Open with a glory shot of King Kong konging around Skull Island. Close it with a glory shot of the monstrous new kaiju being billed as Titan X roaring out of the sea to claim human sacrifices. Stuff the middle with a beat-the-clock Titan chase, Wyatt Russell and Mari Yamamoto making googly eyes at each other, Anna Sawai growling “Try me, little bastard” at a giant bug, and more critters than you can count. It probably goes without saying the result is a damn good Monarch episode, but I’ll say it anyway: This is a damn good Monarch episode.
In the present, our heroes and the Monarch organization deal with the fallout from the events of the previous episode, when Cate, May, Kentaro, and Hiroshi’s rescue of Lee Shaw from the liminal “Axis Mundi” dimension accidentally unleashed a terrifying new Titan, currently swimming full steam towards a choke point for fishing traffic. The creature isn’t Biollante from the Heisei-era Godzilla movies after all, but a brand new aquatic beast named Titan X.
But it’s gone by other names as well. Back in 1957, the people of Santa Soledad refer to it as “The Great God of the Sea,” and worship it with a Wicker Man/Midsommar–style festival of dance circles and creepy masks. (It really does feel much more northern European than Latin American in nature, an smartly unexpected artistic choice.)
By the time the fun starts, Bill Randa has departed, believing he’s discovered a map of the migration route taken by the island’s divine “MUTO” (massive unidentified terrestrial organism, the old term for Titans). This is unwise for two reasons. First, it leaves Lee and Kei alone to keep getting closer, a vibe Bill seems blind to.
Kei opens up to Lee about the death of her son Hiroshi’s father from cancer in Nagasaki years earlier. Then they nearly kiss while under the psychedelic influence of a drug administered to them by Augustin (Camilo Jimenez Varon) and Lucía (Camila Ponte Alvarez), the feuding leaders of the local religion. Augustin’s wanted the outsiders dead since they got there, Lucía’s been trying to get them to leave, but now it’s too late.
A subsonic frequency from deep within the earth heralds the cicada-like emergence of thousands of those little trilobite critters, apparently known as Scarabs, from the hidden cave where Bill found the map engraved on the wall. Lee and Kei snap out of their drugged stupor and run from the altar where the locals sacrificed a massive fish as part of the summoning ritual, dodging the fastest of the Scarabs as they race toward the shore. Lee unwisely kicks one, and Titan X, which has arisen from the sea like Cthulhu or Dagon, attacks our heroes with one of its long tail-tentacles.
And it’s a damn good thing, too! Obviously they survive and live into the future, where their knowledge of Titan X’s behavior helps them figure out how to stop it. If they stumble across the right low-frequency sound and beam it at the beast using a drone, it will theoretically reverse course and the fishing boats will be spared. Until this point Lee has been giving good advice to Tim, the acting commander of the big Monarch ship now that Verdugo is dead. But Lee’s recklessness now costs them the drone, which gets walloped by a tentacle.
Luck intervenes in the form of a critter, as it so often does. Down on one of the lower decks, Cate comes face to face with a Scarab and tries fending it off with a fire extinguisher, leading to her extremely cool comment above. Kentaro winds up saving the day with a flare gun, but even after he shoots it twice and Cate beats it with the extinguisher, it’s still alive — and it emits a low-frequency distress call that calls Titan X right back around. (I can’t tell what this means, but Kei and Cate have an easier time hearing certain Titan X–related vibrations than Lee or any of the other men do.)
It’s the Scarab that Titan X wants, not the ship. Lee darts off in a speedboat with the critter as cargo, tossing it into the sea after luring the kaiju off its crash course with Monarch. The monster’s comings and goings generate a wave that nearly swamps Col. Shaw — but he shoots through the pipe of the enormous wave like a surfer to safety instead. This is the kind of moment you hire Kurt Russell for.
This is the kind of episode you make Monarch for. The herky-jerky plotting of the premiere is a thing of the past now. Whatever was up with those transitional hiccups from one season to the next, it’s clear what the new mission is, and the show is pursuing it as directly as the Monarch ship chased that kaiju.
Which is a really cool kaiju, by the way, a sea monster on a grand scale. In one wonderful shot from below, we watch Titan X’s massive bulk eclipse a whale as it swims above it. The Scarabs are symbiotes of some sort, or maybe some stage in the creature’s life cycle, but whatever they are they cling to the monster’s carapace like barnacles. Creatures from Cloverfield and The Mist served similar functions, for a similar reason: It’s memorably gross. It always helps to have a fast-moving, ground-level monster on hand for instant creepy-crawly thrills if needed, too.
If the monsters are Monarch’s muscle and its chance to show off its imaginative mind, the characters’ relationships are the show’s big soft beating heart. It’s beating loud and clear here. Takehiro Hira is a quiet MVP as Hiroshi Randa, a man forced to justify to his children why they come from two separate families he kept secret from one another — one where his wife was a coworker and confidante and one where he could leave that world behind. Meanwhile, he’s able to reunite with his mother, who’s barely aged since he last saw her when he was a boy. His life his complicated.
Equally complicated are the feelings of young Lee Shaw when he hears Kei describe her relationship with his best friend, Billy. She describes him as being a far better husband for her even than the sainted doctor who died treating victims of the atomic bomb. Lee knows he shouldn’t begrudge his friends that kind of love, but one look at his face is all it takes to know it hurts him badly all the same.
It makes you appreciate the effort that went into ensuring that the human elements of the show could hold your interest between monster attacks. If both remain exactly as good all season long as they are this episode, then the Great God of the Sea has truly blessed us with a bountiful catch.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
