What's the Deal with the Age of Kurt Russell's Character in ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’?

Monarch: Legacy of the Monsters, Apple TV+’s MonsterVerse series, released its third episode today (all of the Apple TV+ episodes are being released early for Thanksgiving). Right up front, I’m not a massive follower of the MonsterVerse — I’ve seen several of the films, but they all blur together — but I am enjoying Monarch. My indifference toward the films was that they were largely monster-driven, while the series uses the monsters sparingly but effectively while focusing more on the characters, most of whom I feel invested in already.

But there’s one issue that — although the series addresses it in this week’s episode — still bugs the hell out of me: The age of Kurt Russell’s character.

For those who aren’t watching, Monarch follows two timelines, one in the 1950s and another in 2015, the latter of which is the show’s main timeline. The 2015 timeline primarily concerns Cate Randa, an American who travels to Japan to settle family affairs. There, she discovers that her missing father, Hiroshi Randa, had another wife and child, Kentaro Randa (Ren Watabe). Half-siblings Kentaro and Cait reluctantly decide to work together to figure out more about their secretive father and, in doing so, discover that Hiroshi was in possession of important files that once belonged to their grandfather, Bill Randa (played by John Goodman in the 1973-set Kong: Skull Island). They recruit a hacker friend of Kentaro’s, May Olowe-Hewitt (Kiersey Clemons), to help them decrypt the files, but in doing so, attract the attention of the Monarch organization, which is dedicated to researching the world of monsters.

Meanwhile, back in the 1950s, cryptozoologist Bill Randa (the younger version of Goodman’s character played here by Anders Holms) and his future wife, scientist Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto), are the first to discover these monsters, along with Lee Shaw, their military escort and friend played by Wyatt Russell. Their discoveries led to the creation of Monarch, the same secret organization trying to retrieve Bill Randa’s files from Cait and Kentaro Randa in 2015.

Here’s where it gets confusing: In the third episode, to escape the Monarch Organization, Cait and Kentaro Randa elicit the help of the same Lee Shaw who helped found the Monarch Organization in the ’50s. Amusingly, the older Lee Shaw is played by Wyatt Russell’s father, Kurt Russell. The older Lee Shaw is essentially being kept under house arrest by the Monarch Organization, but he breaks free and searches for Hiro with Cait and Kentaro.

The thing is, Lee Shaw looks great for his age. And I’m not talking about Kurt Russell looking great for a 72-year-old. I’m talking about the fact that the character looks great for someone born in 1924. Kurt Russell’s 2015 character is 91 years old, but boy, he can get around. In one episode, he’s involved in a car chase and an airplane crash that would kill not just most 90-year-olds but all 90-year-olds.

It’s unclear if Lee Shaw’s youthful appearance for a 91-year-old will be explained beyond what Lee says in the third episode: “I am spry for my age.” It’s possible that Monarch is tossing logic out the door, and this is the only time the show will address his age. We may also later learn that Lee Shaw’s experience with the monsterverse has somehow allowed him to bypass the aging process.

Seventy-one-year-old John Goodman plays Bill Randa in 1973, while 72-year-old Kurt Russell plays a 91-year-old in 2015, yet the characters are around the same age. Goodman can pass for a man in his 50s. Russell cannot pass for a man in his 90s.

It’s not a dealbreaker for a series that’s been surprisingly fun and periodically intense, but trying to keep the timelines separate when the grandfather looks the same age as the father despite being separated by nearly a half-century is annoyingly distracting.