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Monarch Season 1 introduced viewers to the complicated family life of Hiroshi Randa, a high-ranking member of Monarch who disappeared after Godzilla’s rampage in San Francisco in 2014. A year later, Hiroshi’s daughter Cate discovered he had a secret family, and she and her half-brother Kentaro began a quest to find Hiroshi and figure out what happened to him. When Hiroshi finally appeared, though, he seemed more than a little confused that he’d even been sought out. He didn’t even appear to know he’d been missing. Now, Monarch has finally revealed why – at Hiroshi’s graveside, no less.
Hiroshi Randa Entered the Axis Mundi
Monarch Season 2, episode 6 finally reveals why Hiroshi disappeared for a full year, before suddenly picking up his mission where he’d left off. We already knew he traveled from San Francisco to Alaska, where the trail went cold at an old Monarch outpost and the Randa kids stumbled upon an icy titan called a Frost Vark. We’d previously assumed Hiroshi left Alaska after repairing the radio at the Monarch base. But it turns out the truth is very different; Hiroshi instead traveled to another plane of existence.
The Monsterverse’s Titans create rifts (or “vile vortices”) to a realm called the Axis Mundi. This is something of a “world between worlds,” a plane that exists between Earth and the Hollow Earth, the place where monsters dwell. Crucially, the Axis Mundi is out of phase with reality – explaining why Lee was able to survive a hundred-foot drop, simply because gravity doesn’t work properly there.
Gravity isn’t the only thing, either. Time itself operates differently in the Axis Mundi; this time dilation is the reason early efforts to create or enter vile vortices tended to fail. We already know Lee was trapped for a couple of days, emerging 20 years later; Keiko Randa had an even more extreme experience, emerging to meet her adult grandchildren. It seems Hiroshi entered the Axis Mundi at Alaska, emerging a couple of days later – for him. In reality, he’d been gone for a year on Earth.
This finally explains why Hiroshi seemed like such a loose cannon, and even why he abandoned his families. He had no idea he’d been gone for a year; he thought it had just been a couple of days, and he headed to Alaska already believing they were safe. Suddenly his reaction to Cate and Kentaro makes a lot more sense, because he genuinely didn’t realize his families had assumed him dead.
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