The Ending Of Pacific Rim: The Black Season 1 Explained
Guillermo del Toro got to live every child's fantasy by taking a bunch of giant monsters and robots and making them fight each other in 2013's Pacific Rim. The film did well enough, particularly in China, to warrant a sequel, which came in the form of 2018's Pacific Rim: Uprising that brought back a few characters from the first film but mostly focused on a new batch of heroes ready to take down the monstrous kaiju wreaking havoc on Earth. The second installment didn't fare nearly as well, and currently, it's looking less and less likely we'll ever see a true Pacific Rim 3 come to fruition.
Fortunately for fans who have always wanted to see a Godzilla-Transformers team-up film, Netflix has the answer for all your woes, with the latest chapter in this universe — Pacific Rim: The Black. This time around, instead of focusing on Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) or Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the series follows two siblings, Hayley (Gideon Adlon) and Taylor Travis (Calum Worthy) who end up in control of a trainer mech after their parents didn't return home from a mission many years ago. The kids set out to find their parents with their giant new toy, and there's no shortage of monsters waiting to take a bite out of them. Of course, like any good piece of dystopian fiction, the greatest monster of all is man.
With seven episodes ranging in length from 20 to 28 minutes, it's a fairly fast anime to get through, more or less the overall length of a feature film, and it all leads up to a stellar ending. Here are the main points to take away with you, as well as what we can expect going into season 2, which has already been confirmed to happen (via IGN).
Hayley and Taylor get more answers about their parents
Hayley and Taylor may get sidetracked for much of the season from the more immediate threats, but their singular mission through all of it is to find their parents, who left to fight kaiju five years ago, and never returned to their hidden home. In episode 7, they stumble upon a city that's been destroyed by some epic battle of the past, and among the wreckage, they discover their parents' old mech. They go inside, and while they thankfully don't find their corpses, it's also abundantly clear they're long gone.
But all's not lost! Their parents left a video message before abandoning their mech where they state how their nuke got jammed, meaning there was no way for them to defeat the kaiju they were up against. The last we see of them, they're exiting the robot with the only clue to their whereabouts being that they still plan on heading for Sydney, Australia.
Naturally, you can't have the kids find their parents by the end of the first season: you have to string the audience along for a while. However, it's at least a clue they didn't die in a kaiju battle ... at that point anyway, and ultimately, the kids' journey doesn't change all that much. They were planning on going to Sydney in the first place, because that's where they assumed their parents would go. As a result, future seasons will likely see Hayley and Taylor continue their trek to Sydney, provided they don't get distracted with other (more sinister) matters in the episodes to come.
Boy isn't all as he seems
When Hayley and Taylor first take their new mech for a stroll, they stumble upon a dilapidated city they have to traverse on foot to find a new power supply. While there, they stumble upon a creepy laboratory where a young boy whom they later name "Boy" (Ben Diskin) is trapped in a giant incubator. Granted, it's not the weirdest thing to find in this kind of world after they've just escaped from kaiju-dog things, but it definitely throws them for a loop.
Boy doesn't say much, but there's clearly something special about him. At one point, he's shot at point-blank range and then gets up like nothing happened. In episode 6, we see his connection to the kaiju world when he demonstrates a bond between one of the monsters, but then, all gets revealed after Hayley gets knocked unconscious by a beast. Wanting to protect her, Boy transforms into a kaiju himself and takes on the monster all on his own.
While it's pretty cool the gang has its own kaiju to battle the monsters, it opens up a pretty terrifying implication, namely when Taylor says, "That means the Precursors can make kaiju that look like us." For those of you not caught up on your Pacific Rim lore, Precursors are tall, lanky-looking creatures that control the kaiju. They're the ones truly in control who open up the portals to Earth to send the monsters through. It looks like they're none too happy it's taking this long to wipe out humanity, so they've developed their own sneaky weapon to get monsters past the human ranks. The question that really matters moving forward is, "Does Boy have to follow orders given to him by the Precursors?"
Shane is still out there somewhere
It seems like with every dystopian story, instead of all the humans banding together for the greater good, there has to be one jerk who makes life even more difficult for the protagonists. Much like Negan on The Walking Dead, Shane has carved out his own little faction among all the wreckage left in Australia. He sends his goons to kill Hayley and Taylor after they leave Bogan, and we later discover that he took Mei (Victoria Grace) away from her parents when she was a child and then altered her memories so that she would think he saved her. Just real scumbag moves all around.
The last time we hear from him, he taunts Hayley, Taylor, Mei, and Joel (Vincent Piazza) over a radio before revealing his twisted insurance plan to ensure no one ever gets away from him unscathed. The radio contained an explosive, and while Joel is talking on it, it detonates, killing him instantly. Mei's heartbroken over his death, and even though she doesn't head back for Bogan, it's safe to say she has a vendetta against her former father figure and is out for blood.
Shane may be absent from the last couple of episodes outside of a flashback where we see him approach Mei as a child, but it's pretty much a given he'll be back. Mei went to great lengths to try to get her true memories back, even going so far as to ask the mech's AI system, Loa (Erica Lindbeck), if there was anything it could do to help her learn more about her true past with Shane, but no luck. In our opinion, Mei and Shane are on a collision course, and only one of them can make it out alive.
A new threat looms...
As if kaiju and Shane weren't enough, another adversary seems to be lurking in the background our heroes will have to contend with going into season 2 of Pacific Rim: The Black. Looking over the wreckage, a group of what we'll call kaiju dogs walk into frame. With them are humans — cloaked in robes and wearing masks — who appear to have trained them. This isn't a random occurrence, either. Earlier in the series, we hear someone talk about "Sisters" and how they're a bunch of "lunatics in the hills." There's not much more than that at the moment, but it's clear this cult already has quite a reputation for itself.
They clearly have an interest in Boy as his kaiju-form gets a lot of attention during season 1's final moments, and it all leads up to one of the Sisters declaring, "The Kaiju Messiah has come." First of all, Looper calls dibs on starting a punk rock band called "Kaiju Messiah" because that's the coolest two-word phrase we've ever heard. Second, it does seem to imply that this group worships the kaiju, which means they may not have so much of an interest in destroying all of them. If anything, one guess would be that they're actively trying to bring about the end of the world once and for all, and they likely see Boy as a means to accomplish that. Again, that's just speculation.
The Pacific Rim: The Black season 1 ending leaves plenty of plot threads for the show to explore going forward. Across just seven episodes, the series has already greatly expanded upon the mythology that started with the films and even if the franchise doesn't continue in its live-action form, the anime is more than enough to give you all of the giant monster-vs-robot battles you could handle.