakers in a helicopter, which is observed by Shaw and Keiko. As they follow it, they have time to recap past plot events to each other, including Keiko getting a recording of Titan X’s call and Shaw directing his past self in Axis Mundi to plant the tracker. Keiko is hurt and angry that Shaw decided to have his younger self leave her there to preserve the timeline, saying it wasn’t his choice to make for her.

Soon enough, they run into Tim and May in a jeep they commandeered from Team Isabel (which they still mistakenly assume is Apex), and the mostly reunited Monarch team heads for Isabel’s base to find Cate and Kentaro. Meanwhile, Cate uses her science-teacher skills to MacGyver an escape from the locked room, except she comes out of a hatch right next to Titan X just in time for Kong to arrive for the big marquee fight. Keiko sees her granddaughter almost being crushed underfoot by the battling Titans, and almost gets crushed underfoot herself driving to the rescue. Kentaro, unaware that his half-sister is in the middle of it, recklessly pushes X’s aggression to maximum, causing the probe to overload like before so it can’t be shut down. But Tim and May successfully infiltrate the base, which leads Isabel to flee with Kentaro (and why she feels more loyalty to this guy she only met days ago than to the teammates she’s presumably been working with for much longer is unclear). Tim and May open the loading bay hatch to let Keiko and Cate inside, revealing Titan X’s egg to its mother’s view. X’s maternal instincts override the artificially induced rage (aww), and when Kong sees her break off the fight and tenderly cradle her egg, he withdraws and lets her depart in peace.

But as before, the mind-control probe has addled Titan X’s directional sense, so Shaw commandeers Team Isabel’s speaker-equipped chopper to play Keiko’s recording of X’s call as a lure. Cate finds Kentaro about to escape with Isabel and gives him one more chance to come with her, but Kentaro tells her about Hiroshi’s time in Axis Mundi, arguing that they can use the Axis’s temporal weirdness to find and retrieve “a version” of Hiroshi from that time (even though he doesn’t know that Shaw had a similar experience with his younger self). The siblings part ways.

The team starts luring Titan X with the recording, but the audio equipment blows out, so Cate has to stand in the open rear of the chopper and let Titan X see her, relying on their bond to draw her to the rift site. The chopper lands, and Cate and Titan X do the Hiccup-and-Toothless hand touching thing, though with X’s tentacle instead of her forehead, before X goes home with her egg. Aww. In another bit of sentiment, the lingering rift energy inexplicably lets 2017 Shaw and Keiko see (but not hear) the younger Shaw from his time in Axis Mundi, allowing them to say goodbye.

Six weeks later, we get the tag scenes setting up season 3. Director Barris offers Keiko and Cate a job with Tim and May in what Tim calls “Monarch 2.0,” a new, leaner subdivision dedicated to returning to the kind of small-scale, TV-budget-friendly science work out of a basement that the original team did in the 1950s, as well as tracking down Kentaro and Isabel. Barris gives Keiko a fake identity to avoid revealing the whole time-warpy thing; perhaps this means he’s also classified knowledge of the rifts on a need-to-know basis, which might reconcile why the Hollow Earth was still treated as unproven by the Monarch characters in Godzilla: King of the Monsters two in-story years later. Meanwhile, Shaw has gone off on his own and tracks Isabel and Kentaro to somewhere in Southeast Asia (the usual location caption isn’t given). He misses them, but a contact tells him they were seeking something they saw as the key to opening the door to their goals. (Shaw and the contact appear to be old friends, which may be a setup for the upcoming spinoff series about the younger Shaw in the 1980s—except the contact would’ve been a child at most back then.) The contact leads Shaw to it—and it’s Rodan perching atop a volcano, though clearly not the Mexican volcano where he resided in G:KOTM.

–

It’s coincidental that I decided to cover the season in two halves, as the story arc itself breaks down into two halves, focusing on Apex as the threat in the first half and Isabel’s group in the second half. It makes the season feel a little unfocused, along with other things like the redefinition of Axis Mundi from merely having a slower time flow to being timey-wimey in whatever way is convenient for the plot. And the writing is vague on whether the past is immutable, as Cate insists, or rewritable, as the other characters seem to assume. Or do they? When Keiko gets angry at Shaw for leaving her behind, it’s unclear whether she’s talking about his present self having the opportunity to change the past, or his younger self choosing not to rescue her when he had the chance. And what seemed to be Isabel’s plan to alter the past is redefined as an attempt to bring back “a version” of Hiroshi from Axis Mundi, implying that they might be able to split off a parallel-history version of him that doesn’t alter his original history (what’s known in the Ultraman franchise as a Parallel Isotope). And that’s not mentioning the other plot threads that get left dangling here and there.

It’s not just the plot and conceptual elements that seem unfocused, but character elements like the casual revelation of Shaw’s alcoholism, and the contrived way that Tim is elevated to a leadership role in Monarch. Then there’s the failure to follow up in any meaningful way on the first season’s attraction arc between May and Cate, who are kept largely apart this season. Hopefully season 3 will develop it now that they’re working together at Monarch 2.0, but that means that too much of this season is just setup for future stories, rather than a complete story in its own right. Even Isabel’s climactic master plan fizzles out, so even that arc is basically just setup for season 3. I feel that serialization is too often used as an excuse to drag out storylines indefinitely and avoid coming up with good resolutions. Season 1, despite its cliffhanger ending, told a pretty complete story with mostly effective resolution to its plot and character threads. That’s true of some elements of this season; Titan X gets a complete arc, and the Keiko/Billy/Shaw backstory ends up dovetailing fairly well with Kong: Skull Island and bringing a satisfactory resolution to the trio’s storyline. But in other respects, season 2 ends up feeling like a pilot for season 3, and maybe for the Lee Shaw spinoff.

Also, I’m not sure the resolution to Keiko and Billy’s arc is entirely earned. Keiko forgives Billy for abandoning Hiroshi because he was searching for her the whole time, trying to bring the family back together. But I don’t think his goals excuse his methods. Regardless of his intent, his actions made his son feel abandoned, and the harm that did to Hiroshi’s psyche is no less real.

I wish it had been explained why Cate was able to bond with Titan X when Keiko couldn’t. Maybe that lineage of Japanese priestesses who could commune with X were ancestors of Cate’s mother? Yet they never said as much, so it’s still a plot hole. Anyway, Cate’s role here as Titan whisperer reminds me of the role the psychic Miki Saegusa played in the Heisei-era Godzilla film series.

Meanwhile, in my previous post, I said the Scarabs reminded me of the Godzilla parasites that appeared in The Return of Godzilla, but I’ve been reminded that they actually bear a closer resemblance to the Barem from Rebirth of Mothra 2, small starfish-like symbionts produced by the evil kaiju Dagahra.

While a third season hasn’t been announced yet, the producers’ comments suggest that one is in the works, and the fact that more than one spinoff is also in development suggests that Apple TV+ has faith in the franchise. I plan to continue reviewing new productions as they come out.

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Time to resume my kaiju review series with season 2 of AppleTV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, part of Legendary’s Godzilla/King Kong MonsterVerse. My recap/reviews of season 1 can be found here:

• Season 1 Part 1
• Season 1 Part 2

The creative staff is essentially the same as in season 1, with Matt Shakman (WandaVision, The Fantastic Four: First Steps as executive producer, Chris Black (Sliders, Star Trek: Enterprise) as showrunner and as co-developer with Matt Fraction, and Mariko Tamaki as executive story editor. The core cast is the same: Anna Sawai as San Francisco schoolteacher and Godzilla survivor Cate Randa, Ren Watabe as her Tokyo-dwelling half-brother Kentaro, Kiersey Clemons as their friend and Cate’s love interest May Olowe-Hewitt (real name Corah Matteo), Takehiro Hira as their bigamist father and renegade Monarch scientist Hiroshi Randa, Mari Yamamoto as Hiroshi’s mother Keiko Miura Randa, Anders Holm as her late husband Billy Randa (the 1950s version of John Goodman’s Bill Randa from Kong: Skull Island), Wyatt and Kurt Russell as the past and present versions of Colonel Leland Lafayette “Lee” Shaw, and Joe Tippett as the idealistic but scattered Monarch employee known only as Tim.

As before, I’ll cover the 10-episode season in two posts.

Episode 1, “Cause and Effect,” picks up moments after season 1 ended, with Cate and May escaping the interdimensional Axis Mundi with their grandmother Keiko, who’s been there only a few subjective weeks since she was trapped there in 1959, while the 2015 version of Lee Shaw stayed behind to save them. They arrived on Skull Island in 2017, discovering that Tim, Kentaro, and Hiroshi were working with Apex Cybernetics to rescue them. As the episode begins, it turns out Kong’s roaring entrance in the cliffhanger ending wasn’t just posturing—he attacks the base, forcing everyone to retreat in Monarch helicopters, because what last season’s finale implied to be Tim’s rogue operation with Apex was actually a Monarch-authorized joint operation with Tim as the liaison. (This feels like it may be a retcon from what the season 1 writers originally planned.) The characters evacuate to Monarch’s Outpost 18, a ship with a big fancy control room set reminiscent of the Monarch base from Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Tim can’t explain to Director Verdugo (Mirelly Taylor) why Kong went wild after tolerating their preliminary tests.

Keiko experiences disorientation after leaving the alternate time continuum of Axis Mundi, and it also apparently makes her hair grow 4-5 inches in the few moments between last season’s finale and this—a visual continuity error I’m okay with, because Mari Yamamoto looks even lovelier that way. While Keiko’s out of it, Cate convinces Kentaro, May, and Hiroshi to go back to Skull Island to rescue Shaw, going behind Verdugo’s back since the deputy director refuses to risk sending a team when Kong’s on the rampage. Cate feels she owes Shaw after he got sucked into Axis Mundi trying to save her.

In flashbacks to 1957, Keiko (with her hair the same length as in the present), Billy Randa, and Lee Shaw travel to Santa Soledad, an island off southern Chile, to investigate legends of a sea monster, finding the locals hostile when Billy tries to photograph a sort of giant tick thing displayed in their tavern. (The creature, which we’ll learn is called a Scarab, reminds me of the parasites from the early part of The Return of Godzilla.) A bilingual waitress, Lucía (Camilla Ponte Alvarez), tells them the locals worship a giant tentacley sea monster (depicted in some cave art she shows them) and they’d better leave if they know what’s good for them. The locals call the monster El Gran Dios del Mar (The Great God of the Sea), but it’s officially designated Titan X, which seems like an attempt by the writers to evoke King Ghidorah’s “Monster Zero” epithet.

In 2017, Cate-tachi pass through the impassable storm wall around Skull Island with implausible ease, sneak past the island’s deadly creatures (including one previously only seen in the comics) and a sleeping Kong (with Cate surviving Buster Keaton-style when Kong rolls over and his hand falls around her), and reactivate the Apex machinery, which apparently had a hand in opening the rift, though that wasn’t clear before. But Keiko has spotted a Scarab in the video playback from Kong’s attack, and realizes her family’s in danger. She, Verdugo, and Tim go to the island to stop Cate from opening the rift, but she does it anyway, and the capsule is somehow conveniently sucked into the rift and down into Axis Mundi, and then sucked back again once Shaw gets inside, with no explanation for how the heck that works. But a Scarab gets in the capsule with Shaw and attacks him, and El Gran Dios/Titan X breaks out of a cocoon and precedes Shaw’s capsule through the rift. (The time difference between realms is ignored; the few minutes it took Shaw to get to the capsule should have been close to a day on Skull Island, but if anything even less time seems to pass there.) Startlingly, Titan X kills Verdugo before Kong chases it into the sea, then glares angrily at the escaping team that unleashed it.

Shaw comes away with green markings on his face that I thought were an infection, but apparently they’re just monster goo, since he’s fine in episode 2, “Resonance,” when they get back to the ship—unknowingly bringing a Scarab with them on the chopper. With X making Verdugo an ex-deputy director, Tim is improbably next in command, a responsibility he doesn’t want, and he ends up pretty much deferring to Shaw, ignoring Monarch’s orders to detain him. In debating who’s in command, both men ignore the fact that Keiko Randa, one of the literal founders of Monarch who has decades of seniority over everyone else on board except Shaw, is standing right next to them. I can buy that Shaw would default to assuming a man should be in charge, but it seems out of character for Tim, who idolizes the Randas.

They pursue Titan X, merely observing until it endangers commercial ships heading into the Strait of Malacca. Keiko, who’s been learning from Shaw about how Monarch has changed, reminds them that their mission statement, “Discovery and Defense in a Time of Monsters,” is a quote from Billy Randa, and that they should take a chance on discovery rather than just defense, which somehow translates to using a drone to divert the Titan by mimicking its subsonic calls. Keiko and Hiroshi modify the drone together and have a mother-son bonding moment. But Shaw gets overzealous pushing the drone too close to Titan X, which smashes it.

Meanwhile, Cate has been beating herself up for getting Verdugo killed, and Hiroshi tells her to blame him instead, since it was chasing his secrets that led her here. May discovers that Cate hasn’t called her mother yet after being missing for two objective years. But Cate, of course, is the one who discovers the Scarab roaming the corridors (after it’s killed a random bit player), and she, Kentaro, and May have to fight it off. The injured Scarab emits a huge subsonic pulse that gets Titan X to turn toward them, coming after its Scarab baby or whatever. Shaw gets to be ridiculously action-heroey, taking the wounded Scarab out in a jet ski to draw Titan X away from the ship, then tossing it overboard and barely escaping being wiped out by the sea monster’s wake.

Meanwhile in 1957—err, you know what I mean—Billy figures out the cave map of Titan X’s migratory route and insists on chasing after it, but Keiko is determined to stay behind to do more research in the village, over young Shaw’s objection that nobody wants them there. They split up, and the Santa Soledad villagers approach Keiko and Shaw and insist semi-convincingly that they’re not really the hostile superstitious monster cultists they appear, inviting the duo to their festival. Keiko agrees, but they end up getting mildly drugged by the local wine and almost have an inappropriate romantic moment (Keiko is married to Billy by this point in the timeline), before the locals sacrifice a giant fish that attracts a horde of Scarabs that the locals leave the two outsiders to face alone. (There’s a parallel thing in past and present where Keiko and Cate can somehow both sense the subsonic vibrations of the creatures through the ground or water even though nobody else can.) They try to get to a boat, but Titan X emerges in the bay and attacks.

In episode 3, “Secrets,” Shaw and Keiko escape Titan X and the murderous villagers (with Lucía letting them get away) and hole up in an isolated cabin, where they predictably end up sleeping together, ooh, melodrama. This is juxtaposed with 2017 Keiko finding out about her son’s bigamy. Docking Outpost 18 in Tokyo,Tim sends Keiko, Hiroshi, Kentaro, and Shaw on a special mission after Monarch’s Director Barris (Curtiss Cook), a character never mentioned in the movies, sends in an Apex Cybernetics engineering team led by Jason Trissop (Cliff Curtis) to basically take over the ship. Barris demands that Tim remand Shaw and Keiko to Monarch custody, but Tim sneaks them out so they can modify Hiroshi’s spare gamma simulator, aka “Titan phone” (which they call a Suzuki device after its inventor) into a sonic lure to draw Titan X away from populated areas before it’s discovered and causes a panic—since TV writers always seem to treat electromagnetic radiation and sound as interchangeable things. (The actors are filmed outside Shibuya Station, and we glimpse Keiko’s disorientation at a Tokyo that, to her, is incredibly futuristic, but this will not get much followup.)

Tim asks May/Corah to accept Brenda Holland’s offer of a job at Apex to be a mole for him and find out what they’re up to, which she’s oddly more comfortable with than she was when Brenda asked her to be a mole in the opposite direction. She wastes no time hacking into Apex’s surveillance files and finding that they’re tracking the Randas and Shaw in real time, stealing the Suzuki device, since Apex wants the public to know about Titan X, as part of its nebulous plan to “coexist” with Titans and profit from them somehow (building toward their role in Godzilla vs. Kong, a movie I’d rather forget).

For her part, a guilt-ridden Cate ditches the team and goes home to San Francisco, finally reuniting with her mother and telling her all about Axis Mundi and the Hollow Earth, even though Monarch still considers that a myth two years later in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a discrepancy the series is making no effort to resolve. Cate passes up a chance to reunite with her teacher friends and instead meets an old girlfriend at a bar, but when a Titan Alert about Titan X is sounded, Cate breaks down and almost confesses that it’s all her fault.

Keiko tries to talk to Hiroshi, who reveals that Billy sent him away to live with his aunt in Japan and disappeared when Hiroshi was 11, which would be c. 1962-3. (This is used to explain why Hiroshi/Takehiro Hira speaks English with a heavier Japanese accent than Keiko/Mari Yamamoto.) Keiko doesn’t believe that, but then we see a flashback to 1962 where Billy goes through the belongings of the recently disappeared Shaw and finds the “I love you but we can never do that again” letter that Keiko sent to Shaw after their indiscretion. I had to remind myself that this was three years after Keiko got sucked into Axis Mundi. (Shaw will later tell Keiko that he kept the letter as the only thing he had left of her.)

Episode 4: “Trespass” opens with a montage of Billy leaving home in 1962 (after saying goodbye to young Hiroshi, a scene we see at the end of the episode) and going around the world over the following years, cutting away from Anders Holm’s Billy before he expanded to John Goodman’s proportions over the next decade. (I really wish they’d cast someone who was a more credible match for Goodman at that age.) After his death in Kong: Skull Island in 1973, Billy’s papers sit in a warehouse until 2015, when a team from Apex Cybernetics steals them.

Back in 2017, Trissop’s Apex team completes the upgrade of Outpost 18’s sensor system, which flags Titan X as heading straight for San Francisco, where Cate is. Shaw and the Randa family (minus Cate), with May as their inside woman, stage a Mission: Impossible heist to break into Apex’s Florida facility and retrieve the Suzuki device so they can distract Titan X before it subjects the city to its second Titan attack in three years. Shaw creates a diversion in a bar while the others swipe and copy an Apex employee’s access card, Kentaro sabotages Brenda Holland’s SUV to keep her at home, and May fakes a radiation alarm to clear the building so the team can go to work. But Brenda bikes in sooner than expected and shows May how the latter’s computer code has helped Apex develop a neural chip that renders Titans temporarily docile, the key to coexistence. (We see that Apex has smuggled various critters off Skull Island and is holding them in cruelly cramped conditions. At one point, Kentaro and Shaw let out some territorial but non-predatory birdlike beasties called Needlewalkers as a diversion.)

Brenda tells May that she knows her team is trying to retrieve the Suzuki device, and they find it disassembled. But it’s okay, since Tim realizes that Trissop sabotaged the ship’s sensors to give a false alarm; San Francisco and Cate are safe. Apex wanted to create a scare so that they could swoop in with a solution, presumably the mind control tech, which Brenda convinces May to stick around to perfect. Meanwhile, Shaw and the Randas find Billy’s stolen notes in the same lab as the Suzuki device (did Apex want them to find them?), revealing that Billy figured out Titan X’s migratory route decades ago and Apex knew all along that it was actually heading back to Santa Soledad. They take the notes with them, and Hiroshi finds his mother’s letter to Shaw about their affair.

Meanwhile, Cate has coincidentally had a random encounter with the mother of one of the few schoolchildren she successfully saved from the bus that Godzilla inadvertently knocked off the Golden Gate Bridge in 2014. The mother thanks her for doing something when others would have fled, and that conveniently knocks Cate out of her self-loathing and convinces her she needs to rejoin the team and take responsibility for fixing the problem she caused. (We see that the bridge is under repair now, and it actually looks relatively close to how a suspension bridge under construction would actually look, with the partial deck hanging from the restored suspension cables. This is an improvement on the 2014 movie and the corresponding flashbacks in season 1, where the deck somehow magically levitated in place after the cables holding it up were snapped clear through.)

Episode 5 is titled “Furusato,” Japanese for hometown or homeland. It’s the title of a Japanese folk song that Hiroshi Randa sings over the phone from 1990 Tokyo to young Cate (Hana Tanaka) in the US, until he’s called away to the hospital room where Emiko (Qyoko Kudo in her first appearance this season) has just given birth to her son, whom they name Kentaro after Hiroshi’s biological father, since he’s still bitter at his stepfather Bill Randa for abandoning him. (I hadn’t realized Kentaro was significantly younger than Cate, maybe 7-8 years, I’d estimate. So he should be calling her Cate-neesan.)

Back in 2017, Hiroshi has it out with Keiko about her affair. He’s hardly in any position to judge her for infidelity, but he blames her for driving Billy to abandon him. Though Shaw advises him that dwelling on what was done to him in the past can only get in the way of moving forward with his life. Later, Cate and Kentaro muse that maybe Hiroshi’s sense of abandonment is why he felt the need to double up on families, which Kentaro attributes to an engineer’s need for redundancy.

Brenda’s Apex team, led by Jason Trissop, sets up shop in Santa Soledad, whose inhabitants abandoned it long ago after Monarch set up a monitor post there, which is called Outpost 27 even though it’s decades older than the ship Outpost 18. (Maybe the ship is a replacement for earlier Outpost 18s.) They plan to use a drone to shoot Titan X with a gizmo using May’s code to mind-control it. Brenda calls her boss, Walter Simmons from Godzilla vs. Kong, and says success will be proof of concept for their larger plan. (Which is implicitly related to the tech that will create Mechagodzilla, but they presumably haven’t come up with that specific idea yet.)

Shaw and the Randas head there too (using a plane that Shaw somehow arranged to hire, I guess using his old connections), and they notify Tim, who tries to convince Director Barris that Apex is lying about Titan X’s movements. Barris is reluctant, since Apex is nominally their partner, but gives Tim a chance to go to Santa Soledad and find proof.

Team Shaw/Randa discuss how Titan X is following its migratory route years early, because Cate’s use of the Suzuki device awoke it from hibernation prematurely. Cate also mentions the “song” she thought she heard in the ocean in her earlier Titan X encounter, but Keiko doesn’t seem to remember her own parallel experience from 1957.

The team finds Outpost 27, and Keiko finds a childhood drawing of Hiroshi’s there, proving that Billy came back. Keiko assures Hiroshi she loved Billy despite her moment of infidelity, and Hiroshi admitting that learning about the affair has finally freed him of his belief that he somehow drove Billy away. Blaming his mother lets him absolve himself, which paradoxically lets them reconcile.

A flashback to 2014, during the early part of the first film, shows Hiroshi just about to visit Emiko and Kentaro when Tim alerts him to the discovery of Bill Randa’s Skull Island document bag from season 1. Hiroshi reluctantly chooses duty over family.

The team infiltrates the Apex camp and is surprised to find May helping them ready the drone. When they speak to her, it turns out she’s not playing mole anymore as I assumed, but is genuinely all in on helping Brenda, though she still advises them to stay out of it as she doesn’t want them hurt. Still, Shaw realizes that Apex intends to mind-control the Titans as weapons of mass destruction to sell to the highest bidder (hence the need to take it public), so his team commits to stopping them. Yet they fail to prevent the drone launch, as they’re interrupted by the Scarabs swarming toward Titan X like they did in 1957. Cate and Titan X are somehow drawn together, gazing at one another at close range, until the drone fires the mind-control doodad. It overloads because May wasn’t given enough time to perfect the code, and the Apex team flees (with Trissop secretly absconding with something that will no doubt be important later).

The Scarabs residing symbiotically on Titan X’s body bite off the tentacle in which the doodad is embedded (why not just pull out the doodad, or bite out a small crater around it?), causing it to nearly fall on Cate and Hiroshi. At this point, I realized what would probably happen now that Hiroshi’s main character conflict had been resolved, and I was right: Hiroshi is mortally wounded, and his mother and daughter sing “Furusato” to him as he dies. Tim and the Monarch medics arrive just too late (though in real life they’d probably at least try to resuscitate him, since his heart had only been stopped for a minute or two).

–

I had expected season 2 to focus on Kong as much as season 1 focused on Godzilla, so it’s surprising that Kong only features in episode 1 (and the overlapping start of episode 2). This is disappointing, as I’d hoped that season 2 would involve Houston Brooks and his advocacy of the Hollow Earth theory as established in Kong: Skull Island, to make up for season 1 erasing him entirely. (Also it would’ve been cool to see Joe Morton reprise the older version of the character from Godzilla: King of the Monsters.)I suspect Kong will return in the climax to take down Titan X, or else Godzilla will, although so far Godzilla hasn’t appeared at all except briefly in flashback. The focus is pretty much entirely on Titan X and the various smaller species of Skull Island, with the main movie connection being the setup of Apex’s future work with Titan neural interfaces.

But the heart of the storyline is the Randa family drama, this time focusing more on Keiko, Shaw, Billy, and Hiroshi more than Cate and Kentaro. The revelation of Keiko and Shaw’s brief infidelity is kind of melodramatic, but it fills in some gaps in the narrative, like explaining how Hiroshi’s sense of abandonment may have contributed to his bigamy. It disappoints me that we won’t get to see more of the mother-son bonding between Keiko and Hiroshi, but we did get a fair amount of it, and maybe the focus in the latter half will shift toward Keiko bonding more with her grandchildren.

It’s odd how Shaw has been positioned in a more heroic role this season after basically being the main antagonist in season 1. It feels like they’re writing to cater to Kurt Russell’s popularity, and it doesn’t feel entirely earned. The contrivance to put Tim in a Monarch leadership role also feels very forced, although it’s ameliorated by his continuing struggle against Barris’s orders and Trissop’s imperiousness.

To be continued…

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In the wake of my pre-diabetes diagnosis, I’ve been trying to get more exercise, but I’ve also been looking into ways to improve my diet, which I’d thought was already pretty good but may have some problems I was unaware of. I’ve been looking into what foods have a good or bad glycemic index and glycemic load, but though different sites sometimes give conflicting information, it seems that some of the foods I consume frequently have pretty high GI & GL, including packaged macaroni & cheese, bagels, and apple juice — though it seems like orange juice and grape juice are okay, and whole apples are okay because of the fiber. (I add fiber powder to a lot of my foods anyway, but apparently it doesn’t help much with fruit juices because the sugars are already separated from the fiber.) Corn flakes are also pretty bad, though they tend to be cheaper than other cereals, which is the main reason I have them. Eating healthy is more expensive, which is no doubt a factor in why people aren’t healthier.

Most other kinds of pasta are apparently moderate on the glycemic scale, though it’s better to go with whole grain pasta — always my preference, but not always as easy to obtain when shopping on a budget. It’s also good to balance pasta out with vegetables, which I generally do anyway. Also, it’s better to cook it al dente so it’s digested slower — which means I probably need to give up my preference for softer pasta. And apparently cooked and cooled pasta is better than hot pasta because it forms “resistant starch” that isn’t digestible. This even applies to cooled and reheated pasta, so maybe what I should do is cook pasta in advance and save it in the fridge for later reheating. (If you soak cold pasta in boiling water for a couple of minutes, it nearly regains the texture of freshly cooked pasta.) Hopefully this means the packaged/refrigerated ravioli I like, which I presume must have been precooked (as the pasta is soft and only needs a few minutes to reheat), already has resistant starch to begin with.

Whole wheat bread, a major staple of my diet, is moderately high but better than white bread. There’s nothing I need to cut out entirely, but I should probably reduce my intake of bread to some degree, and I’ve been pondering ways to do that. I could try open-face sandwiches and halve the amount of bread I use, though that might be messy. Or I could have salads with cut-up sandwich meat and cheese. Wraps apparently aren’t as good an alternative as they’re hyped to be, but corn tortillas seem to be a pretty good option, though I’m not sure how well they might substitute for sandwich bread or hot dog buns, say. Still, they’re pretty inexpensive, if nothing else. (Weird that they’re better than corn flakes, but I guess it’s a function of how the corn is processed and how much of the good stuff is left intact.)

Naturally I’m open to advice from anyone who has experience with changing their diet to prevent or manage diabetes.

A couple of weeks back, I reported on my new glasses, my astigmatism, and my attempt to figure out why my vision was blurrier some days than others. I ruled out sleeping on my side as a factor, after the blurring got worse after a night when I slept on my back. I’m now pretty sure that dry eyes are the main issue, as the lubricating eye drops have helped — but I also think I may have been making it worse by taking ibuprofen for other things, since apparently ibuprofen can contribute to astigmatism. Anyway, since I stopped taking ibuprofen and started using the eye drops more regularly, my vision’s mostly cleared up, to the point that I can finally say for sure that my glasses prescription works fine as long as my eyes are in optimal condition. In fact, I think it may even be better than my last prescription. At the store yesterday, I realized I’d gotten into the habit of tilting my head back to read the aisle signage (to align the right part of my progressive bifocals), and that I no longer need to do that.

However, before I figured out the eye issue, I got kind of worried when I read that adult-onset diabetes might be a cause of variably blurry vision, since a test I got last year included an indicator of high glucose that could be pre-diabetic. I didn’t take it too seriously then, but the vision issues got me concerned, so I made an appointment to see a doctor (before I figured out the ibuprofen/dry eyes thing), and yesterday I went in and got my blood tested. Good news, I don’t have diabetes, but bad news, my blood glucose is high enough to be a risk factor.

I also have somewhat high cholesterol and triglycerides, not seriously high but enough to be of concern. The thing is, when I look for recommendations for dietary changes to reduce glucose and cholesterol, I find that the diet I already have is pretty good for both those things, but maybe not ideal. Although I get mixed messages on whether things like artificial sweeteners (in my iced tea), potatoes, and pasta are good or bad. I do eat a lot of pasta, and though I try to have whole grains where possible, that’s not always an available option at the store.

Mainly, though, I probably just need to get more exercise. I do try to go for walks nearly every day, weather permitting, but I guess it’s not enough, since my weight is slightly above the optimal range despite my diet being pretty healthy. I guess basically I need to try harder to get more extended or vigorous exercise. I’ve been trying already to take longer walks, but I guess I should consider other options, like dragging out my old ski machine more often. Or maybe biking, but I’ve never been comfortable biking in this neighborhood due to its traffic patterns and steep hills, and I’ve pretty much given it up in recent years, since I don’t have a lot of faith in my balance as I get older.

Otherwise, though, all my blood test results were solidly in the green, so I guess I’m pretty healthy aside from the cholesterol and glucose issues, which fortunately both have the same fix, exercise. However, my ophthalmologist thought some occasional flashes I’ve been seeing in my right eye (which I suspect of being ocular migraines) might be a sign of a circulation issue, so I’m getting a test for that next week. And I haven’t had a full physical yet, so that should probably happen before long.

Anyway, it’s pretty nice out, so I should wrap this up and go for a walk.

Time for another exclusive short story, my fourth in my Thayara fantasy universe, following (in rough chronological order) “The Science of Sacrifice,” “The Melody Lingers,” and “The Demon in the Depths.” “Hive Mentalities” can be read by all subscribers at the $3 level or above, or purchased individually for $3 (the lowest amount Patreon allows me to charge for individual posts).

https://www.patreon.com/posts/fiction-hive-153360131

As usual, the annotations page is also up on my $5 Behind the Scenes tier:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/hive-mentalities-153360684

Since one of the markets I tried submitting this to was an audio magazine or podcast or whatever the kids call them these days, I wrote a pronunciation guide, which I put above the cutoff so even non-subscribers to Behind the Scenes should be able to read it. As always, more information about Thayara can be found in my worldbuilding notes.

Not long ago, I realized that I could no longer manage to look at my desktop computer screen without wearing my progressive multifocal glasses — and what seemed like only a couple of months later, I couldn’t even focus with those anymore. So I went to get new glasses, though I wasn’t sure how well they’d solve the problem, since my vision seemed to vary from day to day, and was often blurrier in the morning and took most of the day to clear up.

After visits to my ophthalmologist and the glasses store’s optometrist, I now know that I have astigmatism, which changes the shape of the eye so that it doesn’t focus quite right. I think it’s been exacerbated by one of two factors, sleeping on my side (which can flatten out the eye sideways) and wearing a sleep mask that puts mild pressure on my eyes. (The dry winter air might have contributed too, since it can affect the clarity of the cornea.) Trying them both separately, I think it’s mainly the side sleeping, but the mask seems to contribute too, so I’ve been going without, and I’ve ordered a mask with cups that won’t press on the eyes. And I’m trying to remember to sleep on my back, but it’s hard to change one’s longtime sleep habits.

I did get new glasses, and as with the last pair, it’s taken me a while to figure out how best to position them to get the right focus, and I think I’ve finally got it more or less figured out, though I probably need to go in and get the fit improved a little (I had the same issue last time). At the store, the clerk offered me the option of reusing the same frame design, which I jumped on because it would save me the trouble of comparison-shopping and having to make — ugh — a decision. (Same design, but not the same actual frame, since they no longer do it in-store in an hour and it takes days for the new pair to be delivered.) But afterward, I realized I should’ve gotten a different frame shape, because I always felt the lower edge of my previous frames (and thus my new ones) was too high, so the reading area was narrower vertically than I preferred, with a significant open space in my field of view below the bottom rim when I look down. But I’m stuck with it now, and I guess I lived with it for two and a half years, so I can live with it until I need my next pair.

Given how quickly my vision seemed to deteriorate before, though, I’m only hoping these glasses will hold me for a while. I’m hoping the perceived deterioration was mainly due to the dry air, to my astigmatism (which I’ve hopefully managed with the sleep changes), and/or to eyestrain from needing new glasses. If the astigmatism does get worse, apparently there are treatments for that, and I’ll need cataract surgery eventually anyway, which should improve my vision. (The reason I went to the ophthalmologist first was to make sure I didn’t already need the cataract surgery, since it would’ve been silly to get new glasses and then shortly thereafter get eye surgery that would render the glasses’ prescription obsolete.) (Also, I seem to be starting to forget how to spell “ophthalmologist.” It just doesn’t seem right for that first “h” to be there. But it’s from Greek ophthalmos, “eye,” while “optometrist” or “optician” is from Greek optos, “sight.”)

I’ve often wished someone would invent adjustable glasses, with some kind of flexible lens material and a little lever on the side you could adjust, or sensors to track your gaze and the distance of objects and adjust automatically. But as long as I’m wishing for futuristic tech, I’d rather wish for a way of regenerating the eyes to work like they did when I was young. Oh, and the rest of the body while we’re at it…

When I upgraded my site to a new theme last month, I lost the PayPal donation button from the sidebar, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it back. Today I figured out how to generate the code for such a button and embed it in the sidebar, but for some reason, the theme template refuses to display it.

Luckily, PayPal gives the option of including a link instead of a button graphic, so I’ve added it to my list of site links in the sidebar. Here it is again:

https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/5G7YPAN2UCCHQ

I hope it works. Feel free to test it out. Assuming it works, I’m thinking it’s been way too long since my last autographed book sale, so I’ll probably organize one soon. I should’ve done one before Christmas, but I was too occupied with my writing.

Here’s an excellent, informed column on the state of generative “AI” (i.e. large language models and large multimodal models) by novelist John Scalzi, discussing creators’ relationship with it and its likely future. I think he’s very much on the ball here, and I was thinking I should post here to express my own position on “AI,” but it would boil down to pretty much “what he said” (in short, that I want nothing to do with the damn thing and all my writing comes exclusively out of my own unassisted brain), so it’s better just to post a link to his column, which is more detailed, more informed, and probably more polite that anything I could say about the subject.

Okay, I figured out this morning that there was, in fact, a simple way to convert the table format of my annotation pages into a form that’s more legible in the new site theme. I just had to open each page’s edit window, copy the table into a blank word processor document, use “Convert table to text” with paragraph breaks selected as the divider, copy and paste the text back into the edit window, make whatever minor tweaks were necessary (including reloading inline images that didn’t come through right), and save. So I’ve spent the morning doing that, and I think I’ve managed to convert all the pages.

In a few cases, where I had tables nested within table cells (which didn’t translate well at all), I just reopened my original HTML files for those pages (from when I created them for my old website using an HTML editor I no longer have) and copied and pasted the tables in between paragraphs. So there are still a few small tables here and there, reasonably legible, though they could be better if this template allowed more options than “all columns equal width” or “the left column squished down to one character wide.”

I’m actually kind of glad the new template forced me to do this. I’ve thought for a while now that the old table format was less than ideal, and I’ve stopped using it in recent years, though for a while I was keeping it up on the new site for the sake of consistency. But it feels better to have all my annotation pages in a consistent format (more or less) without all the excess formatting that doesn’t translate well to different display formats. (It never occurred to me to check whether the tables were even legible on a phone screen.)

Incidentally, it finally struck me this morning why the new site theme looks familiar. It uses the same font as Patreon, and in roughly the same size. So now both my free site and my Patreon site have a similar look, which I guess is a good thing.