It’s the eternal conundrum of the monster movie: how much time do you mete out between the human and monstrous stars of your story? It’s been the tightrope that Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters has been trying to walk since it’s first started with the intertwined family mess of its main characters frequently going head to head with sequence of giant Titans eagerly dismantling real estate. Without human interaction, the monster stuff is just empty Kaiju porn (not always a bad thing), but lean too much on the melodrama and you eclipse the very thing that people have come to see.
To be fair, Monarch hasn’t gotten it right all of the time despite being the most human focused entry of the Monsterverse to date, but with “Furusato”, all the Randa/Shaw/Miura issues all finally come to a head.
Will it be yet another case of the family drama being allowed to overpower huge, bioluminescent, aquatic amphibians – or is Monarch poised to bring this phase of family conflict to a shocking end?
While Monarch and Apex zip around the globe in order to out maneuver one another and get to Titan X first, we find the Randa clan still mired in their own drama. The latest seismic event to strike the most overwrought family in Kaiju history is that a love letter detailing the affair between Keiko and Shaw has surfaced and been read by Keiko’s son, Hiroshi. While this would be shocking in of itself, the fact that the offending note was found in the diary of Bill Randa means that not only did Hiroshi’s step father also knew about the affair, but it’s what caused him to abandon the boy he raised and continue to chase monsters around the world.
Outraged, Hiroshi turns on his mother and Shaw, and in turn his kids, Cate and Kentaro finally have some insight to why their father would split his love between two families; but while the issues of the Randa family threaten to dominate the continuing global threat of Titan X, Apex make their move to put their grand plan into action. With May frantically trying to eradicate any bugs in her program, Apex plans to use a drone to shoot a device into Titan X that’ll make it able to be controlled and they await the coming of the beast in Santa Soledad.
However, while Monarch struggles to keep up and Titan X gets ever closer, Cate admits that she seems to have the ability to feel the massive monster thanks to being able to sense in on some sort of strange frequency and when the Titan arrives to dutifully pick up another swarm of Scarabs, she wanders out, seemingly in a trance, to meet it.
But disaster waits in the wings and after Apex’s attempts to control Titan X fail miserably, the tentacled terror’s subsequent tantrum unleashes it’s monster-sized fury on the fleshy humans in its path. When the dust clears, the issues within the Randa family will be tragically simplified when one of their number falls.
While I often feel like a skipping record whenever I have to address the Titan/human balance of Monarch, it has been literally the entire point of the show since it first started. However, while the continuing histrionics of the Randa clan have been navigated over the past fourteen episodes with varying degrees of skill, Furusato (named after a Japanese nursery rhyme) is one of the first episodes that really drives the tragedy of this family home. While other episodes have dealt with the generational trauma mostly by having Cate act bratty, Kentaro act sullen and Hiroshi act distant (often in the same scene), this episode does something that none of the others has even thought to try, an opening moment that zips back to 1990 manages to encapsulate everything in a single, genuinely heartbreaking moment. Speaking to a young Cate in America from a hospital phone in Japan, we find Hiroshi having to put off consoling a child who deeply misses her father because his other wife has just given birth to Kentaro in the maternity ward and even though we know all about their father’s dual life, seeing it action is legitimately sad. It’s weird that the most successful dramatic moment of Monarch’s history falls at the halfway point of the second season, but in another way it’s entirely fitting, especially once we get to the shock death that closes out the episode.
But before we get to that, there’s the continuing monster related arms-race that’s occurring between Apex and Monarch and while poor old Tim is still struggling to play catch up, Brenda is gearing up her plan to bring Titan X to heel. I have to admit, some of the acting between Kiersey Clemmons and Dominique Tipper seems a little overwrought at times, almost as if certain lines of dialogue were omitted in the edit to get to the point quicker, but it’s cool to see the type of squirrelly shit the Cybernetics corporation was getting into before a rampaging Mechagodzilla would ultimately put the business firmly in the red.
However, it has to be said that now we’ve reached the halfway point of the season, it kinda would be nice for other Titans to manage to get some air time. Kong obviously helped kick off the season with style, of course, and trailers have hinted that both he and Godzilla will have a further presence as the season goes on, but it’s getting to that point where it would nice to get a bit more variety in our gargantuan monsters considering that Titan X has been dominating the show.
However, that’s not to say Furusato doesn’t come with fireworks. Due to having way more neural connections than previously thought, Titan X manages to shake of Apex’s attempt at brainwashing it and even gets it’s Scarabs to dutifully gnaw off the tentacle where the device is attached. Next, we get a rather beautiful sequence where both Titan X and Cate seemingly become entranced by one another, lit in the blue glow of the Titan’s bioluminescent spines. While we still don’t get an explanation for this – although I’m betting her time in Axis Mundi has something to do with it – it’ll no doubt give her sense of main character syndrome another sizable boost. However, the main event here is that in the aftermath of Titan X’s sizable shit fit, Hiroshi is fatally wounded and dies in the arms of his mother and daughter as the croon the titular nursery rhyme to him as he slips away. It’s a monumental moment in the entire season, not just because it’s the first real, major death that’s hit the season (sorry deputy director Verdugo), but it potentially marks and end point to all that family drama. Yes, Hiroshi dies and there’ll no doubt be plenty of emotional fallout to follow – but there truly seems to be some closure here for all that generational trauma and it will hopefully allow the show to move forward with its various emotional threads.
The other hope is Monarch now will have some breathing room in its final six episodes to fully plow into some hefty monster madness to recapture some of that big-screen scale of episode one. With the death of Hiroshi, it certainly seems that the show is charging up its energy for a big finish much like like Godzilla building up a charge to let some radioactive breath fly – so here’s hoping that death isn’t going to be in vain.
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