The group starts the search for Hiroshi.
Tropes:
- Abandoned Camp Ruins: After landing in Alaska, Lee, Du-Ho, Cate, Kentaro, and May find the wreckage of Hiroshi Randa's plane alongside an abandoned research tent.
- Ace Pilot: Du-Ho lets Lee Shaw take the wheel of the plane when they fly into the storm where Hiroshi Randa's plane went missing, assuring Cate, Kentaro, and May that Lee is the best pilot he knows.
- Age Cut: Inverted by the Match Cut dissolve from old Shaw in the present to young Shaw in 1954.
- Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: The nuclear bomb used for the Castle Bravo test had a blast yield of 15 megatons — a much larger explosion than what's shown in the episode. At the distance they are from the blast, the characters should've been swept away by the shockwave or other effects of the bomb's detonation.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Downplayed. Despite her cold, Terminator-like exterior, Duvall sticks her neck out for Tim in front of Deputy Director Natalia Verdugo so that she can keep her partner with her.
- Big "YES!": Bill Randa shouts out a loud "Yes" in joy when the 1950s trio believe that they've gotten the U.S. military's support to bait Godzilla out with uranium for study.
- Canon Discontinuity: The episode firmly decanonizes the events of Godzilla: Awakening, depicting a completely different version of what happened with Godzilla and the Castle Bravo tests.
- Cliffhanger: After Du-Ho is killed by the Frost Vark, it turns to the protagonists, now with no means of escape or shelter.
- Distinction Without a Difference: Discussed by Kate and Shaw on the plane. Shaw attempts to convince her that her father's double life with Monarch was a secret, not a lie, prompting her to counter with this exact phrase. The scene immediately after this shows his reasoning; after sharing the existence of Titans with the military directly led to the attempt to nuke Godzilla, he, Keiko and Randa reason that they're not lying if they withhold information about Titan discoveries, they are just keeping a secret.
- Dramatic Irony: Shaw, Bill, Keiko and Puckett all assume that exploding Castle Bravo point blank in Godzilla's face kills him, whereas the audience is well aware of just how easily he can withstand the blast.
- General Ripper: After Lee Shaw informs him that the Titan that made the giant footprint—revealed to be Godzilla—is a threat to global security and that Keiko and Bill want to bait it with a significant amount of uranium, General Puckett sets up the Castle Bravo nuclear test to kill it. When Shaw relays Keiko and Bill's protests, General Puckett sneers that he should've been more specific about what form he wanted the uranium in, that Shaw was the one who called the Titan a threat to global secrutiy, and that Puckett's superiors were the ones who gave the order to kill it.
- An Ice Person: The Frost Vark is a smallish ice dwelling sub-titan that can breathe out a freezing breath capable of killing a person in seconds.
- Idiot Ball: Shaw, Keiko and Randa are probably the only ones who don't see Puckett's attempt to nuke Godzilla coming. They reveal to the U.S. military general that a 400-foot giant, prehistoric monster is roaming around the world somewhere, they spell out to the general's face that the creature could be an existential threat to global security unlike anything mankind has faced before, and they request as much uranium as was originally dropped on Japan from the military to deal with the creature. Who ever could have seen the military sending the uranium in monster-killing bomb form coming?
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Humorously enforced and subverted. When the plane hits a turbulent storm, Lee has Cate fish out a clear bottle which Du-Ho keeps "in case of emergencies", and he tells her to take a "big" swig out of it, telling her that she'll need it. Except it isn't alcohol, it's just water, and Lee only needed the bottle half-empty so that he can use it on the dashboard as an altitude indicator.
- Ironic Echo: General Puckett repeats Lee's "They're an existential threat to global security" to justify why the uranium he asked for was sent in bomb form to kill Godzilla, rather than to simply lure him.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Deputy Director Natalia Verdugo doesn't pull her punches much when chiding Tim for gallivanting after Bill Randa's files on his and Duvall's own without getting clearance or telling any higher-ups, but nothing she says is wrong at all, and she's right to scold him for his unprofessional and un-orderly conduct which has arguably exacerbated the situation.
- Language Barrier: Lee when he ends up talking to the wrong customs officer in South Korea. Apparently, the customs officer doesn't speak English and Lee doesn't speak Korean. Given Du-Ho's presence, however, he may simply have been playing it up to get himself arrested.
- Like a Son to Me: Lee quite passionately says as much about his honorary nephew Hiroshi, and that it's the reason he's invested in helping May and the Randas find out what happened to him.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Bill and Keiko are horrified that their and Lee's decision to present the U.S. military with hard proof of a gigantic Titan's existence prompted the military to seemingly wipe it off the face of the Earth before they even knew if it was an active threat. Subverted, as the audience knows that Godzilla survives the military's atomic bombing none worse for wear (and might have even been strengthened by it in the long term), and the military are so horrified by the existence of Titans that they afterwards grant Monarch the unlimited funding it needs to operate globally on the scale that it does by the 21st century.
- Not So Stoic: May, who up until now has been calm, composed and semi-apathetic, tears into Kentaro in a moment of vulnerability over him getting her involved with the Randa family drama which has put her on the run and, she thinks, has upended her life.
- Nuke 'em: Puckett has zero hesitation in nuking Godzilla and after Bravo is detonated calls it magnificent, having no idea Godzilla would not only survive but be barely inconvenienced.
- Oh, Crap!: Du-Ho freaks out and immediately makes a beeline back for his own plane the moment he sees the Frost Vark's claw-marks in the destroyed plane's fuselage and realizes that there's a giant, plane-downing monster up on the Alaskan mountain with the cast.
- Perpetual Storm: Implied. After Cate mentioned in Episode 1 that Hiroshi's missing plane disappeared in a storm in Alaska, Du-Ho's plane when pinpointing that location hits a turbulent lightning-storm, which requires Lee Shaw to use his ace piloting skills to get them through it in one piece. And when they come out on the storm's other side, they very quickly come upon the Frost Vark's remote territory, which is also where Hiroshi's plane has been all this time.
- Scientist vs. Soldier: The scientific-minded Bill Randa and Keiko Miura, though aware of and acknowledging Godzilla's power discrepancy and the potential threat, want to at least study the creature and determine his place in the world before jumping to any conclusions about how to deal with him. General Puckett and the military, however, want to kill Godzilla with an atom bomb first and ask questions later, panicking at the thought of what such a creature could do if it ever approaches human settlements in the U.S.. Shaw, a soldier who's allied with Bill and Keiko, is more on the fence about the matter, but he tries to talk General Puckett out of it.
- Series Continuity Error:
- A mild one. Dr. Graham's wording in Godzilla (2014) indicated that most if not all of the atomic bomb tests in the early 1950s were geared towards trying to kill Godzilla. This episode, however, implies that the iconic Bikini Atoll test in 1954 was the first if not sole attempt geared towards ending a Titan's life.
- Graham also notes that the military first became aware of Godzilla thanks to an incident with a nuclear submarine. Here, no mention of this is made, and the first evidence discovered of his existence is a footprint.
- Another mild example, the scene where the military attempts to blow up Godzilla differs from the opening of Godzilla (2014) which showed the bomb going off just as Godzilla is rising out of the water while in the episode Godzilla rises fully out of the water and has time to roar and curiously observe the bomb before it detonates.
- Shout-Out: To We Need to Talk About Kevin, when Shaw jokingly reassures Kentaro that there was no Troubling Unchildlike Behavior to indicate Hiroshi was a budding monster when Shaw watched him growing up, listing things that the titular child sociopath of the movie did: "He didn't torture small animals, no issues potty training."
- Small Role, Big Impact: Not only is General Puckett the military figure who ordered the nuclear strike on Godzilla at Bikini Atoll in 1954, it's revealed that it was his actions that caused Monarch to decide to keep the government and military in the dark about how many dormant Titans they found around the world for the next six decades, leading to the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
- Stepford Smiler: Du-Ho has shades of this. Despite his cheery, pleasant personality, he admits privately to Cate in a moment of graveness that he's seen a lot of death, including the deaths of his father and multiple girlfriends.
- Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: After the results that came of telling General Puckett about Godzilla in 1954 which Bill and Keiko found less-than-desirable, Lee agrees to "trust" that the fledgling Monarch will tell him anything that Bill and Keiko feel he needs to know, regarding any information about future Titan discoveries that he'll be bound to pass on to his superiors in the military.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Tim and Duvall's superior gives Tim a fierce dressing-down for taking matters with Bill Randa's files into his own hands without so much as alerting Dr. Serizawa, herself, or another more qualified superior, saying he did so for his own selfish indulgence.
