Men its almost unfair about casting a real life father and son as two versions of the same character and then writing an episode where they have to talk to each other across four decades without ever being in the same room, because that is exactly what String Theory pulls off and it works awesome while at the same time the name of the episode is phenomenal to everything that goes one, even when the episode surrounding that central idea is doing everything it possibly can to bury its own best moment under a pile of scattered subplots and geography changes specially consider how this people move around the world like its nothing, when did they took an airplane? was the ship that fast? didnt they burn the engines on episode 1, Im like how does this people move from Tokyo to Australia in a blink of an eye. Episode 7 of Monarch Season 2 really shows that the writers know Kurt and Wyatt Russell are the strongest part of the series, but weirdly, they keep splitting the episode between them and other story lines that are just not strong enough to hold your attention. The Operation Hourglass signal bounces off a Titan and accidentally locks onto a frequency from 1962, which means older Lee Shaw is suddenly posing as Mission Control for his own younger self, walking him through a component retrieval from the entry vehicle so they can build a tracker for Titan X, and all of this happens over a radio connection with no face to face contact ever. That should not work as well as it does, its just how they move around from one continent to another that fast without much explanation or reason of time but what ever I guess, but the truth is that the chemistry between those two men does not require eye contact to make your brain think its possible.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17220216/
- Platform: APPLETV
The Shaw radio exchange is hands down some of the best human material this show has produced across both seasons as a continuation of Hiroshi funeral, and I do not say that to be dramatic, I say it because the specific emotional weight of those scenes is built on something the show cannot manufacture through good writing alone, it requires the actors to carry a believable shared history inside a character who is separated from himself by sixty years of living, its Lee younger version feeling desperate because he feels at some point he is been play out by been tired and hungry, that was a very very dangerous moment because I though he was just going to hang up thinking it was just the voices on his head, specially when he finds Keiko. There is a moment where older Lee has to quietly push his younger self away from interfering with Keiko, and the restraint in how Kurt Russell plays that is the peak of any monologue they could have written, because he is playing a man who knows exactly what happens if young Lee makes the wrong move and cannot say a word about it. It reminded me of that moment in Day of the Doctor where Matt Smith has to look at his past self and recognize himself inside a situation he has already survived, the kind of scene where memory and present time fold into each other and you feel the weight of both at once, and the moment where older Lee reassures younger Lee that he is going to make it home carries so much confidence that probably your mind will think "its going to be alright". On the other side of the episode, Cate and Keiko trace a local island legend about a woman supposedly possessed and it leads them down an old well chasing the signal from Titan X, the more interesting thing happening there is Keiko starting to believe that Cate might actually be the bridge to sending Titan X back to Axis Mundi rather than letting Shaw destroy it, and that puts the two women and Shaw on the same course to clash but we know all Lee will do is try to front run them, never to hurt them to take them out of his way.
Not everything is pretty rainbows with this series, something I have been saying episode after episode, my frustration starts stacking up with Episode 7, because everything outside the Shaw exchange and the island thread feels like the show servicing its own obligations instead of earning its screen time. Kentaro is in Thailand with Isabel Simmons and while Amber Midthunder brings a real charged energy to that character, Isabel shows up with a lavish house her father Walter Simmons built, a speech about living in a world where G Day never happened, and absolutely zero foundation underneath any of it to make you care whether Kentaro buys in or walks away, its like they giving her too much power and presence too fast without been earn. There was not much context about who Walter Simmons is and what Apex represents from Godzilla vs. Kong, and Kentaro is suppose to know that? it felt like Isabel came out of nowhere and was suppose to be very important, so watching him get swept up by someone who claims to hate everything her father stood for while using every single thing he built to make her pitch is a scene that plays cheap because the gap between what we know and what he knows is too wide to bridge in a single Thailand trip, come on. Then there is May, who gets picked up under her government name Corah Mateo by Monarch agents after a tense goodbye and ends up back at Outpost 18 in the South Pacific working with Tim on a neural implant fragment pulled from Titan X, and the reveal that the implant is the thing that knocked Titan X off its natural migration path is actually a solid piece of information that deserved thirty more seconds of screen time to breathe, if they only give this idea a bit more room to expand what it really is, this is why everything about it felt rushed, and that is becoming almost an intentional slip to give their back to interesting plots and ideas , turning more into a bad habit.
The tech side of this series just keeps hinting at bigger MonsterVerse stuff without really going all in. The idea of a neural interface built from something connected to Titan X could have huge implications for Apex and the future of the franchise, and that is actually really interesting, but instead of fully exploring it, the show just keeps teasing it and never fully commits, this is not something around the monsters but with everything else like they have this massive ship that looks like a fortress but they just use it like a high tech cruise to chase titans and the ship itself cant even be fast enough to keep up. Episode 7 does not reveal much, but it gives just enough to keep those bigger timeline questions interesting until we all get tired of them teasing, even if the rest of the episode is a little weak. Shaw wanting to face Titan X alone and refusing to let Suzuki come with him because he thinks Suzuki would die can be read in two ways. It could be a real self sacrificing moment or it could be something more manipulative, depending on how you feel about Shaw by this point because the guy has that two side of the coin character, he can be an antagonist and sometimes the hero. Season 1 made Shaw seem like an underdog fighting against a broken system while Season 2 has been slowly making us question whether he is really that different from the kinds of institutions he is against. That is an interesting idea but the show keeps bringing it up without fully doing enough with it.
Im going to be straight up and I do feel disappointed not mayorly disappointed but at this point in time I feel they should already give us way more, starting with some real Titan fights episodes, some real chaos. The episode wasnt bad bad but String Theory kept almost being great and then sidestepping its own best moments every single time something else needed a check in. The two Shaw performances are the real thing and is what kept this episode up float, but they the episode puts a shadow over this moments with Kentaro packing a bag to go to Thailand for who knows what or May getting escorted back to outpust 18, they just not only interrupt the meat of the episode but totally takes you away from the immersive moment, almost disrespectful to what Kurt and Wyatt Russell are doing with the most interesting science fiction concept this season has tried. Three episodes left and Titan X has still not done anything properly terrifying on screen, and that is starting to feel like a debt this season is going to have trouble paying back no matter how good the ending is. I am giving String Theory a 7 out of 10, the radio scenes alone justify that number but the rest of the episode is the show coasting on goodwill and betting the next episodes can deliver what the setup keeps promising because at this point I need something to actually get destroyed, not hinted at from inside a conference room or through a hole in the ground.
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