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While it’s certainly a relief that Monarch: Legacy of Monsters delivers a quality viewing experience, the show arguably carries enough star power in the form of King Kong and Godzilla that it could have skated by with less. Let’s be honest, adding these iconic creatures to any series, even one featuring the likes of Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, could elevate an episode of The Last of Us—another grand, sci-fi adaptation dealing with worldwide chaos caused by biological threats—by a notch or two with their colossal presence.
Yet, Monarch does not solely rely on its formidable monster cameos. The casting of the legendary Kurt Russell alongside his son Wyatt as the adventurous Lee Shaw, portrayed at different ages, initially drew viewers in. Meanwhile, Anna Sawai, fresh off an Emmy win for her riveting role as Lady Mariko in the acclaimed historical saga Shōgun, brings star power to the ensemble, although she blends seamlessly with the group rather than overshadowing it. This balance allows each character to contribute meaningfully, underscoring the collaborative effort required to confront the giant threats.
The narrative begins where the first season concluded, with Kong unleashing a mighty roar as he approaches a human outpost on Skull Island. Here, Monarch has joined forces with its former high-tech corporate adversary Apex to explore a gateway linking our world to the Titans’ subterranean realm. This mysterious area, referred to as Axis Mundi, is a liminal zone where some of our protagonists find themselves stranded, displaced in time.
By the end of Season 1, the rescue mission was successful, bringing back Cate Randa (Anna Sawai), her long-lost and ageless grandmother Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), and her friend May (Kiersey Clemons). However, Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), the stalwart Monarch hero, had to remain behind to ensure their return, sacrificing his escape for theirs.
Interestingly, our heroes weren’t the only ones to exit the rift. Unbeknownst to them, a menacing creature resembling a trilobite with a mouthful of shark-like teeth also slipped through. This insectoid invader provoked Kong, Skull Island’s guardian, into a violent frenzy that left 16 dead and many injured as he attacked the base. In an attempt to eliminate the intruder, Kong inadvertently caused chaos among the humans who crossed his path.
It takes a while for anyone to put the pieces together, however. In the meantime, Kong and every other monster on Skull Island are completely out of control, and the barely penetrable storm wall that seals the island off from the outside world is contracting. The humans scurry off to the Monarch flagship, Outpost 18.
Aboard this floating fortress, Cate vows to return to Skull Island in an attempt to rescue Shaw, whom she credits for saving her own life and reuniting her with her lost relatives, Keiko and her son, Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira). Hiroshi, you may recall, is a Monarch official who led a double life, starting separate families in Japan and the States, fathering Cate in the latter and her half-brother/May’s ex-boyfriend Kentaro (Ren Watabe) in the former. Hiroshi allowed everyone to believe he was dead for a time. Now he’s now older than his mother, whom he barely knew before she got lost in a time warp. It’s complicated.
Anyway, Kentaro, Hiroshi, and May — who’s secretly still in contact with Apex bigwig Brenda Holland (Dominique Tipper), who knew May when she worked at the company under her real name, Cora — all agree to help Cate. The quartet steal a boat and sneak back to Skull Island.
So they’re not around when Keiko notices the trilobite creature on footage of Kong’s attack, and pieces it together with something she saw on a field expedition to Chile decades earlier. Back then, she, a young Lee (Wyatt Russell), and her future husband Bill Randa (Anders Holm, in the role John Goodman played in Kong: Skull Island) investigated a distinctly Lovecraftian fishing village where the locals worship some kind of god of the sea. Human sacrifice is heavily implied.
The flashback segments cut off before we find out what happened to Lee, Bill, and Kei in that village, but whatever it was wasn’t good. Kei convinces Monarch Deputy Director Natalia Verdugo (Mirelly Taylor) and Monarch-turned-Apex staffer Tim (Joe Tippett) to launch a mission to Skull Island immediately to stop Cate, who’s beyond radio contact. If she opens that rift, she’ll let more of those trilobite things through, and they’re clearly the harbingers of a threat dangerous enough to scare King Kong.
Whether or not Keiko and company arrive in their choppers too late depends on your perspective. Cate rescues Lee, who sees the rift she reopens and slips into a Monarch rescue module to make his way back up the dimensional portal.
But he’s preceded by a swarm of those creepy crawlies, and by a monster the size of a mountain to which they’re clearly connected. An amphibious chimera of a creature, with features drawn from species all across the biological-fantastical spectrum, crawls out of the ground, with one of its massive tentacles or tendrils or whatever killing Verdugo in the process. It appears to be the MonsterVerse’s version of Biollante, the huge plant-based kaiju that kicked off the Heisei-era “VS. series” of Godzilla films.
Everyone else escapes in the choppers and watches as the beast races to the sea, swimming away before Kong can put a stop to it. The giant ape roars at the helicopters as they fly away, as if blaming them for whatever’s about to happen.
The biggest problem facing Monarch is not one of its own making, not really anyway: It’s set in 2017, making it practically a period piece. In 2026, it’s impossible to imagine something as well-organized, well-funded, and dedicated to the global good as Monarch surviving its first contact with Elon Musk’s DOGE death squads. (Read about the death toll from the shutdown of USAID if you think that description of that Nazi creep and his little brownshirt IT department is over the top.) Defunding Monarch would have been a chapter in Project 2025.
As for monster attacks…Well, if an enraged King Kong were to pop out of the ground tomorrow and run amok through the Twin Cities, or attack the White House building, or cripple the economy, or threaten the nation’s biomedical and scientific infrastructure, could it be any worse than what our own President and his party have been doing to the country, on purpose, all by themselves?
This is not to say that writer and co-creator Chris Black is entirely blameless here. The plotting feels a bit clumsy here: Lee is abandoned in the finale only to be rescued by the end of the premiere; everyone evacuates Skull Island, then returns (in two separate shifts), then flees again. Even Verdugo’s death feels surprising as in huh?, not surprising as in whoa.
Moreover, the lead actors — particularly Sawai, Yamamoto, and the Russells — are uniformly skilled at wielding the show’s secret weapon, a sense of profound yearning thank links one person to another, whether their connection is familiar or romantic in nature. The dynamic in the past between Mari, Bill, and Lee, three people who love each other but who can never properly resolve that love since a romantic pairing is only possible between two of them at a time, is sophisticated, heartbreaking, and acted with both tenderness and humor.
At times, this group is asked to take on material that isn’t at their level: big gobs of “I’m going back, it’s what he would have done for us” genre-movie motivation, say, or an underwritten scene in which Cate and Hiroshi finally address his bigamy that should have been emotionally riveting. When that happens, you feel the disconnect between their abilities and the script.
I suppose having a cast strong enough to expose the occasional weakness is one of them good problems, however. Certainly you see the advantages of a cast this stacked come through in the character work: Young Lee’s petulant sneer when Kei cracks a dirty joke about Bill, Kei’s mesmeric connections with both men, Cate wrestling with how her Monarch experiences have completely uprooted her from the world. Sawaii makes it feel like Cate’s quest to rescue Lee is less a matter of hero-of-the-story bravado and more a desperate woman clinging to a man who’s been her literal lifeline.
And the monsters! Man, this show has not disappointed there. In addition to Kong and the trilobites and (presumably) Biollante, there’s a giant bat thing that barfs electricity, a huge rat monster Kentaro kills with a forklift, and one of those cool giant ram/boar/rhino things whose hides are protected by a layer of trees and plants and giant thorns. Monarch’s thought process for creating and deploying new monsters and Titans appears to be “Hey, you know what would be cool?”, and so far their answers have been correct. The result isn’t a perfect show, but it’s certainly a fun one.
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.