It is so easy, in the world of Godzilla, to tell a story of loss, but what Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters does to really connect the audience to its characters is bring us into a family that are strangers to each other, across two different time periods.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a story about the creation of Monarch, the scientific organization in the MonsterVerse designed to explore Godzilla, Kong, and the rest of the monsters making their appearances around the world to try to control them. What we see in Legacy of Monsters is that Monarch grows to be less than trustworthy throughout the years.
In the ’50s, the series shows Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) as a military liaison for Dr. Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and William Randa’s (Anders Holm) research with Monarch, but it is the modern era that provides me one of my favorite aspects of the series as a whole. And that’s thanks to two siblings having to come to terms with their introduction to each other and what it means to them both.
The modern era has Cate Randa (Anna Sawai) as she is discovering secrets about her father Hiroshi Randa (Keiko and William’s son) and a life he never told her. The first episode of the series starts with Cate going to Japan to try and find answers about her father, discovering there that Hiroshi has a family he never told her or her mother about. It’s then that she meets her brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe) and the two are forced to work together to find answers.
This, to me, is what makes a show like Monarch so fascinating. We’re forced to watch Cate and Kentaro (along with Kiersey Clemon’s May) all work together to see what Monarch is up to. In the first two episodes of the series, we get to see how Cate and Kentaro grow not only as siblings but in how they interact with each other as they’re learning about their now-shared history. It’s what makes a series like Monarch so much more interesting than other monster stories.
The deeper we get into Monarch, the more the show lets us explore Cate and Kentaro’s relationship. In episode 3, the two are running with Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), and while they still are not exactly warm with each other, we at least get to see two people who are trying to work together to find answers about their father.
Two strangers learning how to trust each other
It would be so easy for Cate and Kentaro to not want to know each other at all. Instead, what Monarch does is let these two people begin to work with each other even if they’re a bit annoyed at the situation they’re in. May says “not my drama” about the issue when they do finally meet with Lee after Cate brings up that she didn’t know she had a brother after Lee remarks he didn’t know Hiroshi had a daughter. It sets the tone of how she’s feeling about her brother and we can see that it’s not an easy situation for anyone but they’re there together.
To see this tension play out without a quick solution or without Cate going home without Kentaro or Kentaro just staying back with May really makes Monarch: Legacy of Monsters work for me. You could have the two understand the other exists and not want to be there for them. Force them back together episodes later and have a quick growth as siblings as many other shows do. Instead, we’re seeing them in real time forced to be together and what happens to them in that instance. They’re not happy about the lies but that unhappiness isn’t seemingly rooted in each other but, instead, in their father and it makes for an interesting dynamic to watch play out.
(featured image: Apple TV+)
