The third and final Roche Limit mini-series, Monadic appears, at first glance, to take place on Earth. Except the first characters we see are Recall creator Alex Ford, Watkins, aka the guy dumping people into the Anomaly, and the night club owner Gracie. In other words, all people who died on or around the Roche Limit colony in the first mini-series. Pretty soon Sonya the cop and her sister Bekkah, who are both supposed to be on Earth, pop up. So does the blind swordsman/drug lord Moscow. And Sasha, the scientist from Clandestiny, is messing around with a radio telescope somewhere out in the wilderness, occasionally bothered by a young girl and her father.
Monadic feels a lot like Dark City. It's a comparison I made more than once when the book was first coming out, but what can I say? All these people, somehow, are in a place that isn't real. Where their memories may not even be real. Alex is standing over a dead body he swears he didn't kill, being told by a mysterious doctor he needs to flee and find the "Black Tower." There's even a sequence where he gets the runaround trying to find a train, only to be stymied as no line seems to go there.
The creatures from the Anomaly want to understand humans, so they can replace them. But they want to do so minus whatever it is that makes us sacrifice our own lives for others. And for some reason, Alex Ford's particular sacrifice in the first mini-series is the problem, even though Moscow acknowledges it's a feature of our species. So why do they need to kill Alex? I'm not totally sure how he's even there, unless his body drifted into the Anomaly and his soul was separated.
Human souls seem to be a problem, something the Anomaly rejects, which is how you end up with the shiny orbs people were interested with in the first mini-series. And so there are two different plans, running concurrently, that involve bringing those souls into contact with the Anomaly. Bekkah and Sonya try to kill Moscow and feed his to the "dark king" atop the tower, which Charles makes look a lot like an Evangelion. Meanwhile, Sasha's regained her memories and contacted Danny aboard the ship he, Elbus, and Colt escaped on. The latter two are long dead, but Danny helps her load the ship with souls to fly directly into the Anomaly.
OK, but here's the thing. We're told, in the first mini-series, that the Anomaly erodes souls. That just living on Dispater slowly kills people and turns them into the black-eyed things that overran the colony. Alex drug, made from something on Dispater, and therefore something altered or tainted by the Anomaly, speeds the process up, but that's all. So if souls can be destroyed, why are they so repellent and dangerous? For that, matter, how does Moscow even still have a soul? He was fully on board with the forces within the Anomaly before the end of the first mini-series (when he got shot in the head, I should mention.) His eyes were already dark; shouldn't his soul be gone, replaced by one of the creatures?
And the ending, I don't know. Sonya and Bekkah succeed in chucking Moscow's soul into the creature. It falls, a bright pink-purple light erupts from its mouth. Next page, a ship flying into darkness. I'm pretty sure it's the one Sasha and her daughter - the girl and her dad were Sasha's deceased family, or facsimiles of them created from her memories - are piloting into the Anomaly. A yellow beams hits the ship. It explodes, bright, wobbly blobs I assume are the souls float in space, there's an explosion and something collapses.
I assume the "something" is the Anomaly, but was the yellow beam the pink-purple beam from the page before, or something different? Why did it change color? Were they on the colony this whole time, and how, since Danny had been on that ship long enough for Colt and Elbus to age and die, and their adventure was 75 years after the first mini-series? Wasn't Danny on the other side (wherever that was) in his ship? What happened to him? Weren't there already creatures on Earth, sending the doomed missions like in Clandestiny, for decades? Did they die with the Anomaly destroyed, or are they still there?
I don't think I'd reread these mini-series in close to a decade, and boy, had I forgotten how muddled and disappointing I found the ending.
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