The MonsterVerse keeps chugging along; though it doesn’t produce nearly as much material as Marvel, DC, or even the Conjuring-related universe, Legendary Entertainment’s film series about Godzilla, Kong, and other fearsome “titans” has now lasted for 12 years and five movies, with a sixth on its way for 2027. It’s also included a couple of TV spinoffs, the most high-profile of which is this live-action series on Apple, filling in backstory and gaps between some of the earlier films. The first season had pretty decent production values, but of course it was more economical for the humans to take center stage. That’s never been anyone’s favorite part of the movies, but on TV the show acquitted itself reasonably well. So how are the non-kaiju characters handling the spotlight in the second season?
Opening Shot: Blurry images slowly come into focus until we realize we’re looking at Monarch staffers fleeing the heavy, furry hand of Kong in his Skull Island home, exactly where Season 1 left off.
The Gist: OK, buckle up, because Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes place in multiple time periods and also fits into the mythology of an ongoing film series. One of its storylines skips around the early days of Monarch, the titan-tracking government agency, in the 1950s and 1960s. This heavily features a love triangle of sorts that forms between married scientists Bill Randa (Anders Holm) and Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and soldier Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) as they investigate monsters around the world, largely unknown by the general public. There is also “present-day” material that in the first season was actually taking place in 2015, in the aftermath of the 2014 Godzilla film (but before the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters or any of the other more monster-filled sequels, when titans become a fact of life for the entire planet).
At the very end of the first season, two major characters in that timeline, Keiko and Bill’s granddaughter Cate (Anna Sawai) and her hacker pal Corah (Kiersey Clemons), jumped forward from 2015 to 2017 after getting briefly trapped in a time-dilating rift between our world and the titan domain of the Hollow Earth. And who was trapped in that same rift not-so-briefly? Keiko, who travels back to the surface with Cate and Corah. Cate and Corah’s guide was an older Lee (Kurt Russell, real-life dad of Wyatt), who had visited the rift before earlier in his life; he sacrifices his escape to make sure the others make it out.
So for Keiko, it feels like a couple of months have passed back in 1959, when she fell into the rift (shown way back in the very first episode of the first season). But back in the surface world, far more time has passed, so when she emerges with her grown granddaughter, she’s jumped forward almost 60 years (while remaining physically the same age she was in 1959). Lee previously spent time in that rift, which is why he’s technically approaching his 100th birthday, but looks more like, well, a spry Kurt Russell. Got all that?
Despite the multiple-timeline shenanigans, the time-jump actually, in some ways, streamlines Monarch as it enters its second season, putting a bunch of characters who had sometimes been separated back in the same general vicinity. After escaping Skull Island and the wrath of Kong, Keiko, Corah, Cate, Cate’s half-brother Ketaro (Ren Watabe), and their dad Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira) all wind up on a mobile Monarch facility set up aboard a large ship. But they want to go back to Skull island, re-open the rift, and rescue Lee, against the wishes of Monarch. Naturally, they defy the organization (which is increasingly influenced by a private tech firm), and this unauthorized excursion puts them back in contact with various Skull Island beasties (and yes, Kong does make another appearance). It also winds up dovetailing with the episode’s flashback material. That story is set in 1957, with Lee, Bill, and Keiko tracking a titan in a remote village in Southern Chile. Both stories set up a new-to-series titan who will serve as a combination MacGuffin and antagonist for future episodes.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Creatures, secret government agencies, and continuity tying into a bigger-canvas film series with soap-opera elements makes Monarch feel kind of like if The X-Files made its way into the MCU, though it’s not as quirky as X-Files nor as normie as most MCU stuff.
Our Take: Even with great advances in visual effects technology (and streaming-TV budgets), doing kaiju action-adventure for the small screen presents a major challenge. You can’t spend $100 million to bring large-scale monster sequences to every episode, but at the same time, if your titan-hunting monster show goes too long without any titans, the audience might start to feel ripped off. There are structural challenges, too; obviously the season premieres and finales of Monarch will include marquee monsters — Kong shows up here just as Godzilla turns up in a few pivotal moments of season one — but you don’t want the material in between to feel like soapy filler, killing time in between monster cameos.
That said, the season-two premiere of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is about as propulsive and action-packed an episode as the series has done so far. (And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that subsequent episodes still have plenty going on, even if they can’t afford to have Kong strolling in every time.) The sometimes-dizzying cutting between time periods feels cleaner and easier to follow with just two clear storylines, and while the show can feel over-reliant on separating and then dramatically reuniting its characters (and this does come into play again later in the season), sending a bunch of them on a Skull Island mission has some cool Jurassic Park vibes, as well as opportunity for less budget-busting creature encounters.
In fact, while it’s entirely possible some MonsterVerse fans might simply prefer to watch a fun kaiju match-up at the movies every few years, it’s arguable that this series is doing a better job than the recent Jurassic World movies at expanding the simple iconography of giant lizard-like creatures wreaking havoc, and figuring out what exactly a world dealing with those creatures on a regular basis might look like. Monarch is mercifully low on cutesy quips, and takes its characters’ personal lives seriously. Maybe too seriously at times; some of the family and romance material alike feels pretty drawn out. But that’s not really a problem in the opening episode, which reintroduces these characters and their family-tree-style interconnections without too much recap. The fun is silly, but straight-faced.
Performance Worth Watching: As Keiko, who now has a story in two different time periods, Yamamoto has a seriousness about her that makes her material feel more like classic melodrama than TV soap.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode, and this isn’t really a sex-heavy show, though there is a pivotal coupling later in the season.
Parting Shot: A furious Kong roars in frustration at the Monarch helicopters, making an anguished-looking Cate feel as if he’s looking straight at her.
Sleeper Star: Takehiro Hira’s Hiroshi is more central to the action this season, and Hira lends the character a quiet sense of gravity and conflict.
Most Pilot-y Line: It’s not so much a line but a line of behavior: When Keiko wakes up in a medical bay on the Monarch ship, she does that very movie/TV thing of immediately panicking and running away from doctors so she can experience a dramatic “where are we?!” introduction to her new environment.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Obviously this isn’t necessarily something to jump into completely cold. But fans of the MonsterVerse should enjoy this deeper dive into the lore of those films, with more room (and necessity) for emotional nuance than those big-budget adventures. For that matter, sci-fi fans who aren’t necessarily up on their Godzilla x Kong shenanigans could still find characters and creatures to latch onto here.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
