Summary
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters deploys a neat ticking-clock device and a couple of fun fakeouts in “Trespass”, delivering what might well be the best episode of Season 2 thus far.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters hasn’t been slacking in Season 2, but I still think Episode 4 is the best of this run yet. “Trespass” doesn’t quite have the character depth of the previous installment, and the flashbacks have almost entirely dried up now that we’ve established how Titan X connects to Santa Soledad and, of course, what happened between Lee and Keiko. But this stuff has been replaced with an effective ticking-clock device and a fun heist plot, not to mention a couple of fake-outs that redefine the terms of the season. All in all, it’s pretty good stuff, and the character dynamics are there if you’re looking for them.
Since the previous outing did skimp on monster action a bit, “Trespass” delivers some early. There’s a nice visual of the Scarabs bursting out from beneath the sand of Ofu Beach in American Samoa to terrorize a couple of surfers, and an even nicer one of a Titan X tentacle crushing up a Monarch patrol boat like an aluminium can. This scene exists to establish the big threat of the episode, which turns out to be a corporate espionage ruse, with Apex trying to upsell their own systems to line their pockets.
In short, after detecting the Titan X activity off the coast, Trissop uses Apex’s predictive algorithm to determine that Titan X is heading for San Francisco at a rate of knots. He tells Tim to pass it up the chain, all the monster alerts go out, and then Trissop, rather suspiciously, disappears. He claims to be off to San Francisco to be there so that, when the Navy pulverises Titan X, he and his team can analyse it. Tim is too preoccupied with the possible threat to realise how convenient and suspicious all this feels.
Meanwhile, Cate wakes up on her own beach, hers in the vicinity of the Golden Gate Bridge, where she passed out at the end of the previous episode. You’ve heard the term “monster hangover”, but hers is a bit more literal. You can tell from the fact she submerges herself in the water in an almost trance-like state that she’s still not feeling especially great about the whole Titan X thing, but luckily, there’s a contrivance on hand to get her back on the right track. She just so happens to run into Esther Keene, the mother of a student, Michael, whose life she saved. Hearing how much her efforts meant to Esther is enough to assuage Cate’s guilt, so she tells her mother that she’s going back to help her friends, and we don’t see her again until the very end of the episode.
None of the others know this, obviously, so when Lee gets a message saying that Titan X is going to make landfall in San Francisco in the next two hours, Hiroshi’s first instinct is to worry about Cate. But there are bigger fish to fry. Hiro’s device is being held in a subbasement at the Apex research facility, and getting inside to reprogram it requires a multi-stage Ocean’s-style heist job. Highlights include Lee pretending to be drunk and feigning a heart attack, Kentaro pretending to have taken a massive dump to excuse making a bar patron wait for the toilet cubicle, and May briefly weighing up the possibility of having to give Lee mouth-to-mouth.
It’s a success, though, and the gang is able to fake a radiation leak at the facility so that they can all break in wearing hazmat suits and gain access to the subbasement. This is Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Episode 4 at its best, because the big ticking-clock of Titan X’s impending arrival, coupled with the smaller threat of Brenda Holland returning to her office before May has finished using her computer to guide the others through the basement, creates a lot of fun tension.
“Trespass” also reveals that Apex has been smuggling monsters off of Skull Island to study, keeping them in inhumanely tiny cells. It’s later revealed, through Brenda, that they were using May’s code to create a tiny chip that short-circuits the monsters’ natural aggression by rewriting neural pathways, making them amenable and — this in a bit of a whisper — controllable. May deleting the code stymied the research, but Brenda is adamant about restarting it with May as a part of the team, and by the end of the episode it seems like May has accepted her offer.
To be fair, she’s going to need an outside-the-box solution because Hiro’s device is a no-go. When May finally unlocks the room it’s being stored in — which she’s able to do thanks to a distraction caused by Kentaro and Lee letting all the Needlewalkers free — Hiro and Keiko discover that it has been completely disassembled. However, the room contains some other goodies, notably a treasure trove of Bill Randa’s research, including his completed map of Titan X’s migratory route. It’s heading back to Santa Soledad, where all this began. The Scooby gang grabs all the research and legs it back to their cheap motel, where they find Cate waiting for them.
Meanwhile, Tim realises that there’s something iffy going on with Apex’s equipment and orders it all shut down. Monarch’s sonar shows that what they have really been tracking all this time is a whale. Apex, who, thanks to Bill’s work, knew where Titan X was going all along, thoroughly played them.
In a last-minute stinger, Hiro becomes the second person to find Keiko’s letter to Lee. It was in Bill’s belongings, and now he knows that it was she who was at least partially responsible for his father’s abandonment of him. I’m sure he’ll take that well!
