Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 has officially embraced time travel. Monarch Season 2’s ending went full-circle, with Titan X returning to Skull Island for a face-off against Kong himself. Where other Monsterverse films focus on the spectacle, though, Monarch used this to explore the franchise’s real villains; human beings. In the aftermath of G-Day, the world is still struggling to figure out whether it’s possible for humanity and Titans to coexist.
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Step forward Isabel Simmons, a trust-fund baby with her own ideas. She’s pieced together reports on the Axis Mundi, and she has theories for how it can be used. A mysterious realm accessed by the Titans, Monarch Season 1 revealed anyone trapped there experienced time dilation; if you spent a day there, it could be equivalent to a year in the real world. But Season 2 revealed there’s so much more to the Axis Mundi than anyone thought.
The Axis Mundi is the Key to Time Travel
Monarch Season 2 initially reinforced the “time dilation” theory of the Axis Mundi, finally revealing why Cate and Kentaro’s father Hiroshi Randa had gone missing for a year after G-Day. It seems he’d stumbled into the Axis Mundi and spent a day there, emerging a year later unaware of the time dilation. But attentive viewers immediately noticed the problem with this, because other characters – notably Lee Shaw and Keiko Randa – had spent time in the Axis Mundi as well, and they’d experienced time dilation at a different rate. Something wasn’t adding up.
Monarch Season 2, episodes 6 and 7 finally explained this. Attempting to find Godzilla, Lee opened another rift to the Axis Mundi – and stumbled on a transmission from his past self. The two versions of Lee wound up working together, with the 1962 Lee planting a tracker on Titan X decades before it awoke. Lee’s memories then adjusted themselves in the present, compensating for the changes he’d made, and an old tracker was suddenly detected on Titan X. History had, to an extent, been rewritten – although in a minor way.
The Axis Mundi Can Be Used To Rewrite History
Isabel Simmons doesn’t know about Lee’s experience, although she has theorized that time travel is possible through the Axis Mundi. She’s toying with two plans at once, and it’s unclear which one she’ll settle on. The first, pitched to Kentaro, involves rewriting the past so G-Day never happened. This would erase vast chunks of the Monsterverse timeline, save countless lives, and mean the existence of Titans remained a secret. It’s easy to see why Kentaro was drawn to the idea, believing it would save his father’s life too.
But Isabel’s second goal is a little more dangerous. She seems to believe it’s possible to travel back and forth in time via the Axis Mundi, tossing out the idea of “visiting the future.” More, though, she also imagined selling access to the Axis Mundi as a sort of “fountain of youth.” She envisioned a world where wealthy people with terminal diseases could buy access to the Axis Mundi, where they could wait until a cure had been found. It’s phlanthropy mixed with greed – but it’s also impossible.
Lee Shaw Proves Isabel’s Plans Won’t Work
To understand any time travel story, you really need to be familiar with the idea of a paradox. The most famous is the so-called Grandfather Paradox, and Isabel has unwittingly stumbled into a variant of this. Imagine a scenario where a time traveler steps back in time and kills their own grandfather before their father’s birth; they would have effectively erased themselves from the timeline. But that would naturally mean nobody existed to travel back and commit the murder in the first place. Different time travel franchises imagine different outcomes from this, but all agree; a Grandfather Paradox is a bad thing.
If Isabel travels back and prevents G-Day happening, then everything since will be unwritten as well. Importantly, that means the lessons about the Axis Mundi will never be learned, and Isabel will never theorize time travel is possible. In some time travel franchises, this would create a branched timeline. But Lee’s experiences suggest we’re not dealing with a multiverse here. Rather, we have a single coherent timeline that adjusts itself around time travel. Isabel is about to crash head-first into the Grandfather Paradox.
We have no idea how the Monsterverse’s timeline would react to something like the Grandfather Paradox. In some franchises, only smaller things can be changed, simply to prevent anything like this happening. In others, time only has a limited degree of resilience to changes, and Isabel would destroy the entire timeline if she managed to create a paradox on this scale. Whatever the truth may be in Monarch, the odds are good that Season 3 will reveal it.
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Image courtesy of Netflix -
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Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios
