Toho and Legendary Pictures Television division did a great job with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. This first season on Apple+ was everything I expected and more. Sure, there are some who complained that "it needs more monsters." But I was satisfied with the count, which ended up being at least one if not two kaiju per episode. Each episode clocked in at about 45 minutes, and this meant that about ten minutes per episode had some huge creature in it, while the other 35 were used for character building, setting up the story, and continuous world-building. For those who may be fans of things like kaiju, and who haven't watched it yet (but intend to), here's your spoiler warning, because I may bring up things in the next few paragraphs that could possibly ruin the story for you.
We picked up in the monster-verse by first doing a bit of backtracking. The show bounces back and forth in time between a set of three major characters. For the most part, the "modern" part of the show takes place after G-Day (in 2014) but before the events of the next Godzilla movie. "G-Day" is the name given to the event that destroyed San Francisco in the movie that launched the Legendary-verse. The other part takes place back in time during the first nuclear tests done at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. This is where Americans conducting the experiment first see Godzilla (who is a bit smaller as he hasn't grown to full size). They think that they end up killing the "Titan" (this is the term the Legendary team uses for kaiju) when the bomb goes off. We know from the future timeline and movies in the "monster-verse" that this simply isn't true. Two of these main characters are scientists. The last one is a military guy named "Lee Shaw" and he's played in part by Kurt Russell (older edition) and Wyatt Russell (his son by Goldie Hawn) in the earlier edition. It actually works out really well, and I definitely need more Wyatt Russell in my life. These three people end up actually creating Monarch, which is the international secret agency that monitors and deals with Titan attacks when they come knocking in the modern world. But they aren't the only team in the game. There's another, called Apex Cybernetics, which we know creates the "mecha Godzilla" that we see in Godzilla versus Kong. Here's a quote from that movie by the character Walter Simmons:
"When we started Apex Cybernetics, we dreamt of new ways to push past the limits of human potential. Robotics, the human mind, artificial intelligence. Who knows what brave new future we will dream of next? I'm Walter Simmons. And it is my privilege to lead Apex into humanity's bold new era. We're not going anywhere, and neither are you."
The Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season one also introduces us to several new characters. One of them is Corah, who is a brilliant computer user who ends up working for Apex after hiding out in Tokyo ( she's there to try and avoid retribution from Apex) and the whole thing kinda flies apart on her. There is also Cate Randa and Kentaro Randa who are siblings, but not from the same mother. Their father, Hiroshi Randa, is a bigamist. He's also the son of Dr. Keiko Miura and Bill Randa (who were the two scientists who founded Monarch along with Lee Shaw which I talked about above). These new characters mostly serve as a vehicle to drive the modern plot.
The first thing they do once they discover that they are siblings on two sides of the world is to go and look for their father. When they find him, he's actually at work trying to call Godzilla using technology designed to provoke a Titan attack. All of this leads to Lee Shaw going on a crusade to close mysterious portals around the world which seem to open in the presence of Titans, and they end up in some dimension that isn't the Hollow World, and which is somehow tied to the Titans. Keiko named this dimension "Axis Mundi," and it has weird time-warping effects. Keiko got trapped there for 57 days, and it basically advanced her from the 1950's to 2019, but she never aged. The same thing is used to explain why Kurt Russell is ninety some odd years in the show but he has the vigor of someone twenty to thirty years younger. Yes, they do escape Axis Mundi by season end, but Lee Shaw gets killed during the escape (or trapped in Axis Mundi again). You don't actually see his body, and sometimes "death off-screen" just means that they could theoretically pop up again as a surprise.
And then the season ends with them being in a laboratory operated by Apex with a closing shot of King Kong coming for them at the end of the episode. This is included (probably) to show that Apex is now on Skull Island, and to show that this is before the events of Godzilla versus Kong (which shows Kong being removed from Skull Island for shenanigans elsewhere).
Look...this show was great, and I really enjoyed it. It's probably up there with Reacher. It's so different that it's hard to compare them, but there was no lacking in budget and the show added to the monster-verse in ways that were unexpected to me. I'm looking forward to the next season wholeheartedly. If you aren't a subscriber to Apple+, go to Best Buy's website and get the free three-month trial and put that into your shopping cart and checkout. Then log on and watch the show. It's worth it, and plus you could binge watch Ted Lasso and Silo and Foundation. Apple+ is actually a pretty good streaming service, given that they don't have near the content of some of the others out there.
On Wednesday, I'm gonna talk about Lower Decks season four, which is on Paramount Plus.
