‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Episode 2 Recap: House of the Dragon

What a difference a dragon makes, huh? There’s a lot I find misjudged and misguided in Apple TV+‘s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters at this early stage, but they got at least this much right: They ended their two-episode series premiere with a huge berserk reptilian creature emerging from the wreck of a sunken World War II battleship that’s now on land for some reason. After all, this is not Monarch: Legacy of America’s Next Top Best Friend. There’s a promise the show makes with its very title, and it knows it has to deliver.

I’m not sure it’s delivering on much else at the moment, unfortunately. Once again written by co-developer and showrunner Chris Black and directed by Matt Shakman, this episode (“Departure”) is not, as I’d hoped, all delivery after the first episode’s setup. It’s basically more of the same.

In 2015, Cate, Kentaro, and May continue to pursue the mystery of Cate and Kentaro’s father’s hidden Monarch files. This puts them in the crosshairs of Tim, the seemingly rogue Monarch minion who first noticed that they’d opened the files. They flee to the one decent lead they have: Lt. Leland Lafayette Shaw III, played as an older man by Kurt Russell. Turns out the retirement home in which he lives is actually a prison for Monarch operatives who know too much, kind of like the Village in The Prisoner. But Lee, happy to meet our trio of young investigators since Cate and Kentaro are the grandchildren of his old buddy Bill Randa, seems ready to escape.

That’s right, by the way—the Billy running around with Lee and Keiko in the 1950s material is a young version of John Goodman’s character from Kong: Skull Island. The show is leaning on the importance of this character and the audience’s presumed attachment too him a bit too hard, to be honest; Kong had the best characters of any of the MonsterVerse movies, but that’s a low bar to clear, and they were good stock characters, not richly developed human beings or pop culture icons. It’s just John Goodman who eventually gets killed by a giant monster. 

Be that as it may, the 1950s stuff shows us how Lee, Keiko, and Bill all meet for the first time, and how their separate hunts for the same elusive quarry — some kind of radioactive entity that soars through the skies of the Philippines like a creature of legend — lead them to the aforementioned dragon. Which, again, is good. Monarch can’t get away with the Andor trick of not having any Jedi. It needs the beasts.

The emergence of dragons (the odds are decent that they’ll come up with a less mythical name for the creatures, but that’s what we’re talking about) remind me of Reign of Fire, the Christian Bale/Matthew McConaughey post-apocalyptic dragon movie. I could see a flock of these things becoming the season’s big threat, in the same way Kong: Skull Island used a multitude of its imaginary reptilians, the Skullcrawlers, as monstrous antagonists for both Kong and the human characters. (Including our pal Bill Randa.)

But that’s just the idle speculation of a monster movie nerd. In terms of what’s actually on screen at the moment, Monarch is a moderately diverting set of scenes you watch on your way to seeing some large animal freak out and destroy something. Along the way it makes strange decisions, like treating Kurt Russell as a big reveal even though he’s the main face on all the marketing, or the aforementioned treatment of Bill Randa like Anakin Skywalker. (And even Anakin has suffered from diminishing returns.) It’s a monster movie in TV form. If we’re lucky, that last scene indicates it’s about to start really acting like one.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.