Summary
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 curbs the monster action in “Secrets”, instead focusing on character drama and long-buried betrayals.
There’s basically no monster action in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which you should probably be aware of. It’s fine, though, since you can have too much of a good thing. Season 2 only has a limited budget, and Episode 3, “Secrets”, is all about putting in the emotional, character-driven groundwork that is going to make the inevitable monster action later feel more resonant. And there are a fair number of moving parts to consider, especially with Apex Cybernetics sticking its nose in, and relationship drama stretching between two distinct timelines.
Most of what we see of Titan X is at the very beginning, though it does look pretty good, if we’re being fair. The small versions are called Sea Scarabs, for what that’s worth, but at least it spares me from dancing around having to name them in the future. That’ll be a matter for later recaps, though, as once Titan X has wrecked a dock in Santa Soledad, picking up from where we left off, both it and the Scarabs disappear for the remainder of the episode.
But Keiko and Shaw aren’t out of the woods. Keiko reflexively takes a few photos of Titan X, which annoys the villagers even more, since they don’t like the idea of non-believers coming to the land in droves and trampling all over their beliefs. So, Keiko and Shaw leg it rather than hand over the camera, eventually removing the film and using the camera itself as a distraction so they can get away.
Keiko and Shaw take shelter in an abandoned cabin, where they patch up each other’s wounds and have a breather. As soon as the kiss during the ritual comes up, it’s really kind of obvious where this whole sequence is going. There are a lot of unspoken feelings between the two. And with Randa still off on his own little sidequest, there’s a lot of room for those feelings to emerge. Cue a little argument, another kiss, and a passionate night together on the cabin’s creaky bed.
As for how this connects to the present-day sequences, after Bill arrives to pick the two of them up, Keiko sends Shaw a letter explaining how what happened between them can never happen again, since, even though she loves him, doing so would cause Bill too much pain. They can’t be together, but perhaps in another life – always a small consolation, I find – things might have been different. Shaw keeps the letter, so we’ll return to this later.
In the present day stuff in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Episode 3, Tim, Keiko, Shaw, Hiroshi, and Kentaro go rogue. For deeply mysterious reasons, Monarch’s Director, Barris, has authorized Jason Trissop, Apex Cybernetics’ Head of Special Projects, to take operational control of Outpost 18 while it continues to search for Titan X. Tim finds this deeply suspicious, so sneaks everyone out – except Cate, who has gone home to San Francisco on her own steam, still feeling guilty about her involvement in letting Titan X loose in the first place – so they can work on their own agenda.
That agenda involves luring Titan X away from populated areas by using a low-frequency sound similar to the one the Scarab emitted to pull it towards Outpost 18. That means modifying the device Hiroshi used to summon Godzilla, which means Shaw and Keiko retrieving some of the plans from his disorganised office. In so doing, Keiko discovers proof that Cate and Kentaro have different mothers, exposing Hiroshi’s double life, which she knew nothing about. Shaw advises she ask Hiroshi about it, since it isn’t his story to tell, so she does, which neatly ties the two timelines together.
Keiko can surely relate to Hiroshi’s admission of loving two people at the same time. What she finds more distressing, though, is the idea that Bill abandoned him when he was only 11. Why would such a good man do that? Well, the flashbacks reveal why. Back in 1962, a young Hiroshi was rooting around in Shaw’s old belongings, and in tidying them up, Bill found the letter Keiko wrote to him, confessing their affair. Yikes. This is also the cliffhanger ending of the episode, but there are a couple more things to discuss.
Firstly, Cate. She goes to see her mother and step-father, and then another in an increasingly long list of ex-girlfriends, but her head clearly isn’t in it, and a Monarch Safety Alert only sends her further west. She starts behaving irrationally, worrying the ex, and then roams to the G-Day site near the Golden Gate Bridge, has a bunch of flashbacks, and collapses.
Elsewhere, May, at Tim’s behest, accepts a job at Apex Cybernetics to work as a convenient double-agent, where she quickly discovers that Apex has been surveilling them the entire time.
