Monarch: Legacy of Monsters revolves around an organization that studies the biology and movements of giant monsters called Titans, the most famous of which are Godzilla and King Kong. The show is set in the same universe as the 2014 Godzilla movie as well as 2021’s Godzilla v. Kong and 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. With a pedigree like that, you’d figure the Apple TV+ show would be a huge deal, but its first season went largely under the radar in 2023. Season 2 is airing now, and it’s proving that the show is worth another look.
The first season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters had some problems
Less legacy, more monsters
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters splits itself between two timelines. In 2015, Cate Randa (Anna Sawai) and her half-brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe) look for answers concerning their father Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira), who vanished under mysterious circumstances. Hiroshi was a high-level scientist at Monarch, and soon the half-siblings are mixed up in a globe-trotting conspiracy involving monsters, family drama, and new worlds under the surface of the Earth.
The first season of Monarch was entertaining, but tended to drag out the human drama in between encounters with the terrifying Titans. That doesn’t mean the human drama wasn’t compelling, just not as much as it should be. The excellent cast helped. Anna Sawai will be familiar to fans of the excellent FX series Shōgun, where she played Toda Mariko. Meanwhile, bona fide movie star Kurt Russell plays Lee Shaw, a former U.S. army colonel who helped found Monarch back in the 1950s.
In the show’s biggest twist, we regularly flash back to that period, where a younger Shaw is played by Kurt Russell’s real-life son Wyatt Russell, which is a very smart way to tie the timelines together. The younger Shaw is accompanied by scientist Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and cryptozoologist Bill Randa (Anders Holm), the grandparents of Cate and Kentaro.
The first season regularly seemed to slow itself down by switching between these two timelines. Prestige TV shows these days are getting fewer and fewer episodes — for example, HBO’s new Game of Thrones prequel show A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms had only six in its first season — but Monarch is one of the few shows where a smaller episode count could have helped. Ten felt like a bit much for the amount of story being told.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 hits the ground running
Bigger monsters, better legacy
The second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes several of our heroes to Skull Island, where they encounter King Kong, the only Titan who can stand up to Godzilla in terms of fame. Not only that, but we meet several new monsters, including the crustacean-like Scarabs, the electricity-spewing Psychovultures, and a new, enormous creature known as Titan X…or Co’cai, or el Gran Dios del Mar. You know he’s important if he has that many names.
The point is that, with one season of know-how under their belts, the Monarch producers are giving us more monster action in season 2, more chances for our characters to either make friends with or run in terror from these gigantic beasts, and that’s a good thing.
The forgotten sci-fi show that quietly predicted our world 14 years ago
A corporate-controlled surveillance state? Technology so useful it makes us complacent? Crazy talk, I tell you.
That said, a TV show can’t survive on giant monster fights alone, even if it wanted to; it’s too expensive to pack every episode full of them, so the human drama will have to pick up the slack. Happily, the human drama takes some interesting turns in season 3, especially in the flashback sections. In Episode 3, “Secrets,” Keiko and young Lee Shaw finally consummate their long-simmering romantic tension, despite Keiko being involved with Bill. Everyone loves a good yearning romance that finally explodes into passion (there’s a reason shows like Bridgerton are so popular), and it’s good to see Monarch finally get there.
In the present, there are also big shake-ups at Monarch itself, with the overzealous Tim (Joe Tippett) taking on a major leadership role. Now that season 1 has established the characters and their world, season 2 is doing some interesting things with them.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters needs to keep doing what it’s doing
Then maybe we’ll get a season 3
The show still isn’t perfect. While improved, the human characters still aren’t as fascinating as the Titans, but the series is getting better at striking the right balance. And in the second season as in the first, Monarch has a great sense of scope to it, with our characters traveling to Alaska, Washington, Japan, Korea, Tunisia, Chile, Indonesia, and more. The story is as big as the monsters at its center.
The second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters will run through May 1, with new episodes dropping every Friday on Apple TV+. We’ll see if they can keep up this renewed momentum all the way to the finish line.
Apple: Legacy of Sci-Fi
We still don’t know if Monarch will be back for a third season, but even if that doesn’t happen, the first two deserve a round of applause. Apple has a reputation for making excellent sci-fi shows that challenge the viewer to rethink the way they view the world. Monarch offers us simpler pleasures, but no less potent.
- Release Date
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November 16, 2023
- Network
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Apple TV
- Showrunner
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Chris Black, Matt Fraction
- Directors
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Julian Holmes, Matt Shakman, Mairzee Almas, Andy Goddard, Hiromi Kamata
- Writers
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Al Letson, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Chris Black, Mariko Tamaki, Amanda Overton, Andrew Colville, Matt Fraction, Milla Bell-Hart
