The following contains spoilers for the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 finale.Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ second season wraps up with a monster-sized face-off between Kong and Titan X on Skull Island, another appearance from Lee’s past self, an emotional split between Cate and Kentaro, and the dramatic rescue of a stolen Titan egg. The finale wraps up most of the season’s outstanding plot threads, but it also sets plenty of new stories in motion, including the establishment of a secret Monarch division (in a literal basement) that’s charged with the top secret task of locating Kentaro and Apex’s Isabel Simmons, who are determined to find a way to Axis Mundi…and potentially a still-alive version of Hiroshi Randa. But with Titan X and its egg safely returned through the rift, and the threat of imminent disaster averted, fans will most likely be focused on the finale’s coda, a moment that reveals the first Monarch appearance of another very familiar kaiju: Rodan.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});“It was an evolving conversation of what our big reveal for the coda was going to be, and do we know where it’s going? [Rodan] ended up being a pitch at some point,” Monarch’s VFX Supervisor Sean Konrad tells Den of Geek. “I don’t want to say when I found out specifically, but it was a really interesting [conversation]. And that ended up being one of the last things we shot. We were shooting in Thailand, and I think it was our last day with Kurt [Russell, who plays Lee Shaw]. We were looking around for a location with a vantage point, with a nice reverse, so we could shoot something. It took a long time to find it, but we ended up at a perfect spot. Even though a lot of that view over to the volcano is digital.”Given that Legacy of Monsters takes place in the gap between the films Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, this is technically our first sighting of Rodan in the Monsterverse timeline. Here, the giant pterosaur-like Titan is nesting in a volcano in what appears to be Thailand — an intriguing development given that, by the time of King of the Monsters, Rodan is contained in Mexico. But, visually, the creature looks essentially the same. “This Rodan is basically the same monster from Godzilla: King of the Monsters. And I love that design,” Konrad says. “So we didn’t really want to touch it, but it’s an ongoing thing, as you’re telling a story, you always find new details in an asset that need improving or working on, or other stories you can tell with them. While we didn’t do a lot with Rodan in this case, the company that took that work on, [Rodeo FX], they did change things a little bit, but it was more to make the rendering of it a little bit more efficient.”Viewers were likely a bit surprised to see how little Godzilla features in Monarch’s second season. The giant lizard only appears twice in season 2, first during a sixth episode dream sequence that sees the creature destroy Tokyo, and again during its penultimate hour, which sees Godzilla and Titan X face off. And, according to Konrad, that minimalism is on purpose.“When Godzilla shows up, it’s on. But there’s only so many sorts of big, action-y moments you can really do with Godzilla,” he says. “A lot of those moments have been done, like Godzilla on the ropes in 2014, looking at the soldiers on the ground like they’re ants. And then, Godzilla doesn’t quite understand humanity in the way that Kong does. So there’s less you can really do without starting to violate what the canon of the character is. But I always like a Godzilla scene. I always like those challenges.”Instead of Godzilla, the mysterious Titan X takes center stage for much of season 2, a new monster that, from its earliest moments, seems quite different from many of the other creatures we’ve met in this universe, from its more demonstrative and expressive demeanor to its actively maternal tendencies. “It’s a lot of the same premise of Star Trek, for instance, where [Gene] Roddenberry has this rule about how every alien needs to have eyes so you can empathize with them,” Konrad says. “I think their eyes end up being a really important part of Titan X and in the visual filmmaking language, we use a lot of close-ups of the eye to give a lot of emotionality to [the creature].”Konrad and his team employed many visual cues in the creation of Titan X to help convey the breadth of the creature’s expressions and feelings. “While the face itself may not have a ton of range of motion, we figure out what the most empathetic angles were for it,” he continues. “In the same way that if you, say, shoot a person from below, they’re going to look a bit more heroic, or they might look dominating. You shoot somebody from above, they’re automatically a bit meeker or smaller. So you get the camera up above and suddenly she starts looking a little bit more empathetic. You tilt the head a certain way, and she starts to look a little bit more empathetic. Or you can go in the opposite direction and really take the lip and expose more teeth, and suddenly she starts to look a little bit more fearsome. We really wanted to design all those aspects into it.”Given that much of Titan X’s behavior is motivated by its quest to protect its egg, it was also important to acknowledge that, at least to some recognizable degree, the creature is female and a mother. “We didn’t want to overdo the gender binary feminine look of Titan X, either, because what is the notion of that [for these creatures]?” Konrad says. “But a thing that I looked at a little bit was the alien queen [from Alien] and the literalness of the crown in that design. The normal alien is basically just a giant phallus, but they subvert it for the queen by making it more of a crown. Those kinds of ideas are what informed us as we were doing this — we gave her very pronounced eyelashes, for example. Those are very subtle things that I don’t think the audience necessarily notices or reads — things you’re not conscious of, but then retroactively become conscious of as the story reveals itself, is kind of what we were going for.”With the reveal of Rodan at the conclusion of the finale, it’s clear that Monarch isn’t done bringing some of its biggest monsters to the small screen. “I always question whether or not I should answer those kinds of things,” Konrad laughs when asked if there’s a particular creature or kaiju he’d be most excited to bring into this universe. “It’s just so tricky because you’re like… just by saying something, does that suddenly lead the audience to [assume that’s happening]? But I worked on Godzilla 2014, and bringing Godzilla into the world in this way was really exciting. There’s always a million other creatures from the canon that I think are really interesting. I love all my children equally… But I always wonder about how you could update, like, Ebirah, which a lot of people hate as a design. I’m always curious about the ones that would be really hard to do.” All 10 episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 are available to stream on Apple TV.The post Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ VFX Supervisor on the Debut of Another Familiar Kaiju and Humanizing Titan X appeared first on Den of Geek.