Monarch: Legacy of Monsters teases Keiko’s death in the very first episode. However, she miraculously returns in the ninth episode.
In 1959, Keiko, Billy, and Lee chase a radiation in Kazakhstan that brings them to the nursery of a new species of MUTO, Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism.
Keiko’s adamancy to get closer to the nursery and collect a sample of the species’ genetic material sees her taking a risk.
Soon, the eggs start hatching, and the little insects that come out of them chase Lee and Keiko, who have come down to collect samples. Keiko fails to get back up in time and meets her end in Kazakhstan.
In 2015, Cate’s group discovers a file on Keiko that claims that she is missing and presumed dead.
Miraculously, during the ninth episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Keiko shows up to save Cate, who fell into a rift and came to Hollow Earth.
Keiko’s survival
In the eighth episode, Lee returns to Kazakhstan to close the portal to the Hollow Earth that exists there at a Monarch outpost.
Lee succeeds, but in the process of saving each other, Cate, Lee, and May fall into the rift that exists there, and they arrive in Hollow Earth.
Similar to Cate, May, and Lee, who all fell into the portal or rift there, Keiko also fell into the same portal in 1959 and arrived in Hollow Earth. She didn’t get killed by the species that lived there.
Keiko’s age
The ninth episode also explores Monarch’s first attempt to enter Hollow Earth in 1962 through Operation Hourglass.
Monarch aimed to understand whether a world existed beneath them by sending four individuals down through a rift that they had discovered.
Among the four individuals who were sent into the rift, only Lee survived and returned, but 20 years later, in 1982.
Even Lee was of the same age as he was in 1962 when he returned to Earth. Time works differently in Hollow Earth, and that explains why Keiko hasn’t aged either.
However, Keiko will have a lot to catch up to, as it’s been more than 50 decades since she disappeared in 1959.
Also Read: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’s timeline in MonsterVerse explained