Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode 6: So much Godzilla [Apple TV+ recap]

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode 6 review has Godzilla popping up all over. Plus love and more betrayal.

Read on for kaiju-size spoilers about the latest episode, plus some speculation about the show’s future.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode 6 review and things you might have overlooked

Monarch is the best show on Apple TV+ now. It’s set in the MonsterVerse with classic kaiju like Roddan, King Ghidorah and more. The list, of course, includes Godzilla who shows up quite a bit … especially in the latest episode.

I’m a huge fan and and did an analysis of the first two episodes, followed by episode three then episode four and episode 5.

All those are available to watch now. They will be followed by a new episode every Friday through January 12.

Love turns Lee Shaw into an idiot

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode 6, “Terrifying Miracles,” starts in 1955 with Captain Lee Shaw (played in this era by Wyatt Russell) and Dr. Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) at a fundraising event for their new Monarch organization.

It’s an opportunity for the two to spend time together when they’re not chasing a kaiju, and we see them start to become romantically involved.

I’m sure there’ll be a wide range of opinions on whether they are a believable couple. I try not to be overly judgmental about on-screen romances because I know people in real life who seem to have little in common but have stayed married long enough to have grandchildren.

Shaw and Miura connect well enough that they are headed for a bedroom when they are interrupted by Bill Randa (Anders Holm) with news that evidence of another kaiju has shown up in Japan.

They need to investigate but there’s an important funding meeting for Monarch in a couple of days. They decide to spit up: Miura and Randa will go to Japan on a kaiju hunt while Shaw will handle the meeting.

Trouble is, Shaw thinks he’s in love with Miura and can’t stand to let her go into danger alone. So he runs after her like a love-sick puppy. And this is after he was warned by his boss, General Puckett, that skipping the Monarch funding meeting will bring negative consequences.

To make it worse on Shaw, Dr. Miura tells him “We can’t do this.” It would interfere too much with running Monarch.

And that comment was prophetic — when Shaw, Miura and Randa get back to Washington, D.C., they find that without Shaw at the critical Monarch meeting the organization is now being run by a regular Navy officer. Someone from the “just kill all the kaiju“ group. And someone who doesn’t like Japanese people. They’re screwed and it’s all because Shaw is a love-sick idiot.

Much of the storyline of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters explains how the organization started with a couple of scientists studying kaiju and turned into a globe-spanning evil institution that hid the existence of Godzilla and other giant monsters from the public. The military take-over in 1955 is an important step in that process.

And it was good to get back to the 1950s timeline and characters in episode 6. They hadn’t been in the series since episode 3.

Godzilla here, there and everywhere

The evidence of a kaiju that Dr. Miura and Bill Randa followed led them to a small island in the Pacific where a scientist has made a “gamma radiation simulator” as a way to attract the attention of a kaiju. Miura calls it a “titan phone” because the Apple TV+ series doesn’t like the word kaiju for some reason.

The gizmo works and the mysterious titan who’s been taking the phone calls is Godzilla. That’s important because everyone thought he’d been annihilated with an H-bomb in episode 3.

Now let’s fast forward to 2014, where Cate Randa (played by Anna Sawai), her half-brother Kentaro Randa (Ren Watabe), May Olowe-Hewitt (Kiersey Clemons) and Colonel Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell in this era) are in Algeria/Morocco still hoping to track down Hiroshi Randa (Takehiro Hira), Cate’s and Kentaro’s missing father and the MacGuffin of the Apple TV+ series. They found a clue that their dad would be in north Africa in episode 5.

Sure enough, the missing man shows up, and he’s made his own gamma radiation simulator. And the Titan phone works again because Godzilla rears up out of the ground and wrecks the family reunion.

This is the first time something has happened in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters that is a flat-out mistake. Godzilla spends his spare time under water. Usually at the bottom of the Pacific. Over and over, that’s where the big guy appears from. It’s out of character for him to bury himself under tons of rock in the middle of a desert.

And we viewers know from 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters that Baphomet lives in Morocco. That’s the kaiju that should have responded to Hiroshi Randa’s Titan phone, not Godzilla.

But at least episode 6 includes much more kaiju on-screen time that episode 5 did. And it also had fun easter egg: a reference to Monster Island. If any of you are too young to remember, Monster Island is where Godzilla and his buddies live in the movies made in the 20th Century — back in the guy-in-a-rubber-suit days.

Duval turned on Monarch. Maybe.

Also in 2015, Lee Shaw is free to run off to Morocco with the Randa kids because Michelle Duvall (Elisa Lasowski) switched sides and helped him escape the clutches of Monarch in Alaska.

But I question whether Duvall has actually become a turncoat. Her helping Shaw could be a plot by Deputy Director Verdugo (Mirelly Taylor) to use Shaw to track down kaiju. The Randa kid’s friend May is already a double agent for Monarch, and she’s working with Duvall.

That said, it could be real instead. It wouldn’t be surprising that some of the people who work for Monarch joined because they wanted to study kaiju, not just… whatever it is that Monarch does now. Not much, as Shaw repeatedly points out.

Shaw is trying to help Godzilla

At the end of episode 6, we finally learn what Shaw’s plan is. After Godzilla stomps off, Cate tells Shaw “You can’t stop him.” And Shaw answers, “I’m trying to help him!”

Shaw understands what most people at this time do not: Godzilla is not the enemy. He’s big and destructive but that’s accidental. He’s there to defend the Earth from threats humanity can’t deal with.

Godzilla didn’t attack San Francisco – he fought two kaiju to prevent them from laying their eggs in the city, which would have resulted in much of North America being crushed under a hoard of giant insects. Godzilla is the hero, not the villain. But that’s not what people think in 2015 when Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes place.

All we viewers should understand what’s really happening because we’ve seen Godzilla: King of the Monsters in which Big G protects the Earth from King Ghidorah. But that movie is set in 2019, years after this Apple TV+ series is set.

Speculation about future episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+

I haven’t yet seen the last four episodes of this series, but I can make some guesses about what’s coming.

We actually got to see Hiroshi Randa briefly in this episode before he disappeared again. And he’s maybe presumed dead. Again. But I’m sure he’s alive and won’t be reunited with his kids until the end of episode 10. That’s how a MacGuffin works.

I’m still convinced that Dr. Keiko Miura is alive in 2015, and she’ll show up later in the series. Maybe she’ll even be the MacGuffun in season two! She could be trapped somewhere she doesn’t age normally (as apparently happened to Lee Shaw for a while) and could be played once again by Mari Yamamoto.

A chunk of this episode is about a romance between Lee Shaw and Keiko Miura, though she marries Bill Randa later and they have a son: Hiroshi Randa. But Lee Shaw seems very connected to Hiroshi’s kids, Cate and Kentaro. Maybe he just feels like an uncle, but I strongly suspect we’ll find out later than Shaw is Hiroshi’s real father so Cate and Kentaro are Shaw’s grandkids.

We will find out more next Friday when the next episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is released. It’s called “Will the Real May Please Stand Up?” and is obviously going to be the mysterious May Olowe-Hewitt’s backstory. Finally. I for one am greatly looking forward to it.

Staying very popular

You might ask your friends and coworkers if they’re watching Monarch — the series is a big hit for Apple TV+. It was No. 5 on ReelGood’s list of Top 10 TV Shows on streaming during the week of December 7 through December 13. That puts it ahead of almost everything else on any streaming platform.

And it has an 85% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.