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Godzilla, Kong, Gamera & Co.: The Kaiju Mega-Thread

A Delta Triangle type deal…with Baku thrown in?

In Hollow Earth, life is also perhaps more ideal than it is here.
 
Dammit... hearing all you guys being so positive about this show has me hoping for a physical media release. I don't want to get another streaming service just for one show.
 
I don't want to get another streaming service just for one show.

I've been taking advantage of my AppleTV subscription to watch Ron Moore's For All Mankind, the alternate-history NASA series with several Trek veterans on staff including David Weddle & Bradley Thompson, Joe Menosky, and Michael & Denise Okuda as tech consultants. It's pretty good, and I love seeing an SF show that gets space physics right and uses it as a story driver (aside from ignoring lightspeed time lag for dramatic convenience), though I'm finding some of the character-arc choices in season 2 unsatisfying. (It's a weird coincidence that two of the Apple shows I've watched in the past week have had episodes involving ants as a plot point.)

I'm also planning to check out Foundation, but I decided that before I watch it, I should finally do what I've been putting off since the 1990s and do a re-read of Asimov's entire Robots-Empire-Foundation sequence in chronological order. I know the show has very little in common with the books, but I want to refresh my memory of the books so I can compare, and I figured that if I was going to re-read the Foundation books, I should read the whole sequence and check that box off my bucket list at last. (I'm not sure I've ever actually read my copy of Forward the Foundation. I think I bought it in the '90s, put it on the shelf planning to get to it as part of a full chronological read-through, then never actually found the time for the read-through.) Although going from Robots and Empire straight into The Stars, Like Dust (which is what I'm currently up to) just underlines how imperfect Asimov's attempt to retroactively graft three separate series into one continuity was.

I tried watching Apple's reboot of the PBS Ghostwriter educational series, which I was a fan of in its original run even though I was way older than its preteen target audience. But I find it disappointing. It's not bad, but it's too different from the original show, which was about a team of kids who solved mysteries with the help of a ghostly entity that communicated only in writing. The new Ghostwriter has a broader set of telekinetic and magic powers of which writing is only a small part, and the main gimmick is that she (?) can bring characters from classic literature to life in the real world, either as actors or celebrity-voiced CGI characters, though only the main cast of kids can see and hear them. It feels more like Wishbone than Ghostwriter. I liked the original show because it used its mysteries to teach kids research and library skills, problem-solving, and critical thinking; the new one just seems to be about introducing kids to classic literature, which isn't a bad thing to do, but it feels elementary in comparison. And at least judging from the opening 2-parter, it's not a mystery series the way the original was, more just a character drama.

Other than those, I don't see much else on Apple to hold my interest. I'll probably drop it in a couple of months and switch back to something else.
 
I've been taking advantage of my AppleTV subscription to watch Ron Moore's For All Mankind, the alternate-history NASA series with several Trek veterans on staff including David Weddle & Bradley Thompson, Joe Menosky, and Michael & Denise Okuda as tech consultants. It's pretty good, and I love seeing an SF show that gets space physics right and uses it as a story driver (aside from ignoring lightspeed time lag for dramatic convenience), though I'm finding some of the character-arc choices in season 2 unsatisfying. (It's a weird coincidence that two of the Apple shows I've watched in the past week have had episodes involving ants as a plot point.)

I'm also planning to check out Foundation, but I decided that before I watch it, I should finally do what I've been putting off since the 1990s and do a re-read of Asimov's entire Robots-Empire-Foundation sequence in chronological order. I know the show has very little in common with the books, but I want to refresh my memory of the books so I can compare, and I figured that if I was going to re-read the Foundation books, I should read the whole sequence and check that box off my bucket list at last. (I'm not sure I've ever actually read my copy of Forward the Foundation. I think I bought it in the '90s, put it on the shelf planning to get to it as part of a full chronological read-through, then never actually found the time for the read-through.) Although going from Robots and Empire straight into The Stars, Like Dust (which is what I'm currently up to) just underlines how imperfect Asimov's attempt to retroactively graft three separate series into one continuity was.

I tried watching Apple's reboot of the PBS Ghostwriter educational series, which I was a fan of in its original run even though I was way older than its preteen target audience. But I find it disappointing. It's not bad, but it's too different from the original show, which was about a team of kids who solved mysteries with the help of a ghostly entity that communicated only in writing. The new Ghostwriter has a broader set of telekinetic and magic powers of which writing is only a small part, and the main gimmick is that she (?) can bring characters from classic literature to life in the real world, either as actors or celebrity-voiced CGI characters, though only the main cast of kids can see and hear them. It feels more like Wishbone than Ghostwriter. I liked the original show because it used its mysteries to teach kids research and library skills, problem-solving, and critical thinking; the new one just seems to be about introducing kids to classic literature, which isn't a bad thing to do, but it feels elementary in comparison. And at least judging from the opening 2-parter, it's not a mystery series the way the original was, more just a character drama.

Other than those, I don't see much else on Apple to hold my interest. I'll probably drop it in a couple of months and switch back to something else.
Try Severance.
 
See is fantastic, and I haven't watched it yet, but Hello Tomorrow looks really good.
My mom and I watched the Tom Hanks movie Finch and it was really good.
 
They're gonna need to explain this new plot twist (that we all knew was coming) because it doesn't line up with when they do it in the movies.
 
Best Buy will give you three months of Apple TV for free on their website.

If you're a Target Circle user, there's another three months under their Partner program.

If you have a PS4 or PS5 and set up your account on there, they're also giving you three months. This may have to be done first. Don't know if you can get free months this way if you've already done free months.

And if it says you've maxed out on codes, just make another account.
 
I went from 6 month free trial from sky to a 3 month one from my new iPhone. Apple TV is the only one you don’t need to buy. :)

I assume the place they are in is different from the one in Godzilla vs Kong since they wouldn’t be able to get there from the strong gravity changes.
As soon as they said there was a time dilation I knew Keiko was alive. I don’t expect her to be the Green Arrow though.
 
I was puzzled by something in this week's Monarch episode, and in mulling it over, I had an epiphany about what might happen in the remaining two episodes.
I was wondering how Cate, May, and Shaw could fall into the Hollow Earth in 2015 if it was still an unconfirmed theory in KOTM in 2018. Then I remembered the mystery of how Shaw is some 20-25 years younger than he should be. What if time moves differently in the Hollow Earth, and when the characters get out, they'll have jumped forward to after KOTM, so there's no discrepancy? The conjecture above about the show jumping forward to the present day may have been right after all.

More than that: If Shaw fell into the rift in 1959 and jumped forward in time 20 or more years, that would put him at least 6 years after Kong: Skull Island, which is just right if they wanted to tie into that movie's events, maybe even bring back Corey Hawkins as Houston Brooks, who would tie into the whole Bill Randa connection and the Hollow Earth stuff. If they do, I hope they also bring back Joe Morton as the present-day Brooks.

Of course, this also raises the possibility that Keiko Randa will turn out to be alive somehow in the Hollow Earth and the older Shaw will get to reconnect with her.

Well, I guessed mostly right. Shaw was lost in '62 rather than '59, but there's no Brooks. Also, I was thinking that Shaw would be lost along with Keiko in '59 and that's why Monarch didn't know about the Hollow Earth being real until decades later. Instead, it turns out they knew more about the phenomenon in 1962 than they were shown knowing in 2018 in King of the Monsters, but apparently it all got classified and buried after the disastrous test and the shutdown of Monarch. As with so much prequel fiction, the characters’ premature knowledge of something not supposed to be known about for decades is handwaved as the result of a coverup.

One other thing was easy to guess in advance: the part of the Hollow Earth they fell into looks remarkably like the forest outside Vancouver.

It took me a while to realize that the kindly nurse who took care of Shaw in 1982 was Emiko, Kentaro's future mother. I realized it when Hiroshi, her future husband, brought her the flowers and talked with her. So she wasn't as clueless about Monarch as she seemed.
 
So Shaw seemed to have barely spent any time in Hollow Earth and returned 20 years later... Keiko has been there almost 60 years and doesn't look much older.

Makes me wonder why we had no time difference stuff resulting from hollow Earth in the movies.
 
Makes me wonder why we had no time difference stuff resulting from hollow Earth in the movies.

Hmm, yeah, I guess the Hollow Earth scenes in GvK ran simultaneously with the surface scenes, so they'd have to be in sync.

Well, the description on Apple TV for the finale says the characters try to get out of Axis Mundi, not the Hollow Earth. And we don't see the weird opposite-surfaces topography we saw in GvK. So I suspect Axis Mundi isn't the actual Hollow Earth but some kind of transitional zone between the worlds, and maybe it's only there that time runs slower.
 
Yeah, it has to be something different since they mention in GvK that its impossible to enter the Hollow Earth due to the gravimetric forces,
 
Yeah, it has to be something different since they mention in GvK that its impossible to enter the Hollow Earth due to the gravimetric forces,

But that was specifically addressed here. The barrier was usually impassable except when Titans passed through, which was why they tried "drafting" behind a Titan as a way in. And it still crashed the capsule and caused a catastrophic magnetic or gravitational implosion at the drop site. So it's clearly meant to be the same barrier. What I'm saying is that the destination might be some kind of intermediate limbo, that they didn't make it all the way to the H.E. "Axis Mundi" is from ancient Latin, the axis that connected Earth to the celestial sphere, so it's used to refer to things in mythology and religion that connect the Earth to the heavens. That implies it's the name for a connecting nexus between Earth and Hollow Earth.
 
I wonder if the time dilation is caused from the immense gravimetric distortions. Like seen in one of my favourite Stargate episodes.
HAMMOND
I just came from there myself, Captain. Colonel Cromwell, I believe.

CROMWELL

(salutes)

General Hammond.

O'NEILL

(incredulous)

You just came from Washington, sir?

HAMMOND
There and back again. After someone upstairs managed to explain what was going on to me, we called an all-night session with the President and the Joint Chiefs. I've been gone nearly eighteen hours.

O'NEILL

(dryly)

I thought you were on the phone.
 
I wonder if the time dilation is caused from the immense gravimetric distortions.

Unlikely. Gravitational time dilation is weak compared to its depictions in fiction, and it takes an enormously intense gravitational field for it to become significant. For gravitational time dilation to be that severe, the gravity would probably have to be at black hole levels and nothing could survive it.

Although, of course, this is fiction, in a universe that already plays wildly fast and loose with physics and common sense, so anything is possible.
 
NOTE: I thought I posted this last night, but I apparently forgot to hit the post button. Rather that rewriting it, I'm just going to post it as is.
IGN has exclusive preview images from tomorrow's episode of Monarch, along with some comments from co-creator Chris Black.
The Brambleboar looks pretty cool, and I like that the gave them their own little corner of the Hollow Earth to play in.

New post:
Yeah the time thing with Hollow Earth here isn't really making sense. We didn't see it in GvK, and if just the few minyutes Lee was in HE sent him form '62 to '82, then May, Lee, and Cate would have to be decades ahead of Earth by now. And then we have an unaged Keiko at the end. I'm curious if they're going to off some kind of explanation for all of this next week or if it's something we're just going to have to ignore. I'm curious if Hiroshi spent down their too.
As someone who loves pigs, I got a big kick out of the Brambleboar.
I'm curious what convinced the DoD to continue Monarch after they shut it down here. Did Bill actually go through with his threat to call up a Titan? We've already seen them use the Titan bait twice, so he's got pretty obvious way to do it.
I was a little surprised Kentaro didn't even consider the idea of them having ended up in the Hollow Earth, and just took Tim and Verdugo's word that they were dead.
One other thing was easy to guess in advance: the part of the Hollow Earth they fell into looks remarkably like the forest outside Vancouver.
According to the article in my link it was Oregon, not Vancouver.
 
I'm curious what convinced the DoD to continue Monarch after they shut it down here.

Well, if my memory isn't letting me down, wasn't Monarch basically a sad shell of itself at the beginning of Kong: Skull Island? With Randa going door to door with Congressmen trying to beg for any funding he could get? Presumably, then, this incident is what leaves the organization in such dire straights. And Kong is what puts them back on the map.
 
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