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“I need more Godzilla and King Kong in the Godzilla and King Kong show.” This sentiment has echoed across social media and forums since the premiere of Monarch. Despite the series being generally well-received, with its romantic drama, bureaucratic intrigue, nostalgic flashbacks, and impressive casting choices like the Russells, many viewers crave more screen time for the titular titans. After all, sometimes you just want to see the real stars of the show in action.
To borrow a line from Valerie Cherish, “well, you got it.”
This week’s episode of Monarch kicks off with a spectacular flashback, showcasing Kong majestically roaming Skull Island. Observing him is Kentaro Randa, who captures the beast’s likeness in his sketchbook. The encounter is so intense that it sends Kentaro scurrying back to the joint Monarch/Apex facility, where he and his father, Hiroshi, have dedicated two years to rescuing Cate Randa from the mysterious rift she fell into. This setting lays the foundation for the events leading up to the Season 1 finale.
During a moment of bonding, Kentaro and Hiroshi share beers, and Hiroshi reveals his own experience of falling into a rift, which explains his disappearance following Godzilla’s initial attack. While this revelation doesn’t drastically alter our understanding of Hiroshi, it deepens the father-son relationship. Hiroshi expresses that their collaborative efforts to rescue Cate have compensated for his lost time during his absence.
Later in the episode, Kentaro finds himself at the center of a dramatic Godzilla sequence. A surprise visit from May leads to a night out, during which Kentaro makes a clumsy attempt to express his feelings for her. The situation takes a turn when he accuses her of being more interested in his half-sister Cate, lamenting, “I’m the wrong Randa.” This personal turmoil adds another layer to the unfolding drama, blending human emotions with the epic monster storyline.
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.