‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Episode 5 Recap: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Godzilla

“Monsters” seem, to me, to be a reasonable expectation of any given episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. It says it right there in the title! A show set in the MonsterVerse, a Godzilla continuity rooted in kaiju combat from the very start, ought to deliver a) monster fights; b) new monsters; c) famous monsters doing new things; d) any combination of the above, on an episodic basis.

By that standard, Monarch Episode 5 (“The Way Out”) is a failure. The only titan on display is Godzilla, via recycled footage shown in Cate’s PTSD flashbacks as she, May, and Kentaro infiltrate the ruins of San Francisco to recover the rest of her dad’s files. I get that Cate is our POV character here, so there are a limited number of things we can see Godzilla do through her eyes, but it just feels like a lack of imagination and elbow grease to simply re-use old stuff. It’s not like Godzilla is some actor the studio couldn’t get ahold of for the TV show. He’s an imaginary radioactive dinosaur. You make him show up on set at will and have him do literally anything you want! 

This is to say nothing of the lack of new monsters to marvel at and cower from. We haven’t gotten a new critter since the ice beast showed up at the end of episode three. Come on, guys, you’re the giant monster show. I know this is a post–Walking Dead world and the real monster is us etc. etc. etc. but I want to see huge awesome monsters running amok, dammit! I can watch plenty of shows about trauma, but I can only watch one show about the King of the Monsters, you know what I mean?

So why is it that I still consider “The Way Out” a success, in artistic terms the show’s biggest yet?

To toss things back to another Godzilla incarnation, Shin Godzilla, it feels like this show’s characters are evolving at an exponential rate. I wasn’t interested in any of them besides Lee Shaw, and him only because of the actors portraying him, until last week, when Kentaro and May’s lovely, doomed romance got a turn in the spotlight. This episode did the same for Cate, turning her from the show’s flattest character into its most complex and human. 

I hate to say it, but it did so by making her kind of a jerk. In increasingly eerie flashbacks to the days just before Godzilla’s landfall in her native San Francisco, we see Cate on the verge of getting really serious with Dani (Courtney Dietz), the lovely coworker she’s been dating, only to cheat on her the very night she agrees to move in together. Dani smells a rat and breaks things off with Cate just as the doors close on the bus that will bring her into Godzilla’s path and condemn many of her students to death. These memories hit Cate like concussive blasts as she and her comrades move through the rubble-strewn underbelly of the destroyed sector. It’s pretty brutal stuff, and not flattering to Cate, which ironically makes her much more likeable as a protagonist.

It’s echoed in the way May turning coat and ratting her friends and their dad out to Duvall makes her more compelling. That’s one of the episode’s big plot points, the others being the trio’s discovery of Hiroshi’s route across the globe by the trio, and Col. Shaw hinting at an everything you thought you knew was wrong situation vis a vis the titans. 

But for each of these there’s an equally memorable moment rooted in character, like May coaching Cate through a flashback, or the trio singing together in Japanese as they walk through the rubble. Or there’s a haunting shot, like the fog-shrouded wreckage of the Golden Gate Bridge, or the half-empty classroom Cate walks into the day before the attack, as parents begin to fear the worst.

In character terms, Cate’s mother, Caroline (Tamlyn Tomita), is another live wire, thanks equally to Tomita’s energetic performance and Amanda Overton’s writing. She weathers the news that her husband Hiroshi Randa had a second family too well for Cate’s liking; she freely admits to enjoying having “a part-time husband” and thus never asking questions. She further admits that this was unfair to Cate, who had no such request for a part-time father. Meanwhile, she’s involved, emotionally if not physically, with her much younger coworker on a supply route she runs for San Francisco refugees. Just a really interesting person and a really interesting performance, right out of the box.

That’s the other thing: The whole concept of people who go into the ruins, collect photos and stuffed animals and other personal effects rather than valuables, and attempt to contact their owners to return them is just one of the artifacts of post-Godzilla life that crop up tantalizingly this episode. There’s the airport signage admonishing travelers to “respect the authority of ALL first responders,” the kind of uptick in low-grade authoritarianism you might expect in the aftermath of a literal monster attack. There are the underground bunkers for rich “tech bros” our heroes see advertised on airport TV. There’s the economy of state violence and military graft that determines who can and can’t trespass in the forbidden zone. There’s the constant drumbeat of denialism, of people who think it’s all a hoax to “burst the real-estate bubble,” as one kid puts it.  It’s all thoughtful, even provocative stuff.

Then there’s my favorite moment of all, one of the scariest split seconds of television in a long time. After an administrator admonishes Cate to take the warnings about the titans seriously and then departs, another woman is briefly seen running down the hall just before we cut away from this flashback. We know why: She’s seen what’s coming, and she’s about to tell a classroom full of children that their death awaits them. The show doesn’t lean on this at all, doesn’t even draw your attention to it. It’s just…there, hidden in the background by director Mairzee Almas. 

It’s a little uncomfortable texture in a world that, based on this episode, benefits from uncomfortable textures greatly. If Monarch can get to the Andor point, where you don’t need to be bombarded with capital-F Franchise stuff to feel what it’s like to live in that Franchise’s world…well, let’s not count our MUTOs before they’re hatched.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.