Diksha Sundriyal
In Apple TV+’s ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,’ the world is forever changed after the appearance of Godzilla in San Francisco and the destruction he causes. The show follows two timelines, one that takes place in the 1950s and 60s and another that takes place after G-Day in 2013. Both timelines offer insights into the Monsterworld, giving the audience a roadmap of what to expect after the events of the eighth episode when May, Cate, and Shaw fall into the portal. The ending of the ninth episode makes things even more twisted when Keiko Randa appears in the last episode. How is she still alive? SPOILERS AHEAD
Keiko Has Been Trapped in the Monster World
The first episode of ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ takes the audience to 1959 Kazakhstan, where Keiko, Bill Randa, and Lee Shaw follow a lair of monsters. Their object is to collect samples for research, but things take a bad turn when Keiko is caught by one of the monsters and she fall into the pit. At the time, it looked like she had fallen to her death, but as the events in the show unravel, it becomes clear that there is more to these pits full of monsters.
Bill Randa came up with a theory that the monsters don’t live on Earth. They have their own world, and they come to Earth’s surface through pits that act as portals between two worlds. At the beginning of the ninth episode, we see that the portals cannot be accessed by humans. In fact, the only ones who can generate enough energy to activate a portal are monsters. Whenever they have to travel, they release an immense amount of energy, which activates and opens the portals, and they remain open for as long as the monsters need them to be. Once the monsters have traveled across, the portals are shut down, which ensures that no foreign element enters their world.
In the first episode, when Keiko and Lee descended into the pit in Kazakhstan, the monsters inside it woke up. They released the energy that activated the portal, and when they traveled through it, they took Keiko with them as well. Bill and Lee didn’t realize what happened because, at the time, the portals were just a theory. Moreover, they saw Keiko being pulled away by the monsters, and the image of her being dragged away pointed towards only one theory: that she had been killed and most probably eaten by them.
At the end of the ninth episode, it is clear that Keiko has managed to stay alive in the Monster world. It’s unclear how she managed to do it, but there is a rough estimation we can make based on how others have traveled through it. At the beginning of Episode 9, Lee and three others board a ship that is meant to take them to Monster World. They wait for the monsters to show up, whose energy opens the portal, and the ship falls into the pit, using the portal to travel across the world. Their journey, however, isn’t smooth at all.
Even inside the ship, they feel immense pressure and are tossed about, with the journey leaving them completely disoriented by the end. Considering this, we can say that something similar must have happened to Keiko. When the monsters pulled her inside the portal, they lost hold of her during the journey, so when they fell into the Monster world, Keiko fell off and had enough time to run away rather than be eaten by those monsters.
Having spent most of her life chasing monsters, Keiko knew a lot about them, enough for her to find ways to keep herself safe and sound. She’d also been rather resourceful when she was on Earth, so it’d make sense that she found ways to keep herself alive all these years. Speaking of years, one should also keep in mind that for Keiko, not much time has passed in the Monsterworld. When Lee fell into the Monsterworld, he spent a very short time there, but when he came back, 20 years had passed. Since Keiko’s death, more than 50 years have passed on Earth, but for her, time has slowed down, so it might have been just a few years from her point of view. Now that she’s met Cate, she’ll find out how long she has actually been trapped there.
Read More: Godzilla and Monarch Legacy of Monsters Timeline, Explained
