‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: Bizarre Love Triangles
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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
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Why is Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the King Kong vs. Godzilla TV show, a thoughtful and at times painful meditation on how it feels to love two people at once? Beats me, man, I only work here. You’d need the combined resources of Monarch and its corporate frenemy Apex to figure out the exact brainwaves among co-creators Chris Black and Matt Fraction that caused them to smush Jules et Jim in the middle of Destroy All Monsters.
But I’ll tell you what: I’m sure glad they did! Written by Kari Drake and directed with bold colors and soft nighttime light by Hiromi Kamata, this episode makes explicit a connection I’d somehow missed until now: Both Dr. Keiko Randa, the long-lost co-founder of Monarch, and her son Dr. Hiroshi Randa, her maverick successor at the organization, have lived divided lives.
Kei loved both Bill Randa, her late husband and Hiroshi’s adoptive father, and Lee Shaw, her and Bill’s mutual best friend. Hiroshi loved both his daughter Cate’s mother in San Francisco and his son Kentaro’s mother in Tokyo.
“I gave in to what my heart wanted,” Hiroshi tells her, finding the explanation painful. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
Of course, no one Hiroshi could talk to right now could understand better. In this episode’s flashback material, Kei and Lee witness a magnificent sight, as the bioluminescence of the monstrous Titan X shifts from angry red to peaceful blue when its tiny Scarab minions or offspring or whatever reunite with it.
But they’re forced to flee when the people of that Lovecraftian fishing village try to silence these witnesses of the creature they call Co-Cai. Holing up in a half-abandoned cabin in the jungle, Lee and Kei patch up each other’s wounds, blow up at each other — and fall into bed when Kei can take the tension no longer and leans in for a desperate kiss.
The next day the two are rescued by Bill, who returns by water after his unsuccessful attempt to track down Titan X himself. (Never leave fun to find fun, my sainted mother always said.) He’s all apologies about ignoring their advice and heading off on his own. Both Kei and Lee keep quiet about what went on between them. Kei later writes Lee a letter explaining that while she has always loved him, what happened between them can never happen again, or it will destroy the man they both love.
That’s all well and good until several years later, after first Kei and then Lee have disappeared into another dimension. Bill comes across young Hiroshi — who still has an American accent at this point — going through a box of his Uncle Lee’s old stuff. Bill is happy to remind himself of his old friend…until he comes across that letter. The episode ends before we find out if he reads it or how he reacts.
The present-day segments of the episode may be able to shed some dark light on that subject. Kei has been troubled or overwhelmed or blown away by many things since she emerged from the Axis Mundi netherworld to find the world had gone on for decades without her. Lee’s age, Monarch’s tech, and the bright lights of Tokyo have all been a lot for her to swallow.
Nothing, however, compares to Hiroshi’s revelation that her beloved Bill abandoned him at age 11 and never saw him again. Could profound disillusionment with Kei following the discovery of her letter be the reason he left, rather than the obsession with monsters that Hiroshi blames?
Either way, it’s a pleasure to watch actors Takehiro Hira and Mari Yamamoto play off one another in these moments. Their performances, even more so than the writing, are what made me finally connect their respective conflicts of the heart: They look and sound like two people whose pain is a symptom of the same underlying cause.
Though their mugshots have been plastered all over every electronic billboard in the city, Kei and Lee, along with Hiroshi and Kentaro spend the bulk of the episode racing around Tokyo. They’re to retrieve the components and plans necessary for Hiroshi to craft a decoy buoy that can lure Titan X back out to the deep sea before its approaches civilization and triggers a worldwide panic on the scale of “G-Day,” Godzilla’s catastrophic landfall three years earlier.
Unfortunately, other parties have an interest in Titan X’s future. Apex Cybernetics, Monarch’s private-sector partner and financial backer, commandeers its floating fortress, Outpost 18. Their on-site leader, Jason Trissop (the great Cliff Curtis), seizes control of the vessel and its computer systems from the Outpost’s erstwhile commander, Tim. Monarch Director Barris (Curtiss Cook) orders Tim to obey Apex, and to detain Kei and Lee.
Tim helps them escape instead, likely at the cost of his job. In Tokyo, he seeks out May at a noodle shop and asks for her help. Whatever his fate at Monarch may be, something about their deal with Apex stinks. He suggests that May get a job at Apex and work as a mole for Monarch. Given her history of shifting from one side to the next, Apex honcho Brenda Holland, who was already interested in her services, rehires her. Now she’s our heroes’ eyes and ears inside an unscrupulous tech giant that’s been granted unprecedented access to a sensitive public system. Imagine that!
With her new insider access, May/Cora discovers Apex is onto her intrepid friends (she’s named their group chat “Goonies 2”) and warns them to get back to where Hiroshi stores his nearly completed prototype decoy. Unfortunately, they’re too late: Apex absconds with the thing, presumably because they want the world to know there’s another Titan out there. Before long, the news is out, and panic strikes.
Unlike the others, Cate has decided to retire from that Titan life. She’s returned to San Francisco, where she reunites with her mother (Tamlyn Tomita) and her (amusingly much younger) boyfriend (Charlie Hewson), who’ve feared Cate was dead for years. Later, she heads out for the night with an old girlfriend (Anna McGahan), dancing and drinking and making out like it’s Industry all of a sudden.
Then the Titan watch hits the emergency airwaves. While everyone else in the club rushes home for safety, Cate melts down, insisting on staying and then claiming responsibility for Titan X’s presence, a claim that would make no sense to anyone who hasn’t been watching Monarch. Cate wanders off to a rocky outcropping overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, still under repair from when Godzilla destroyed it, killing a school bus full of Cate’s students in the process. She thinks of this moment, of Kong screaming at her after she unleashed Titan X, and breaks down with a silent scream.
It’s Cate’s first moment this season that’s truly commensurate with actor Anna Sawai’s talent. She has an easy, convincing sexual chemistry with her ex. Her the world is ending, might as well party bravado curdles into open self-loathing in an admirably ugly way. Just from the bottomed-out way she looks at the ruins of the bridge where she lost so many children to Godzilla, she makes the emotional cost of living in a world overrun with monsters feel real to us. Of course, it isn’t hard to relate to a woman living in world overrun with monsters these days.
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.
