Summary
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters delivers Season 2’s strongest character work yet in “Furusato”, leading to a major last-minute development that feels all the richer for the effort.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters trades in the giant monster action — mostly — for more focused character work in “Furusato”, and it’s a gamble that doesn’t always look like it’s going to pay off. Season 2’s best interpersonal drama is to be found here in Episode 5, but you can have too much of a good thing, and for most of the 45-minute runtime, the balance feels a little bit off. It’s almost like we’ve forgotten about Titan X altogether, even though the creature’s imminent arrival at Santa Soledad functions as a kind of ticking clock.
I should have known, frankly. This episode opens with a flashback to Tokyo, circa 1990, with Hiroshi calling a young Cate from a hospital waiting room and singing her to sleep with the titular song. Of course, the “reveal” here is that he’s in the hospital because Kentaro is being born; it’s a neat summarisation of the strain of his double life, and when we get back to the present day, he’s still trapped in that stretch of no-man’s land between his bad decisions.
This feeling is obviously compounded by his discovery at the end of the previous episode that Bill abandoned him because he discovered Keiko’s letter to Lee. Keiko’s improprieties remind him of his own. But, more to the point, he believes her betrayal drove his father away. The anger is tinged by a note of relief, since he always blamed himself for Bill’s absence, as though something he did pushed him away, but it doesn’t make the emotions any easier to process. Even after a stern talking to from Lee, which amounts to him basically telling Hiro to get over it, he spends most of the episode sulking.
We’re now back in Santa Soledad. Apex, represented by Brenda, May, and Jason Trissop, primarily, are already there, planning to float a giant-size version of their monster-controlling neural implant up in a drone so that it can be fired via a small missile into Titan X. However, they’re keeping this plan a secret from Monarch, whom they’re trying to misdirect to the Bering Sea to verify a supposed sighting. It’s only thanks to Tim, who is really coming into his own as a leader aboard Outpost 18, that Barris doesn’t buy it. Barris wants proof that Titan X is really heading to Santa Soledad that’s a little more concrete than the word of a fugitive and the migratory maps of a dead man, and he gets it, since Titan X swims straight past the vessel on its way to the coast.
The Randa Scooby gang is also on Santa Soledad, where they sneak around Apex and discover Monarch’s Outpost 27, which has been abandoned since 1968 after a decade-long vigil. Bill had also been there at some point, since he conveniently left one of Hiro’s drawings behind. The discovery is enough to lead to a breakthrough in Hiro’s relationship with Keiko and another flashback, this one of Tim summoning him back to work instead of seeing his family, whom he had already been apart from for a month. At this point, anyone who has seen any TV before should have a good idea of where Hiro’s contemplation is going to get him.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Episode 5 picks up a head of steam towards the end. Titan X is due to arrive imminently, and the Scarabs all come to life, bursting up through the ground and storming towards the coast. Lee gets caught up in a hilariously fake-looking stampede and hurts his leg while he’s trying to sabotage Apex’s drone, so he doesn’t manage to wreck it in time. May is no help, either. She seems to have drunk the Apex Kool-Aid and believes the work they’re doing is good, even though it’s obvious to everyone that Apex’s secrecy means that they’re intending to control Titan X in order to turn it into a weapon that can be sold to the highest bidder.
A couple of weird things happen here. Titan X arrives, and Cate, continuing a trend of being able to communicate with it on some level, ambles to the shore to greet it. I’m not totally sure what’s going on here, but when the Apex drone hits Titan X with the implant, which causes it an immense amount of pain, Cate feels it too, so they must be physically linked in some manner. Predictably, the implant isn’t powerful enough to actually control Titan X, which Cate warned Brenda about multiple times, and the mission has to be hastily abandoned. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered either way since the Scarabs do the smart thing and hack off the tentacle that the implant is stuck in, which goes crashing into the remnants of the little village while Titan X smashes up Apex’s base camp.
At some point during this, Hiro, who was trying to rescue Cate from Titan X, gets mortally wounded. It’s very sweet that his immediate instinct is to make sure Cate is okay, but he, however, is not. He’s quickly surrounded by Cate and Keiko, who sing him the song “Furusato” that he sang to Cate as a child, way back in the cold open. It’s a touching scene and, needless to say, a pretty big moment for the season. Now we’ve established that even the main gang isn’t safe, I wonder who else might end up on the chopping block?
