Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Recap: Tokyo S.O.S.

Photo: Apple TV+

It’s a good thing the trailers for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters contained some scenes of Godzilla that aren’t of the King of the Monsters smashing the Golden Gate Bridge in 2014, because otherwise, there would be reason for some concern. After two episodes, Godzilla has not really been in this, uh, Godzilla series. The premiere featured a neat, extended sequence of that arrival to San Francisco, and the second episode features only a brief flashback to that flashback. The kaiju’s absence is not necessarily an ominous sign for the series as a whole, especially since there’s the promise of new Godzilla action (and the welcome arrival of Kurt Russell). But there’s a difference between Jaws slow-rolling its reveal of a giant shark and Monarch taking its time to check off a bunch of multiple-timeline prestige-TV boxes before getting to the fireworks factory (so Godzilla can smash it).

Part of that is because episode two doesn’t move one of its two story lines forward, as the Wyatt Russell–led timeline instead jumps back seven years to 1952, where we see how Lee Shaw, Billy Randa, and Keiko first met. Lee, as punishment for fighting with some fellow soldiers because they were harassing a woman in a Manila bar, has been assigned security detail to a Japanese scientist. When Lee first meets Keiko, he initially doesn’t believe that a lady — let alone a Japanese lady — could be a scientist, but she’s been tasked with investigating radioactive isotopes that the U.S. detected over an island in the Philippines. They’re the wrong type of isotopes for them to have been fallout from a bomb, so it’s not the Americans or the Soviets.

Billy, a cryptozoologist, is on the self-appointed case, too. He emerges from the jungle, much to Lee’s chagrin, explaining that he’s been brought to this island not by isotopes but by legends, as the natives of the islands have an oral tradition about a dragon that creates a path of fire. His investigation into these stories led him to map out a path where this so-called dragon is said to travel. That path perfectly matches the map of the isotopes Keiko has. Billy and Keiko are bonding over being geeks, which irritates Lee, the jock of the trio. He returns to the jeep and leaves them to their nerdy devices as they trek off into the jungle and stumble across … an American battleship.

It’s the Lawton, which went down in 1943, 200 miles west of Pearl Harbor, some 5,000 miles from its current location on dry land. Billy knows the ship well. He was the only survivor when it hit something in the water and went down, and it’s fair to assume that Billy’s dragon-hunting stems from a belief that it was a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that sank the boat. But, while Billy is going down traumatic memory lane, the MUTO comes back, depositing a bunch of slime-covered fresh corpses inside the hull of the ship and then starting to claw it apart. It’s only with the help of Lee, who turned around when he saw the path in the sky and managed to perfectly track the pair, that Billy and Keiko are able to escape. The culprit is a gigantic, somewhat batlike dragon, which roars as the three stare on in disbelief.

As far as origin stories go, Lee, Billy, and Keiko’s meeting isn’t a bad one, and it’s clear from this initial encounter why they would go on to become a Titan-tracking family (for seven years until Keiko gets eaten by bugs, at least). But it feels a little bit like Monarch getting sucked into its own lore before it has a chance to really establish any momentum or true sense of purpose. In the premiere, old Bill Randa wished that he could leave a legacy — the titular Legacy of Monsters — to his son Hiroshi. So far, that legacy feels like a vague MacGuffin because, really, we’ve just seen how Hiroshi’s parents met Lee Shaw, a feeling that’s not helped when the other timeline also mostly amounts to seeing how Hiroshi’s children met Lee Shaw.

In Tokyo, in 2015, Cate is getting ready to leave her dead dad’s secret family behind her, but a Monarch agent named Tim harasses her about the files they found in Hiroshi’s office safe. Cate, sensing that Tim is bad news, nails him in the face with her phone and tries to make a run for it, but his co-agent stops her. When Tim puts a hood on her in the back of their car, the now-captive Cate has a panic attack, flashing back to the episode’s only Godzilla sighting. She freaks out, causing the car to crash and giving her a chance to escape.

Kentaro, too, has been harassed by the Monarch agents. He found another canister of footage in his dad’s files, along with a folder with Lee Shaw’s information in it. He learns that Shaw is living in a senior center in Japan, a bit of knowledge that comes in handy when the Monarch spooks arrive at his and his mom’s apartment. Kentaro’s mom, who earlier had explained that “Uncle Lee” was the only family Hiroshi had after his dad died “in Vietnam” (really on Skull Island) when he was 18, pulls a fast one and helps Kentaro escape, encouraging him to go find Shaw.

Cate, Kentaro, and May, whose loft was also raided by Monarch, meet up. May has extra passports, and she wants to flee, while Cate wants to just give Monarch the files. But Kentaro wants to go find Shaw. The trio drive up to the retirement home and ask to see “the Colonel.” Upon seeing them, Shaw is delighted to meet Kentaro, whom he pegs as “Hiroshi’s boy,” but he had no idea about Cate or even that Hiroshi had a daughter at all. When they begin to explain the situation to them, he shushes them. This isn’t just a normal retirement home — it’s Monarch’s secure asset management. But he’s ready to escape and join the three of them on a quest because he seems doubtful that Hiroshi is really gone since there’s no body.

“You can choke down that mountain of Monarch bullshit about your father disappearing without a trace, or we can get the hell out of here and find out what really happened with your dad,” Shaw says as he chucks his ankle monitor into a pond. “We’ve got about 60 seconds to make up your minds.”

There are much worse ways to end an episode of TV than with a battleship-destroying dragon and Kurt Russell saying, “We are so back.” Both story lines’ endings set up what look like they should be engaging plots going forward, as we’ll see the early foundation of Monarch in the past and go on the hunt for Hiroshi in the present. (Hopefully, there will be some monsters in both timelines.) That doesn’t change the fact that this episode feels like — and very much is — setup for the coming weeks. Godzilla is strong, but not strong enough to escape the trap that so many ambitious TV shows fall into, offering up a tantalizing premiere before pumping the brakes and killing the momentum to do the actual work setting up the premise in episode two. Our human protagonists are just going through the sophomore-episode motions, which is a bigger issue than missing monsters. Still, let’s just hope that there aren’t any viewers who are ready to check out of Monarch: Legacy of Monster due to the lack of monsters because, in theory, we’re ready to get cooking with atomic fire breath now.

• The official synopses for the episodes refer to Wyatt Russell as Lee and Kurt Russell as Shaw, so that’s how I’ll be addressing the Lees Shaw.

• Kentaro’s mom says something happened to Hiroshi and Lee that led to a falling-out. Timeline-wise, this must’ve been after the events of Skull Island in 1973, but presumably well before Kentaro was born. This opens up the tantalizing possibility of a sequence set right in the sweet spot between the two Russells’ ages. Taking bets now on whether they age up Wyatt or de-age Kurt.

• “Terrestrial?” Keiko questions when Billy tells her about MUTOs. “So you don’t think they’re space aliens?” Little do they know that Ghidorah, the three-headed Titan seen in 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is indeed from outer space.

• Is anyone else consistently underwhelmed by the design of Monsterverse-original creatures? The dragon in this episode looks fine, but it’s hardly memorable, and it seems to be operating off of a different design playbook than Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and the rest of the classic Toho monsters. All of the Monsterverse creatures are busier and more of a mishmash of parts. Perhaps it’s because these monsters never existed as physical props or costumes. The old monsters needed to function as puppets or as suits that a suitmation actor could fit inside. Monsterverse’s CGI-original Titans, meanwhile, can have weirder body shapes and more negative space, which might be visually more interesting, but it can’t help but make them feel different — and less iconic — than the old guard.