Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 is better than the first one. If that's all you want to know about it, you will have a good time.
But even with improvements, Monarch remains a frustrating and often incomprehensibly boring series. It still suffers from the same issues, especially when it comes to the younger generation of its sprawling cast, even when it's more confident in the story it tells.
If you enjoyed the first outing, you're bound to enjoy the second one. On the other hand, if you were put off by the dull pacing and flat characters three years ago, chances are this is only the first step in winning you back.
The plot picks up two years later. Shaw (Kurt and Wyatt Russell) remains trapped in the Axis Mundi while the rest of the crew, including Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), work around the clock to bring him back. Others, like Cate (Anna Sawai), fearfully attempt a return back to normality with mixed results.
Around them, the world continues to shift as Godzilla roams the planet and a new monster, one witnessed by Keiko and Shaw half a century earlier, makes a return.
Monarch's second season is one of intense plotting and very little forward motion. Every episode leads into the next one, which makes the pacing once again off-putting. It's too slow for a movie and too interconnected for a series. It's impossible to point to a favorite episode because they're all just fragments of a bigger picture. One without a beginning nor an end.
What does work is the same thing that worked last time. Everything to do with Keiko, Shaw, and Bill Randa (Anders Holm) is tremendous. They have the chemistry and depth that all of the modern day cast lacks. Whenever the story focuses on them, and it does so much more this season, Monarch soars.
Sure, the love triangle is dire at this point, especially as it requires the characters to consistently make the worst decisions possible to keep things going. But Wyatt Russell, like his father, could build a rapport with a tea cup and it would be fascinating to watch. Similarly, Holm brings and easy charm to the hyper-fixated Randa. He's the kind of friend anyone would wish to have, even when he drives you nuts.
But the heart of the show belongs to Mari Yamamoto, who remains tremendous as Keiko. Trapped between two great loves, worlds, and eras, Keiko is one of the most fascinating characters in the American Godzilla mythology. Yamamoto communicates her frustrations, heartbreak, and yearning to pursue her dreams with immense conviction and believability. Even when faced with the laziest tropes, she makes the best of every scene available.
Kurt Russell is as reliable as ever, especially now that he's got something else to do than babysit the younger cast. While the stunt casting of the two Russell generations felt gimmicky at first, it's incredible to witness how much it pays off in some of the best scenes this season.
And yet, despite all the praise, Monarch can't help but find ways to disappoint. It is once more a series that can't decide what kind of story it wants to tell, so it moves forward like an old car pumped full of bad gas. Even the action sequences feel small, which is a crime considering the subject matter. There are at least a handful of colossal set pieces involving the big name monsters, yet all of them fail to impress.
It's also immensely frustrating to watch a talented collection of young actors like Sawai and Kiersey Clemons wasted in such nothing parts. After a full season of twiddling their thumbs, you'd think Monarch would find something to define their young leads beyond: "Good at computers" and "saw Godzilla once."
I want to like Monarch, I really do. I'm a sucker for monster stories that reveal something about ourselves, which is precisely what Godzilla is all about.
At its core, Monarch touches upon fascinating concepts of love, loyalty, and discovery, but only in one half of its material. The other half remains a vague and tedious melodrama that detracts from what could potentially be one of the great Godzilla stories ever told.
It is, like its characters, stuck between two worlds. Until it can let one of them go, it will never become fully whole.
