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There are two points of emphasis on which any given episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters can focus — legacy and monsters. Some episodes maintain a perfect balance. (These tend to be my favorite.) Others tilt in one direction or the other. This week’s installment is more of legacy than monster.
Which isn’t to say no kaiju or creepy crawlies raise their ugly heads in this one. A pair of doofus surfers attempting to catch some waves on a beach vacated by a Titan warning (“Godzilla don’t surf,” they reason) are overwhelmed when Titan X’s Scarabs emerge from the ground en masse. A herd of spiny bipedal dinosaur-type things are set loose on Apex’s corporate campus as a distraction to help our heroes finish their mission. A whole horde of other creatures smuggled off Skull Island by Apex lurk in the bowels of their research facility, Alien: Earth–style.
Most specatcularly, Titan X itself reaches up out of the briny depths and wraps its tentacles around a Monarch patrol boat, crushing it in a cephalopod bear hug and killing all aboard. This is the kind of giant sea monster action I’m here to see!
But I’m just as much here for the legacy portion of the proceedings. It occurs to me after watching this episode that the Randa family — Bill and Keiko, their son Hiroshi, Hiroshi’s children Cate and Kentaro, Keiko’s lover Lee Shaw, Kentaro’s ex-girlfriend and Cate’s potential future girlfriend May/Cora — is like any other troubled family, passing its problems from one generation to the next.
Decades in the past, having lost both his wife Kei and his best friend Lee to the portals of Axis Mundi, Bill Randa leaves his son Hiroshi behind to embark on an endless Titan quest. Just like his mother and his Uncle Lee, his dad will never see Hiroshi again. (Bill meets his end during the events of Kong: Skull Island.)
It’s not hard to see Hiroshi’s resultant abandonment issues as a root cause of his bigamy. He could never leave people he loves behind just because he’s fallen in love with someone else. Better to live a life divided, starting two separate families in two separate countries and leading two separate lives with them, than to inflict upon one of his two children what Bill inflicted on him.
Those abandonment issues appear poised to intensify. Hiroshi has grown close with his (pardoxically younger) mother Kei during their adventures; there’s one moment when she snaps at Kentaro not to speak disrespectfully to his father, and you can see the rush of emotion Hiroshi feels now that he finally has a mother around to defend him. Here’s a guy who grew up having convinced himself that his mom and dad disappeared while trying to save the world, and now he’s found out this is in fact the case. Her very presence vindicates his most deeply cherished beliefs about her.
Imagine how all that will come crashing down now that he’s found her Dear John letter to Lee Shaw. We’ve already seen its contents, how it explains that despite their love for one another and their night of passion, she must stay with Bill, whom she loves just as deeply and could not bear to hurt any more than she knows Lee could. That simply won’t fit his idealized version of his mother, the selfless hero.
Hiroshi comes by the letter when our heroes infiltrate Apex headquarters, with the help of a barfight picked by Lee, some stolen tech from a pilfered backpack, and a fake radiation scare. They find Hiroshi’s Titan decoy, but discover it’s been completely dismantled and rendered useless. Now they’ll never be able to lure Titan X away from its collision course with San Francisco.
Fortunately (?), that path for the creature was a put-on. After commandeering the Monarch vessel Outpost 18 and loading their own tech into the system, Apex’s goons created a fake Titan landfall scare, presumably to get the creature somewhere only they can track it while Monarch is scrambling to pick up its scent once again.
It’s Bill Randa’s legacy that may save them. Elsewhere in Apex’s HQ, they find a room full of Bill’s old ephemera, from family photos to a fully charted map of Titan X’s migratory route. Now our heroes know that the monster is bound for that same creepy town where Lee and Keiko nearly bought it all those years ago. I’m sure the locals will be just as happy to see them this time around.
May/Cora, meanwhile, is off on a quest of her own. As their woman inside Apex, she plays a crucial role in creating the distraction and sneaking them in and around the building. But she doesn’t rejoin them, because her boss, Brenda, has let her in on a little secret. They’re working on some kind of nerve implant that turns the hostile Titans and other beasts docile and harmless. We don’t get to see everything Brenda shows Cora, but whatever she sees, it’s enough to convince her to stay at Apex and see if their way of stopping Titan X can work.
Almost no sooner does May depart the group than Cate returns to it. She wakes up on the beach the morning after her wild, borderline suicidal night out, and is beset by those strange pulsing headaches, the waves of which intensify when she submerges herself.
From there, she trudges through town evacuating along with everyone else when the bogus Titan warning is sounded. On her way, though, she bumps into the mother of one of the few students she was able to save from the school bus that fell when Godzilla first came ashore and destroyed the Golden Gate bridge years earlier. “You could have run,” the woman says, “but you did something.”
That renews Cate’s resolve. Saying goodbye to her mother, she rejoins our heroes in their quest to stop Titan X, which she unleashed in her attempt to save Lee Shaw. The fates of the Randas, their friends and lovers, and the entire world seem inextricably intertwined.
Monarch is hardly the first franchise effort to use its genre elements to explore family, but the absence of any kind of superheroic or chosen-one mantle to be passed from one generation to the next allows the show to focus more on what matters. Few of us are going to view what our families bequeath to us as a cape and cowl or a mighty ancestral sword, even if we are generally happy with them. It’s more likely that it’s like the Randas — setting an fine example in some ways and a poor one in others, passing on their genius and their dedication to others, but also their fixations and obsessions and hubris.
In your case or mine, we might inherit heart disease, or a likelihood of cancer, or a treatment-resistant mental illness, or outright abuse. In the Randas’ case, they inherit the ability to set loose the beasts of the apocalypse. But when you’re there in the heat of the moment, dealing with your own family fallout, it really can feel like the world is ending.
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.
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