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This article contains plot details from the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 premiere.
For a show that has both Godzilla and King Kong in it, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a surprisingly human story. Yes, giant Titans occasionally fight each other and destroy a bunch of presumably expensive property along the way, but the Apple TV series’ real hook is its characters, who are all tied together in a sort of time-wimey web that’s very hard to explain.
Set across two distinct timelines and in between the events of several other franchise properties, Legacy of Monsters has a little bit of everything: kaiju, worlds between worlds, an interdimensional rift, multi-generational family drama, and an incredibly tragic love triangle that’s tangled up in the foundation of the organization that gives the show its name. Its second season leans hard into its human element, a choice that the show’s creators say is a deliberate one.
“We always talk about the fact that the monsters are so oftentimes a metaphor for what we’re facing as humans,” executive producer Tory Tunnell tells Den of Geek. “Monsters are this existential threat. They represent the things that are out of our control. We’ve talked a lot about how in our show we’ve really felt like this season we’ve earned the title Legacy of Monsters, and how are the choices that we make, how do those create the monsters in our own life? What are the consequences that our actions have? We see that both literally and figuratively.”
Nowhere is this theme more apparent than in the relationship between scientists Bill Randa (Anders Holm) and Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and army sergeant Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell in separate timelines). Much of the show’s first season explored the early days of the group’s friendship, Keiko’s romantic feelings for both men, and the lead-up to their founding of Monarch, with a kaiju sighting or two along the way. But what makes their relationship so compelling is that all three of them form deep and very real bonds with one another, outside of anything romantic that may or may not be going on.
“I think Billy and Keiko are powered by passion, and I think that Lee is more task-oriented,” Anders Holm, who plays Billy, says when asked about the group’s unique dynamic. “Lee’s given a task, and it’s like, ‘I’m either going to complete the mission or not.’ And then he meets the two of us and is linked up into our passion, and he’s like, ‘Oh, there’s more than just completing the task. There are living, breathing aspects of the journey that become part of you.’ I don’t think he expects that. And I think that’s what he clicks with Keiko about, and I think that Keiko and Billy share the passion aspect.”
But in a rare move, Legacy of Monsters’ primary love triangle isn’t constructed in a traditional “who will she choose” kind of way. Yes, Keiko ends up marrying Bill, but their relationship doesn’t make her feelings for Lee go away, nor does it damage the two men’s friendship with each other. In fact, things just kind of get more complicated all around, as the three chase Titans and butt heads about what kind of organization Monarch is supposed to be. At least until one of them is pulled into a pit by monsters in Kazakhstan.
“I think that the problem is that they all love each other, like Lee and Billy too, all the same — probably intensely — and that’s what makes it complicated, but also compelling and tragic,” Yamamoto says. “The throuple [vibe] is something that we’ve accepted. It’s baked into the name. It’s just … supposed to be tragic.”
The connection between all three only gets deeper and messier in the series’ second season, especially now that Keiko has returned from the interdimensional portal world known as Axis Mundi to find that over 50 years have passed in her absence. Bill is dead, Lee has grown old, she has a pair of grandchildren, and is now technically younger than her own son. It’s kind of a lot. And though it’s evident she still loves Lee — after all, only something like 60 days have passed for her — she is also confronted with the fact that he’s not entirely the person she remembers.
“It’s interesting. Looking back at how I played it, I think there’s a lot of disorientation around who Lee has become because she’s expecting him to be the same person [she left],” Yamamoto says. “But there are things that she hears and snippets of things she sees, which isn’t who he used to be. So there’s an adjustment that happens, and more and more as the season goes on, I think she understands that he’s lived a whole life that she doesn’t know about. Ultimately, I think she finds that he’s become a different person — but I think, maybe the core of who you are never really changes. But in some ways, he’s not who she remembers him to be.”
Yet, despite everything, the two remain drawn together, and it is their complicated reconnection — as well as the search for a series of interdimensional portals that was once Billy’s life’s work and answers about what really happened to him on Skull Island — that powers much of the season to come.
“In the end, I feel like it’s beyond love,” Yamamoto says. “It’s just some karmic thing. The tragic throuple. They talk to each other and are connected over space and time, and that’s what’s beautiful about it.”
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