Legendary PicturesThe fate of the Pacific Rim saga is one of the unsung tragedies of new-school sci-fi. The first film in the franchise, spearheaded by Guillermo del Toro, fused the director’s love for monsters with awe-inspiring scale. The result was a splice between kaiju movies and Gundam adventures. But rife with potential as it was, del Toro unfortunately couldn’t stick around to see his vision through. Pacific Rim: Uprising carried the torch with mixed results: it was essentially a legacy sequel, following a new generation of Jaeger pilots led by John Boyega’s Jake Pentecost. While characters from the original Pacific Rim — like Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), Newt Geiszler (Charlie Day), and Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) — do continue their stories, fans didn’t feel like they got the endings they deserved. Uprising on the whole felt like a completely different beast to the original Pacific Rim, a follow-up that most were eager to leave behind. The franchise’s potential ground to a halt after the release of the 2018 sequel... at least, on the big screen. Though del Toro probably won’t ever return to deliver his own gonzo vision for the battle between Kaiju and Jaegers, producers at Legendary Pictures are continuing the story with a weird (yet potentially wonderful) finale.The Kaiju are back for more in Pacific Rim: Final Breach. | Legendary ComicsThis May, Jake Pentecost’s adventures continue in a canon sequel comic, Pacific Rim: Final Breach. The son of Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) is still striving to end humanity’s battle against the Precursors, the alien race that’s been sending Kaiju through portals to destroy the Earth. Jake vowed to continue the fight at the end of Uprising, but Final Breach won’t force him to complete that mission alone. The comic series, written by Joshua Fialkov with art by E.J. Su, wisely teams Jake up with one of Pacific Rim’s original heroes, Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam). Raleigh was one of two co-protagonists in Pacific Rim, partnering with Mako to pilot the Jaeger Gipsy Danger. The duo came the closest to destroying the Precursors: they crossed through the breach into the Precursors’ universe (known as the Anteverse) to detonate the nuclear payload that should have ended the conflict for good. Though it didn’t actually work, that plan becomes the new foundation for Final Breach. Six years after Uprising, the Pan Pacific Defense Corps is trying to send new Jaegers into the breach to finish Raleigh and Mako’s work, but none of those attempts work. That’s partially because only Kaiju can pass through the breach into the Anteverse. Raleigh and Mako were only able to cross over by tricking the system... or, at least, so they thought.After over 10 years, we finally know what happened to Raleigh Becket. | Legendary ComicsFinal Breach rightly describes Raleigh as the only living human to survive behind enemy lines. (Mako would have been the other, if she hadn’t bit the dust in Uprising.) But the comic also reveals that neither he nor Mako returned to Earth scot-free. Their DNA was fundamentally altered by their time in the Anteverse; on paper, Raleigh might be more Kaiju than human. It’s the kind of twist that you’d sooner expect from del Toro himself, but it goes a long way in giving Final Breach a new lease on life. In this three-part series, Raleigh becomes the secret weapon in the ongoing fight against the Precursors. His return also allows the franchise to address some of its biggest missed opportunities and forge ahead with the parts of Uprising that actually worked. Fans have openly wondered what a partnership between Raleigh and Jake, the son of his old CO, would look like, and Final Breach builds a compelling tale on that hypothetical. Uprising’s most upsetting twist — Newt Geiszler’s strange villain turn — also gets some redemption in the first installment of Final Breach. It all will, ideally, culminate in the kind of resolution that fans might have deemed impossible: Legendary can’t fix all of the franchise’s mistakes, but Final Breach might cancel the apocalypse in more ways than one.Pacific Rim: Final Breach will release on May 5. It is currently available for pre-order.