Cate heads to Japan to settle her father's affairs, only to find he was living a double life.
Tropes:
- Action Prologue: The opening scene of the show is about William "Bill" Randa in the 1973 expedition, running away from Mother Longlegs, then witnessing a short, but epic battle between her and another titan called Mantleclaw.
- Apocalyptic Log: Bill records a video for his family in case he doesn't make it off the island, though the Mother Longlegs is ultimately distracted and then drowned by a Mantleclaw hiding on the cliff.
- Area of Effect: Played With. As Shaw and the Randas get closer to the abandoned power plant where the Endoswarmers are nesting, they cross the threshold from an irradiated area with live vegetation to a radiation-free area (due to the Endoswarmers feeding) where the trees are all long dead, with the power plant visible roughly in the epicenter.
- Behemoth Battle: Mother Longlegs chases Bill to the edge of the island, where a Mantleclaw is disturbed by the intrusion and immediately turns its attention to the other monster.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The Mother Longlegs, a gigantic spider partially made of bamboo, chases Bill through the forest.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: One of the photos in the Monarch files is of Bigfoot, suggesting the cryptid is actually real. Then again, given they're no better at taking photos of the stealthy creature, perhaps they were just following up on rumors.
- Big "NO!":
- Cate lets out a couple heart-rending Big No's when the busfull of schoolkids plummets in front of her.
- And again at Hiroshi when he lets her down in the aftermath of G-Day in one of the most emotionally-traumatic ways he could have.
- Bilingual Backfire: Cate only seems to know English, but eventually reveals she can speak Japanese fluently and just chooses not to. Hiroshi had been insulting her to her face in Japanese assuming she didn't understand, and is taken aback by the reveal that she does.
- Broken Tears: A little downplayed, but Cate's eyes are brimming with tears when she finishes recounting how she last saw her father in the wake of G-Day.
- Bus Full of Innocents: Darkly subverted. There is a schoolbus full of kids balanced on the collapsing Golden Gate Bridge, but no-one saves it. Cate only manages to get a handful of children out before the rest go into the river.
- Cooldown Hug: Emiko gives Cate one when she's having a full-blown panic attack in the subway shelter.
- Crowd Panic: A relatively (emphasis on relatively) orderly one occurs when the new Titan warning system goes off in Tokyo and everyone starts rushing off the streets into the designated subway shelter.
- Curiosity Is a Crapshoot: The Bad kind. Ultimately, approaching and accidentally disturbing the Endoswarmer nest gets Keiko seemingly killed despite Bill and Lee's best efforts. In fact, Lee and Bill got into an argument before directly approaching the nest about whether it was worth getting a sample for research or leaving well alone out of caution.
- Death Glare: Emiko gives Cate a pretty impressive one at one point when the truth about her late husband's double life comes out.
- Distant Prologue: The opening scene of the show is a flashback of William "Bill" Randa on Skull Island, running away from a Mother Longlegs, as he records a videotape he hopes will be discovered after his possible demise. The flashback takes place in 1973, whereas the plot takes place after the battle of San Francisco.
- Empty Promise: In the flashback to G-Day, Cate tells the children on the Bus Full of Innocents that it's okay to try and calm them while she's trying to get them all off the bus. Moments later, the bus falls to its doom with most of the kids still onboard.
- Flat-Earth Atheist: The taxi driver who picks Cate up from the airport believes that the events of G-Day over on the U.S. West Coast were all faked using CGI and that no-one really died. As he says this, he and his charge are driving by and talking about the long-range ballistic rocket launchers that the Japanese government have had mounted in urban Tokyo in the last year, never mind all the other little changes to everyday life and establishments to signify how the world has changed. Cate is about as disbelieving as the audience, and it's clear this guy's beliefs are very much in the minority.
- Futile Hand Reach: Cate when the Bus Full of Innocents falls to its doom.
- Gas Mask Mooks:
- Even if Monarch aren't technically evil, the gas masks and black gear that their soldiers wear in Cate's flashback to G-Day, while coldly documenting the destruction and ignoring a distressed Cate's cries for help as they walk right around her, certainly help to cement Cate's bleak view and expectations of the organization.
- In the 50s plotline, Keiko removes her gas mask and has Bill and Lee do likewise when they startle a Kazakh boy with a rifle, in order to defy the psychological intimidation effect that this trope has.
- Giant Footprint Reveal: Played With. One of the photos on Randa's files is of Keiko standing inside a giant Titan footprint revealed two episodes later to have been created by Godzilla, smiling and posing for the photo.
- Gut Feeling: Lee has a bad feeling about approaching the Endoswarmers, despite Keiko and Bill both being more confident that it's okay. It turns out Lee's gut was right.
- Hates Their Parent: Cate is bitter towards her father Hiroshi—who was often busy with work, or so he claimed—for having abandoned her and her mother in the wake of G-Day to go on a trip to Alaska that seemingly got him killed. Finding out he had a secret second family on top of this does little to improve her opinion of him, and she's rude and standoffish towards Hiroshi and Emiko as a result.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: The Mantleclaw is burrowed into the top of the cliff that Bill Randa runs along while fleeing the Mother Longlegs, and only reveals itself to confront the other kaiju.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Hiroshi assumes Cate doesn't speak Japanese and uses this to insult her. Meanwhile, his mother Emiko isn't very fluent in English, and doesn't understand Cate's scathing remarks are insults.
- Infant Immortality: Brutally averted. While Cate manages to get a few of the kids on her school bus off, a flying piece of debris jostles the precariously-hanging bus and causes it (still filled with a good number of screaming kids) to fall into the ocean below.
- Living a Double Life: Cate learns Hiroshi has a second family in Japan, assuming the keys she had were just to an apartment he was leasing while working there. Hiroshi's other wife Emiko and their son Hiroshi are just as shocked to discover he had a second family in America.
- Mutual Kill: The Mother Longlegs stabs the Mantleclaw before it in turns rolls them both into the ocean, the latter definitely unable to swim.
- Never Found the Body: Hiroshi is presumed dead after his bush plane disappeared in a storm over Alaska, though neither wreckage nor a body was found.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Remember in the 2014 film where Godzilla had no intention of breaking through the Golden Gate Bridge, and was trying to find a way to get through, and the Navy shot at him and kept shooting him in a panic? We actually see several cars plummet to their deaths, and Cate's schoolbus of children dies falling to their deaths in the San Francisco Bay.
- No Escape but Down: Subverted. Bill is cornered on a cliff edge, but chooses to throw his bag full of research rather than jump himself to escape the Mother Longlegs. The Mantleclaw then emerges and takes care of that problem for him.
- Not Wanting Kids Is Weird: Downplayed. Keiko expresses surprise when Lee comments that he doesn't intend on having kids, mainly because, she says, he used to entertain the idea of parenthood.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Slightly downplayed. Cate makes several attempts to crack Hiroshi's safe by inputting the birthdays of herself and other people close to him. Ultimately, the real passcode is found by mixing and matching the days and months in Cate's, Kentaro's and their respective mothers' birthdays — once Cate applies this logic, she gets the right mix-and-match of the four birthdays on the first try.
- Secret Other Family: Coming to the apartment in Tokyo where her father stayed, Cate is rocked to find a woman and a son her own age living there with photos of her father. She soon realizes her dad had been cheating on her mother for years and lying about it. Meanwhile, Emiko and Kentaro are just as shocked to learn that Hiroshi had another family in America.
- Take My Hand!: Lee tries to grab Keiko as the Endoswarmers climb up her legs, but Bill loses his grip before Lee can do so.
- Take That!: Cate's taxi driver in Tokyo who murmurs about San Francisco being a hoax and offers his podcast on it is a very clear one to other conspiracy theorists who deny disasters as being set ups. Note
- Tracking Device: The Monarch files, even outdated as they are, contain markers that are designed to ping home base if accessed without authorization. This leads Tim to discover that they're in Tokyo.
- Uncertain Doom: The fight between Mantleclaw and the Mother Longlegs ends with them both falling off the cliff into Skull Island's sea and they don't resurface, leaving it unknown if either of them drowned or if one or both of them killed the other underwater.
