Monarch S1E2 Review: A Hunt for Dragons Finds a Ghost Ship
A 1950s radiation chase in the Philippines and a present-day kidnapping in Tokyo lock the show's dual timelines together around the wreck of the USS Lawton.
Monarch’s pilot spent its energy on G-Day fallout and the file cache that detonates the Randa family’s secrets. The second hour does the harder work. It splits the runtime cleanly between a 1950s expedition that founds the agency the present-day characters are running from, and a Tokyo abduction-and-flight sequence that forces Cate, Kentaro, and May into the same minivan. Both threads lean on small rooms, two-handed scenes, and a single visual reveal at the end of each. The reveal in 1952 is the rusted hull of an American destroyer five thousand miles from where it sank. The reveal in 2015 is a Kurt Russell smirk behind a chain-link fence at a Monarch black site. The episode trusts the audience to register that those two reveals are the same story.
A jeep ride in 1952 introduces the trio that becomes Monarch
The cold open belongs to Wyatt Russell’s young Lee Shaw, hauled in front of a colonel with a swollen eye and a file on his late father. Shaw has been brawling with Marines on whatever Pacific outpost the army has stashed him on, and the colonel offers him a way out that is also a way down. Escort a Japanese scientist on a milk run through the Philippines. The army has already lost a man on the last one. Protect, observe, report. The scene is doing two things at once. It establishes the Shaw the present-day Monarch wants safely sedated in their “secure asset management” facility, and it sets up the chip on the lieutenant’s shoulder that Mari Yamamoto’s Keiko Miura will spend the next forty minutes calmly walking past.
The meet-cute is the episode’s best comic beat and its sharpest political one. Shaw assumes the man in the lobby is Dr. Miura. The man in the lobby barely looks up. Keiko introduces herself, accepts Shaw’s apology, and then corrects his attempt at familiarity with a level “you may call me Dr. Miura.” The jeep ride that follows is a master class in how to telegraph a partnership without flirtation. Keiko drives because she has been driving these roads for weeks. Shaw asks why she is overqualified for a snipe hunt. Keiko answers without flinching that Washington would have sent half of Los Alamos if the readings had been legitimate, and would not have sent a woman, and certainly not a Japanese woman. She is not asking Shaw to deny it. She is asking him to notice it. The show registers her postgraduate Berkeley English and his father-was-a-drunk inheritance as adjacent forms of someone-else’s-history, and lets the jeep keep moving.
John Goodman’s Bill Randa arrives as a younger man, identified in the credits as Billy, holding a movie camera in a clearing and offering a deal he is already breaking by filming the strangers with the radiation gear. Cryptozoologist, he says. “He studies animals that don’t exist,” Keiko translates. The episode plays Billy as a believer with a vocabulary the army has not yet learned. He is the one who coins MUTO. He is the one who reframes the radiation trace as a migration path. He is also the one who has been quietly hoping that the wreck of his own ship would be at the end of it.
Tokyo 2015 turns a passport conversation into a kidnapping
The present-day half of the hour belongs to Anna Sawai’s Cate. The pilot established her as the daughter who flew to Tokyo to confront her father’s second family. The second episode strips her of agency in stages and asks how she rebuilds it. The first stage is a phone call to her mother in San Francisco, cut short by Cate’s promise to come home. The second is a stranger at the train station who clocks her American accent, jokes about being the harmless Tim variety, and then mentions the files. The third is a black hood, a panic attack inside a windowless van, and the realization that the Japanese police officer she eventually reaches treats her like a tourist who overindulged at karaoke. Joe Tippett’s Tim is good casting for this exact role. The man is plausible as both a junior office worker and a kidnapper, and the show uses the ambiguity to keep Cate, and the audience, off-balance for the entire sequence.
The Kentaro thread is the present-day half’s other engine. Ren Watabe plays the son who was supposed to have inherited the apartment, the studio, and the version of Hiroshi Randa where there is only one family. He spends the morning being told by his mother that his father lost too much too young to be judged for it, and the afternoon being told by Monarch agents that the files he took from the safe belong to them and that they are more important than he can imagine. Kiersey Clemons’s May is the audio engineer ex-girlfriend Kentaro went back to because she is the only person in Tokyo who can read the old computer files, and because he does not have anyone else to ask. Her line about him grabbing onto her to keep his head above water is the closest thing the episode gives us to a back-story dump, and it lands because the show refuses to underline it.
When Cate, Kentaro, and May finally end up in the same minivan, it is because May has the contacts. The Monarch agents have already broken into Kentaro’s mother’s apartment in a scene the show plays as half home-invasion and half farce, with Emiko offering tea and asking the lead agent if she is single while Kentaro slips out the back with the drive. The three of them are now fugitives without a plan, and the only address May can think of is a place she does not name out loud.
The Lawton anchors the season’s central impossibility
Billy’s map is the bridge between the two halves of the hour. He has plotted the radiation readings against the local oral tradition and against the path of his own torpedoed destroyer, and he leads Keiko to a clearing in the Philippines where the USS Lawton is sitting upright in the jungle five thousand miles from where it went down. The image is the first true monster-shot the series has earned. The ship is too far inland for a tsunami, too intact for a salvage, and too radioactive for an ordinary wreck. Billy walks the deck like a man visiting a grave he already paid for. Keiko, who is a scientist and therefore has to ask, asks. He says he hoped. He says it is not very scientific.
The interior is worse. The Geiger counter keeps clicking. The corridors are coated in what looks like an organic resin nine years younger than the ship. The walls are studded with pods. Keiko’s “there are so many” is the closest the script comes to a thesis statement. Whatever scooped the Lawton off the surface of the Pacific has been using it as a nursery, and one of the residents is still on board, and it is not happy that the trio is interrupting the brood. Billy gets pinned under a fallen beam. Shaw, who walked out twenty minutes earlier and came back because Keiko did not chase him, levers him free with a length of pipe. The three of them sprint for the deck while the creature shrieks in a tunnel behind them. Keiko sees it last. “It is a dragon,” she says, and the show finally trusts her to use the word Billy has been using all hour.
The reveal of elder Lee Shaw at the Monarch facility is the present-day equivalent. Kurt Russell shows up behind a fence at what he calls “secure asset management,” registers that he is talking to Hiroshi’s son and Hiroshi’s daughter at the same time, and offers Cate and Kentaro about sixty seconds to decide whether they trust him enough to follow him out. The casting trick of the Russells playing the same man at sixty-year remove is no longer a novelty by 2015, but Monarch is using it for a specific purpose. The Shaw of 1952 is the lieutenant who walked out on his own assignment because he could not stand being told he was redundant. The Shaw of 2015 is the colonel who has been waiting half a century for a Randa to come looking for him. The show wants us to read the older man’s offer as the younger man’s apology, and it almost gets there.
What this episode argues
The pilot was a mystery box. The second hour is the thesis statement. The argument is that the agency the present-day characters are running from was built by three people who needed each other before they had a name for what they were studying, and that the secret Monarch is now trying to bury is a secret it was founded to protect from the same powers it now serves. Billy’s “I’m looking for the truth” in the jungle is not yet the corporate slogan it becomes. The Lawton is not yet a classified asset. Keiko’s curiosity is not yet a national-security liability. The episode argues that the institutional sin Monarch keeps committing in the present, secure asset management of inconvenient people, started with the army putting a Japanese scientist on a snipe hunt in 1952 and discovering she was right.
The second argument is about inheritance. Cate has inherited a father who was good at keeping secrets. Kentaro has inherited a father who was good at keeping a second family. Both inheritances run through a man, Bill Randa, who was on the Lawton when it went down and walked off the jungle wreck nine years later believing in dragons. The episode lets Emiko throw fistfuls of curry across the living room with her son because anger is a perfectly reasonable response to discovering that the man you mourned was someone else, and lets Cate scream “I was almost kidnapped” at a Tokyo officer who does not care, because the colony of women in this story who are told they are confused is older than Monarch itself.
Verdict
“Departure” is a confident, patient hour that fixes the pilot’s biggest weakness, which was that the 1952 thread had been all atmosphere and no characters. Wyatt Russell and Mari Yamamoto have immediate, prickly chemistry. The introduction of young Bill Randa as a believer with a camera reframes the older Bill’s file cache as a half-century of evidence, not an obsession. The Tokyo abduction sequence does what the pilot could not, which is give Cate a present-tense crisis instead of a backstory. And the final image, three twentysomethings standing in the dust outside a Monarch black site while Kurt Russell smiles through chain-link, is the kind of cliffhanger the show needed to prove it can land.
The hour is not flawless. Tim’s dialogue is broad enough that Joe Tippett has to work harder than the script does, and the scene where Emiko stalls Monarch with offers of tea is funny in a way that sits uneasily against Cate’s panic in the van earlier. The radiation-procedural mechanics get a little gear-grinding in the middle stretch, especially the moment where Billy explains MUTO straight to camera. But the episode’s central image, the wreck of the Lawton standing upright in a jungle that has not had time to grow over it, is strong enough to carry the rest. Monarch has shown its hand. It is a show about a family of monsters, biological and bureaucratic, and about the women who keep being told they are imagining them.
Rating: 8.1/10