“I need more Godzilla and King Kong in the Godzilla and King Kong show.” I’ve heard variations of this comment since Monarch debuted, even from people who generally enjoy the series. The romantic sturm und drang, the bureaucratic/technocratic squabbling, the fun flashbacks, the stunt casting of the Russells, a star turn for Anna Sawai, all the other monsters — that stuff’s well and good. Sometimes, however, you just wanna see the big guns.
To paraphrase Valerie Cherish, well, you got it.
This week’s Monarch opens with a lengthy flashback glory shot of Kong wandering around Skull Island, observed by Kentaro Randa as he draws the beast in his sketchbook. When Kong puts the fear of, uh, Kong into him, Kentaro runs back to the joint Monarch/Apex installation where he and his father, Hiroshi, have spent the past two years trying to extract Cate Randa from the rift she fell into. (These are the events that immediately preceded the Season 1 finale.)
The two men share beers, and Hiroshi reveals that he, too, fell into a rift once, hence his year among the missing after Godzilla first attacked. The reveal doesn’t really amount to much; there’s nothing about Hiroshi that makes more sense now than it does before beyond an explanation of his absence. But it establishes his newfound closeness with his son, when he tells Kentaro that the time they’ve spent working on a way to rescue Cate has made up for his lost year.
Kentaro is also the star of the Godzilla sequence that takes place much later in the episode. A surprise visit from May leads to a night on the town, during which he makes an awkward pass at her. He fumbles things further by angrily accusing her of being more into his half-sister Cate than himself, saying “I’m the wrong Randa.”
When May bounces, Kentaro is almost immediately hit on by another beautiful American woman. This one is named Isabel (Amber Midthunder, who is never less than magnetic as a screen presence), and her openness in trying to pick Kentaro up after watching him “strike out with [his] date” is very sexy. It becomes much less so, however, when she reveals herself to be the daughter of Apex CEO Walter Simmons, who tracked him down to offer him a job with the enemy. Then it’s his turn to bounce.
That’s when things go bad. A Titan warning sounds. Titan X is sighted in the bay. An entire building goes flying through the sky and crashes into the busy downtown, announcing the arrival of Godzilla himself. As Kentaro runs into first his mother (Qyoko Kudo), then May, and finally Cate, who stands their in funereal attire and says she told them that Titan X means them no harm. The Titans clash, the area is devastated by a shockwave…’
…and Kentaro wakes up. Okay, so it was just a dream. But it’s a vivid illustration of the kind of paranoia and terror these people have to live with every day. I’m sure all of us can relate to the feeling of waking up every morning wondering what the monsters have done this time.
Other than the appearances of the Big Two, Hiroshi’s lovely, austere funeral and its fallout dominate the action. At the gravesite, Lee is reunited with Dr. Suzuki (Leo Ashizawa), the scientist who’d once helped Kei, Bill Randa, and himself lure a Titan and briefly stabilize the rift that sucked Lee into Axis Mundi decades earlier. “Zook” survived the debacle and lived to an old age, far older now than either Keiko or even Lee.
Dr. Suzuki and Hiroshi had kept in touch, collaborating on their “Titan phone” lures. Dr. Suzuki still has his, and the confirmation of the time dilation between our world and the Titans’ is the missing piece of the puzzle for perfecting it. Lee plans to use it to summon Godzilla, wielding him like an attack dog against Titan X. The very idea of it disgusts Cate, but there’s no stopping Lee Shaw when he gets an idea in his head.
While the old-timers are off monster-hunting in their own way, Cate and Kei do so in theirs. Hiroshi’s death has hit Cate especially hard, since she blames herself for creating the circumstances that led to his death. Kentaro blames her, too, and doesn’t believe a word of her explanation that she’s somehow communing with Titan X, which is what lured her into danger to begin with.
Kei, however, has seen signs of these mysterious Titan X–related phenomena before. Rigging up a delightfully analog set of sci-fi whosits and whatsists galore, Kei wires her same-age granddaughter up and immerses first her feet, then her whole body off a dock into the still ocean water. Cate acts as a conduit for Titan X’s song, which Kei is able to record. When she plays them back after Cate resurfaces, her granddaughter diagnoses the sounds of distress they can hear: Titan X is panicked and afraid because it’s lost.
Meanwhile, at a nearby rift site, Lee and Zook work their magic, creating some kind of anomaly the likes of which Shaw has never seen before. Rather than summon a monster, however, Lee hears a strange sound: the voice of his father, Leland Lafayette Shaw III. A member of the Army brass, Lee 3 nearly transferred our boy to Vietnam rather than see him waste any more of his time either on a cushy office job or with a bunch of eggheads who want to “understand” monsters that only want to destroy us. Lee runs right back to Monarch, from which he’d stepped down to avoid further involvement with Keiko, as a result. The rest is history — at least until Lee hears the voice of his time-displaced father in the here and now.
Personally, I’m not convinced Lee stands to gain from developing daddy issues of his own. We’ve had plenty of those to go around with Cate, Kentaro, and Hiroshi. Perhaps this is just the show’s way of bringing Lee in line with the Randa clan.
That complaint aside, this episode of Monarch does what episodes of Monarch do. Want some warmly sexy and effective romance? Witness the disarming way Isabel comes on to Kentaro. (I think he should have gone for it, though admittedly he does eventually call her back to accept that job.) How about some familial angst? Watch how grief pulls Kentaro apart from his sister Cate, while giving Cate an almost sisterly relationship with her grandmother Keiko. Giant monsters? You got the two biggest names in the biz. Okay, so one is a dream sequence — but again, kaiju-related PTSD is an important part of Monarch’s worldbuilding. Their world’s precarious existences feels just an Axis Mundi away from our own.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
