True to its title, this latest episode focuses squarely on the mystery of May’s backstory regarding her hacker past that landed her in deep water with a former employer: Applied Experimental Technologies. In a series of flashbacks, we find out she became dissatisfied by the nature of her work, her lack of agency in ownership of her own coding, and, as a final straw, the company’s Elon Musk-like torture of animals during research into cybernetic links. May, then living under her actual name Corah, made the rash decision to hack AET and destroy decades of their research with a few keyboard strokes, prompting her to give everything up and go into hiding in Japan under an alias. So when Cate and Kentaro initially came to her for help in decrypting the old Monarch files they found in the premiere, it turns out she’d only done so in an attempt to get herself out of trouble with AET. But she couldn’t have anticipated just how connected AET would be with one of Monarch’s biggest rivals — Apex Cybernetics.
It all clicks into place during one of the final scenes of the hour, when May’s old AET boss Brenda Holland (Dominique Tipper) retreats to her office and takes a call from a very important (and unseen) individual. Set up by Holland’s prior remark about the company going through a “rebranding” effort, her conversation reveals that the company has been taken over by (or merged with) Apex. The man on the other end is none other than Walter Simmons, the CEO played by Demián Bichir in “Godzilla vs. Kong,” who was chiefly responsible for the creation of Mechagodzilla.
In the span of just a few minutes, “Monarch” throws down the gauntlet and suggests an even deeper conspiracy to come.