A New Monsterverse Spinoff Will Fill A Big Gap In Lee Shaw’s Origins
The next chapter in the story of Monarch is on the way.
Legendary’s Monsterverse is about to get even bigger.
Though a new season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is already on the way, Apple TV’s spinoff series is... creating yet another spinoff. Wyatt Russell, who shares the role of Colonel Lee Shaw with his real-life father, Kurt Russell, is striking off on his own. The yet untitled project will follow his adventures in the ‘80s, splicing and old-school conflict with the heady sci-fi worldbuilding that brought “Titans” like Godzilla and Kong into the present day. Per the official synopsis, Shaw will go behind enemy lines to stop Soviet forces from unleashing “a horrific new Titan” on U.S. soil. It’s an interesting concept, but after so many similar sci-fi projects set in the ‘80s — from Netflix’s Stranger Things to HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry — the Monsterverse will have to work overtime to make this one stand out.
Apple’s upcoming spinoff also runs the risk of redundancy on another front. Lee Shaw is the ostensible lead of Monarch: the show straddles three periods of history — the 1950s, the early ‘80s, and eventually the 2010s — and thanks to a wild time travel twist, Shaw appears in each. At first blush, focusing on Young Shaw’s clandestine missions in the ‘80s feels like overkill... in truth, though, this new series will actually fill a curious blind spot in the Monarch timeline.
Young Shaw may be moving on from Monarch.
Monarch pulled a clever casting stunt in tapping the Russells to play the same character, but throughout its first season, there seemed to be a major plot hole. How was Shaw, a man born in the 1920s, still so young-looking in 2015? Monarch, fortunately, had an answer: in the ‘50s, Shaw and his allies discovered the Hollow Earth (or Axis Mundi), a realm below the Earth’s crust that exists outside of time. When Shaw enters this realm and exits at a different point, he winds up somehow 30 years in the future, the ‘80s. It’s a fantastic twist, but Monarch Season 1 doesn’t spend any time exploring the aftermath — and there’s a sense that its second season won’t focus on it much at all.
With the series pushing ahead even further in the timeline, bringing its heroes to Skull Island circa 2017, it may be abandoning its ‘50s and ‘80s timelines altogether. It makes sense that Monarch would want to hone its focus, as the arrival of familiar Titans (like Kong) will inevitably give the show an even bigger scope.
We don’t necessarily need to know what Shaw was up to between 1982 and 2015, but it could make for an intriguing spinoff. It could add more context to Monarch’s transition from a quaint monster-research group into what is essentially the S.H.I.E.L.D. of the Monsterverse. Diverging these timelines is probably the best move for the franchise: its showrunners clearly have big plans, and with multiple spinoffs reportedly planned, this is just the beginning of a monstrous expansion.
