Meet the Frost Vark Titan – the terrifying new creature awaiting Shaw’s team in the all-new episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, airing Wednesday, Nov. 22 on Apple TV+. As Lee Shaw, played by father/son duo Kurt and Wyatt Russell in the timeline-bending drama, leads his team on a dangerous mission to Alaska in search of Hiroshi Randa (Takehiro Hira), they come into contact with a brand new species straight from the Monsterverse. PopCulture.com has an exclusive sneak peek of the Frost Vark Titan’s dramatic debut, as well as exclusive insight from executive producer Matt Fraction on what went into building one of the monsters at the heart of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
“Conceptually, we wanted to find a way to present a new kind of Titan/Superspecies/Megafauna from the Monsterverse that could be a different kind of scary and dangerous than we’d seen so far in the show,” Fraction told PopCulture. With author Milla Bell-Hart dialing into the “man vs. nature” aspect of Shaw and his team “stranded in a hostile environment they cannot survive” and being stalked by a new creature trying to kill them, the creative team “dialed into the ‘Jaws’ idea of the unseen predator complicating an endurance and survival story.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
Something under the permafrost that remains unseen until it suddenly bursts up from below “felt cool and scary and new and like a different flavor of Titan to us,” Fraction explained. When it came to the look of the Frost Vark, Fraction said the idea was to build off of the Monsterverse’s mythology of having a realistic inspiration to “Titan-ize.” That inspiration came in the form of the “ultra-creepy and bizarre” star-nosed mole, as well as the armored pangolin with its plating and digging claws. Add a bit of bioluminescence, exaggerate the face and make it more terrifying? You’ve got the Frost Vark Titan.
Fraction pointed out that adopting Toho’s methodology of thinking about the monsters not as monsters or “natural disasters with faces” but as characters with their own motivations leads to one of his “favorite” bits of behavior with the Frost Vark, the start of which can be seen in PopCulture’s sneak peek of the episode. “When it gets fed up with the plane, it kinda stomps on it like a frustrated kid that’s angry with a broken toy then turns its attentions to our cast,” he teased. “It’s a great little bit of physical behavior that not only makes it intimidating and ferocious, but communicates it hasn’t found what it’s looking for yet and, more frightening than that, maybe we don’t know what it’s actually looking for…”
Balancing all the thought that goes into building the monsters of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters with the human aspects was vital for Fraction and the rest of the creative team. “What we wanted to do was build a compelling story around complicated, messy, human characters, then send them on their way through a world where everyone knew Godzilla was real and Titans exist,” he told PopCulture. “My co-creator Chris Black and I both felt that we could never hope to compete with the scale of the feature films, but, at the same time, TV maybe shouldn’t even try.”
“Movies are spectacles, they’re meant to be seen with crowds in theaters we buy tickets for and watch on the biggest screen possible,” he continued. “TV is a thing you invite into your home week to week and to do that, I think the root has to be characters you want to spend time with. So it all started with the human cast and their very messy, painfully complicated, and morally complicated problems set against, then driven straight into the heart of the Monsterverse.” Don’t miss an all-new episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, airing on Wednesday, Nov. 22 on Apple TV+.
