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The following contains spoilers for the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 finale.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ second season may feature some of the series’ biggest Titan battles to date, but its primary story is a deeply human one. From Cate’s refusal to leave Lee Shaw in Axis Mundi to Kentaro’s wild plan to try to save the dead father he can’t bring himself to admit he lost, it’s been a season of big emotions, hard choices, and far-reaching consequences. And perhaps no character has been asked to endure quite as much as Keiko Randa, the brilliant, time-displaced scientist who is forced to reckon with so much loss and change during season 2’s 10 episodes.
“They really tortured her through the season,” Mari Yamamoto, who plays Keiko, laughingly tells Den of Geek. “I think she probably needs a lot of therapy, right? Because it’s been 10 days…the whole season is actually just 10 days, isn’t that crazy? I’ve been describing it as she’s grieving while she’s running.”
Over the course of those 10 days, Keiko has (among other things) lost her son Hiroshi, learned that Lee consciously chose to leave her in Axis Mundi to protect the future, discovered that the letter she wrote admitting her feelings for Lee broke up the family she left behind, and found the spot where Bill Randa most likely died on Skull Island, along with a series of notes that affirm he never gave up the search for his wife. It is, by any sort of reckoning, a whole lot.
“I think she gets to a place around episode seven or eight, when [she and Cate] are on their mission to get Co-cai [a.k.a. Titan X] back on track. I think, for her, there is a sense that, ‘I’ve literally lost my son too, if I die doing this, I’m okay with it. If I die doing this but I can save people, then maybe it’s worth having traveled in time and lost everybody,’” Yamamoto explains. “She’s at a place where…I wouldn’t call it suicidal, but I think it’s a very ready to really risk it all kind of place. But then she comes back from it. And I think that forging this bond with Cate, seeing Cate accomplish this monumental task of getting a Titan back on track, it reignites her own excitement about Titans and the work she was doing.”
Keiko’s relationship with her granddaughter doesn’t just give her a purpose in her strange new modern life; in one version of the Monarch finale, it actually played a key role in her decision to keep living it.
“One thing I will say is that I think the reason that she finds the will to live again is Cate,” Yamamoto says. “In the original cut, Keiko could choose if she wanted to go back to the past with Lee. And she almost steps in, but then she turns back for Cate.”
Keiko and her granddaughter are surprisingly alike, from their rampant curiosity and unique connection to the Titans to their time spent in Axis Mundi.
“At the very end of last season, [Keiko] couldn’t even process that she had a grandkid,” Yamamoto says. “But seeing the similarities in Cate and the way she understands her, about why she had to go down into the pit all those years ago, it’s small moments, but inside of her there’s a massive shift because she’s just like, ‘wow, you really are like me, and you really understand me’. And that bonds them even more.”
To hear Yamamoto tell it, Keiko’s onscreen bond was very much informed by her own off-screen relationship with co-star Anna Sawai, who plays Cate.
“I think we really built it off our own connection as actors. Like Anna is just… as everybody knows, she’s just incredible. I look into her eyes, and I basically start crying. That was the kind of relationship we had. We completely trusted each other, and I so admire her. I think that permeated into Keiko’s feelings as well.”
Of course, Keiko’s bond with her granddaughter isn’t the only relationship that’s front and center in the season 2 finale. (Though it is the only one that involves a badass rescue beneath a pair of dueling Titans.) Her relationships with both Lee and Billy are tangled and messy enough that they could probably fuel an entire 10-part drama all on their own. But for Yamamoto, it’s the inexplicably connected nature of this trio that makes their shared bonds so compelling.
“I’ve never wavered in my belief that the three of them — Billy, Lee, and Keiko — are soulmates,” she says. “It’s not just Lee and her, and it’s not just Billy and her. It’s the three of them. And, in a strange way, Lee and Keiko don’t work without Billy, which is the tragedy, right? Kurt [Russell, who plays the older Lee Shaw] was saying that when we find Billy’s letter in the rift, Lee also looks at it and realizes it’s for Keiko, and he’s like, ‘Damn, I was never meant to be with her. It was always supposed to be Billy.’ That’s how he played it. And I thought that was so beautiful. But also at the same time, they couldn’t have worked without Lee. If any of those elements go missing, including the time and setting on all of those things, they’re just doomed. That’s the tragedy of these three people.”
The finale manages to give Lee and Keiko — at least their younger selves — some closure thanks to the timey-wimey magic of the rift energy that sends Titan X back to Axis Mundi and allows the pair to see each other one last time. (Granted, Lee’s older self also gets a moment with his younger self, which is equally moving in a slightly different context.)
“Playing that moment, looking at young Lee…as I said, there was a scene that was cut where she struggles to make that decision, but she ultimately accepts it, decides to stay, and says goodbye to young Lee. He’s okay with it. It’s that thing of, ‘See you in the next one’, you know? There’s a hope in that sadness. And looking at Lee now…he’s still that person that you know is always going to be there for her. They do have their differences, of course, but she knows that and he knows that, and that’s just how it’s going to be, no matter what age difference there is.”
As we look toward a third season of Monarch, Keiko and Lee are taking separate paths in their attempts to track down the still-missing Kentaro and Isabel Simmons before they can find a way to open a permanent rift, a choice that could provide some intriguing conflict for the pair down the road.
“It would kind of be interesting to see them fall into real opposition, right?” Yamamoto says. “Because they haven’t really, in these 10 days we’ve seen them together. And like the more intense the feelings you have for someone, what happens when that curdles or is misdirected? I think that’s an opportunity to explore both their dark sides, maybe. That’d be really interesting.”
All 10 episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 are available to stream on Apple TV now.
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