Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode eight ended with a gut-wrenching cliffhanger that saw Cate, May, and Lee tumbling through a rift. Episode nine, the season’s penultimate, keeps us hanging about their fate and instead opens with a flashback to a Monarch test site in Kansas, 1962, and a young Hiroshi being babysat by Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) and Bill Randa (Anders Holm).
Scratch that…it’s actually Bill who’s pulled babysitting duty for the day as Lee is about to make history by traveling into a rift via a specially constructed ship. Before leaving, Lee loans Hiroshi his pocketknife to hold onto until he returns.
Bill and Lee have grown close to Hiroshi, and Lee compliments Bill on the job he’s doing raising the boy. Lee thinks Keiko would be proud.
General Puckett (Christopher Heyerdahl) does a walk-and-talk with politicians and officers as Operation Hourglass is about to commence. He notes that space travel is still decades away but that they’re capable of traveling into “underspace” now; it’s the culmination of Monarch’s two decades of research and work.
Lee Shaw leads a team of four into the spacecraft as General Puckett proclaims this operation is a matter of national security. Plus, the future of mankind is at stake. However, the only way to enter a rift is with the appearance of a Titan. Otherwise, it’s too unstable.
Bill and Lee exchange quick salutes before Lee enters the craft. Dr. Suzuki (Leo Ashizawa) activates his Titan signal, which lures in a creature with the promise of a meal. A massive creature responds, the tunnel stabilizes, and the spacecraft drafts into the rift in the Titan’s wake.
Mere seconds later, it’s apparent there’s a problem when all the metal surrounding the launch platform folds in on itself. Anything not tied down gets caught up in a quick-forming tornado above the rift. The crew signals that they’re in distress, but no one above ground responds.
The tornado vanishes, and even Bill and Dr. Suzuki have no idea what happened to Lee and the other rift travelers.
In the aftermath of the disastrous mission, General Puckett informs Bill Randa that the DoD has taken away all of Monarch’s funding. Puckett acknowledges the DoD doesn’t understand underspace and that to the powers-that-be, it all sounds insane.
Both men believe they could have stopped Operation Hourglass, which cost them their friend, Lee.
Almost 15 minutes in, the action finally moves forward to 2015, with Kentaro (Ren Watabe) recuperating from his injuries in a hospital in Tokyo. Verdugo (Mirelly Taylor) informs him that the Kazakhstan reactor plant collapsed down on itself after Shaw imploded the rift. Tim (Joe Tippett) was injured, but Duvall saved him. He breaks the news to Kentaro that Cate, May, and Lee never made it out.
Verdugo blames the deaths and the chaos surrounding the implosion on Shaw. She also informs Kentaro there’s no further need for his assistance at Monarch. Kentaro becomes emotional, suggesting there must be something he – and/or Monarch – can do. Verdugo says the only thing left for him to do is live.
And it turns out Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) is also busy trying to just live after falling through the rift. He regains consciousness in the Titans’ underground universe, surrounded by tall creaking trees. Cate doesn’t respond when he calls her name.
May (Kiersey Clemons) also comes to in this bizarro world, and Lee knocks her out of the way just as the ground lights up with an electrical charge. Lee warns her they need to move fast, and she needs to follow exactly in his footsteps. They carefully make their way through a field of lightning, pausing in an area Lee believes is momentarily safe. Lee says that after a rift closes, an electrical charge is left behind that feels like a lethal static shock. It also affects your vision.
Lee explains he was down there once on a recon mission. He also confirms he caught Cate and that they fell together. However, he doesn’t know for sure that she’s still alive.
Lee promises to keep May safe if she does exactly what he says. Together, they set off to find Cate. Lee confesses he’s not a science guy but knows that time’s running short.
A flashback shows the moments after Lee returned from his first disastrous trip into the underspace. He’s peppered with questions while being examined but refuses to eat unless they agree to contact Bill Randa. A nurse brings him a cookie, and Lee returns her kindness by taking her hostage and demanding to see Bill.
Lee’s finally informed that Bill is dead. Oh, and 20 years have passed since Operation Hourglass. (This explains why Kurt Russell’s Lee Shaw looks so much younger than his chronological age.) The man who informs Lee of this is a grown-up Hiroshi, who still has the knife Lee handed him two decades ago before the mission into the rift.
Lee goes into shock when he realizes it’s now 1982.
Later, Hiroshi apologizes to the nurse Lee assaulted, and she understands Shaw was simply alone and terrified. Hiroshi confesses that when he was a child, Lee, Bill, and his mom promised they’d return. They didn’t, and now he’s having a difficult time accepting Lee’s back after spending so much time mourning his death.
Hiroshi works through his issues and has a chat with Lee. Lee reveals that they followed a Titan down and crashed. One crew member died upon impact. The survivors immediately began to try and contact Mission Control while also doing a recon of the landing area. Unfortunately, that was interrupted by a Titan.
Lee was pulled up through the rift in the draft of a Titan. He remembers looking up and seeing an airplane and then nothing else until he came to at the hospital. Hiroshi fills in a few details, including that he was found in the woods near the site of a shrine that marks the boundary of the living and the dead.
Hiroshi claims they found a rift inside the shrine. Lee believes Bill was right about everything, including the Titans’ world and its balance to our world. Hiroshi corrects him and says his dad was crazy. He also informs Lee that he’s being sent to a “retirement home” for further study.
Lee asks Hiroshi for help with the Titans, and Hiroshi refuses. He believes the Titans lived here for 300,000 years and it wasn’t until Lee, Bill, and Keiko disturbed them that there was any trouble between the worlds.
Tokyo, 2015 – Kentaro’s mom helps him settle in back home, and although she tries her best to tell him he’ll get through this, Kentaro feels guilty he wasn’t with Cate when she fell into the rift. He can’t just go back to the way things were before learning about Monarch.
Kentaro’s mom says that to get through this, he must accept that he can’t go back. He needs to allow himself to feel the pain and loss. She also says that he shouldn’t listen to Verdugo and shouldn’t cut himself off from what just happened.
And speaking of Verdugo… Over at Monarch, Dr. Barnes discovers the gamma-ray bursts are signals. There’s a pattern in the bursts, and Tim believes someone is sending them a message.
A brief scene of Lee from 1982 taking medication while watching TV with his fellow retirement home residents and then an elderly Lee going through the same motions indicates decades have passed while he was locked away. He’s about to take his meds when a breaking news report gets his attention. The news shows Honolulu under attack (there’s a scene of Godzilla fighting a MUTO) and confirms the USS Saratoga has been deployed to help.
The action catches up to Lee and May still trying to find Cate, but at least May now understands what Lee’s been through over the past 50 years. Lee hopes what happened to him doesn’t happen to May and that he can get her and Cate home quickly – if they ever find Cate.
Kentaro’s looking through his dad’s office when Hiroshi walks in on him. Kentaro’s still angry at Hiroshi for deserting them, but Hiroshi’s more interested in learning why his daughter and son were together in the desert. Kentaro explains they were looking for him and thought he was dead.
Hiroshi never expected his two families to meet. He also didn’t expect Kentaro to be taking some of his files. Kentaro reveals that since Monarch won’t help him, he’s conducting his own research now into what happened at the rift. Hiroshi begs to be allowed to explain everything to Kentaro and Cate, and Kentaro breaks the news that Cate is dead.
Sobbing, Hiroshi sinks to his knees, devastated to learn Cate’s gone. Kentaro calls him a sad, lying, secret little man who caused all of this.
Episode nine ends with Cate (Anna Sawai) finally waking up from the fall. The forest is full of weird noises when suddenly she hears a growl nearby. A Titan stalks her and breathes directly into her face from inches away. It then circles the tree she’s leaning against as if taunting its prey.
Cate crawls away on her hands and knees, and the creature comes charging after her. It’s just feet away when an arrow hits its face and causes it to turn tail and run off. Cate turns to see her savior and discovers it’s Keiko!
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 1 “Aftermath” Recap
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 2 “Departure” Recap
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 3 “Secrets and Lies” Recap
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 4 “Parallels and Interiors” Recap
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 5 “The Way Out” Recap
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 6 “Terrifying Miracles” Recap
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 7 “Will the Real May Please Stand Up?” Recap
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Episode 8 “Birthright” Recap
