Monarch Season 2 Pays Off Apple TV’s Monstrous Gamble

Nothing about Monarch: Legacy of Monsters should work. When the show launched on Apple TV back in 2023, it occupied a dubious spot in Legendary’s growing Monsterverse, which encompasses all the Godzilla and King Kong films after 2014’s Godzilla reboot. Monarch’s mission in 2023 is the same as its mission with Season 2 in 2026: to tell a story set after that 2014 movie, but before everything else, as well as charting the organization’s rise in the 1950s and 1960s, too. In doing so, Monarch has become a show as much about time jumps and time travel as it is about monsters. But, in Season 2, the series attempts something honest and largely successful: It aims to make its monster show focused even more on giant monsters and the real people left in their wake of destruction.

Here’s the good, the monstrous, and the wibbly-wobbly time-wimey aspects of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and why it remains one of the most unique and compelling sci-fi dramas on TV.

Picking up where Season 1 left off, Kate Randa (Anna Sawai) has emerged from the timeless Hollow Earth known as Axis Mundi. Now it’s no longer 2015, but 2017, and everyone’s hanging out on the infamous Skull Island, which gives the show a chance to get into the gonzo nature of smaller creatures that aren’t necessarily on the level of the titans like Kong and the big G. And with these details, Monarch is doing something that fans of old-school Kong may not know they needed: Random scary monsters showcasing their creepy presence, without a huge impact on the plot.

Just to linger on this detail a bit longer: In the 1933 King Kong, the titular monster monkey murdered a T. rex and tangoed with some Pterodactyls on an island populated with Apatosauruses. Creatures crawling around and jumping out at people all the time, particularly smaller creatures is an essential part of making a good monster movie work. Say what you will about the 1998 Godzilla, but those little baby Godzillas are part of what makes the larger monster more exciting.

Monarch Season 2 understands this “little versus big” paradox. In new flashbacks in the 1950s, we learn that the younger Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell), Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), and Bill Randa (Anders Holm) all encountered strange mid-sized monsters, which are connected to another new massive sea monster creature, dubbed Titan X. In the present, the older Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) is very much getting too old for this sh*t, and his impatience with the contemporary version of Monarch, which he helped create, is both understandable and slightly mysterious.

While Season 2 retains some of the structure from Season 1 — contemporary monster conflicts, made clearer by monster flashbacks — Lee’s time-jump into the 1980s isn’t really explored in this season because we’re saving some retro-monster flashbacks for his upcoming spinoff show. Shaw’s relationship with Keiko also gets more interesting in Season 2, simply because this time, we get to see Keiko interact with young Shaw and old Shaw, thanks to her time-defying journey through Axis Mundi.

That said, the strength of Season 2, and something that makes it a bit breezier than Season 1, is the fact that right at the start, the majority of the characters are all together, working, more or less, as a monster-hunting team. In Season 1, the mystery arc of what was even going on, and how Kate and Kentaro’s father was even connected to Monarch, occupied at least half of the season. In other words, with Season 2, Monarch has gotten well beyond the getting-to-know-you phase with these characters and is more interested in putting them in the action.

So if you found the slow burn on Monarch Season 1 to be, well, a bit too slow, it's safe to say Monarch Season 2 is delivering the higher-octane action, with more monsters and higher stakes, all happening more quickly. To borrow an infamous director’s note from George Lucas, the vibe of Monarch Season 2 versus Season 1 seems to be: faster and more intense.

That said, Monarch Season 2’s heart and soul are still in its character dynamics, which are made more interesting because those dynamics play out between several generations and in different time periods. If this show were only set in the 1950s or only set in the 2010s, the novelty of a TV show about monster hunters would wear off fairly quickly. With Season 1, Monarch effectively changed Monsterverse canon by revealing that Godzilla, Kong, and others were, and always have been, effectively time travelers. This idea, at least subliminally, elevates the importance of these monsters in our minds and makes them characters, just as important as the humans who are chasing them down.

Is that same feeling true of Titan X? Well, yes and no. In a way, the introduction of the new sea monster menace, Titan X, solves a certain storytelling problem with a show like this: When we are rooting for Godzilla and Kong not to get hurt or murdered, is there a monster we can — at least initially — be afraid of?

The answer to that question is what Monarch Season 2 tackles, pinning much of its story on our fear and interest in a monster we’ve never heard of before now. Luckily, if you’re not into this new sea monster, Godzilla and Kong are very much around, along with a charming and capable group of humans who you’re worried about in both the past and the future.

Monarch Season 2 debuts on Apple TV on February 27.