Let me tell you the kind of romance Monarch: Legacy of Monsters has in its heart. Roughly 60 years prior to the events of this season, Bill Randa and Keiko Miura elope while on a rift-finding mission in what’s now known as Papua New Guinea. Delivering her own vows, Keiko talks about how happy she is to have found someone “who dreams as big as I do, sees the world as I do, full of possibility and magic.” When it’s Bill’s turn, all he can say is “I don’t have any words.” After much goofy back-and-forth with the official at this remote colonial government outpost performing the ceremony, they’re pronounced “man and Doctor Wife,” and Bill kisses the bride, or rather the bride kisses Bill. It’s all very silly and very sweet.

Fast forward to the present. Keiko and Lee are on Skull Island, trying to find a stable rift they believe Bill was hunting for when he was killed. Since Titan X is on the island — lured by Isabel Simmons, who has the monster’s egg, and guided by Godzilla, who was only ever trying to act as a sheepdog and herd Titan X back on course — they hope to use this rift, if it even exists, as a doorway for the creature to return home to Axis Mundi.

But first they find the field of Titan bones where Bill met his end during the events of Kong: Skull Island. They come across his belongings, and they realize that they’ve found the spot where he died. The moment hits like a freight train, leaving Keiko on her knees. “Goddamn you, Billy!” she yells. “I trusted you, I believed in you, and you threw it all away, for what?” She believes his scientific obsessions tore him away from his responsibilities to their son, Hiroshi. (A separate flashback set in the late 1960s, in which Dr. Suzuki tries and fails to persuade Bill to abandon his riff quest and return to his child, appears to confirm this.) All the while she’s literally surrounded by death. 

Then Keiko and Lee reach the final spot on Bill’s map, where he believes Titan X’s migratory route always ends. The rift there appears dormant, but it’s there beneath the surface of a pond, and if Titan X can be brought there it can likely reopen the rift, an ability innate to all Titans. But there’s plenty of evidence it’s been opened before: probes, dropped into rifts around the world by Bill Randa over the course of years, all of them washing up here at the “Grand Central Station” hub that connects all the other rifts.

And every single one of them has the same handwritten note for Keiko inside, in which Bill recites the vows he’s finally had time to put into words. “I’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth and beyond,” he says, barely exaggerating. With that, Keiko realizes that Billy never gave up looking for her. She was what he was obsessed with, not the rifts themselves. She’s hit with a wave of emotion that maybe really is beyond words this time — regret, relief, grief, all in one.

All this — grappling with death amid a field of colossal bones, finding messages in bottles dropped around the planet by a man who never stopped searching for his one true love, series-best work by actor Mari Yamamoto — drawn from John Goodman’s semi-comedic death in a fun popcorn creature feature. It’s really the damnedest thing!

There’s plenty of creature-feature in this thing, don’t get me wrong. Godzilla and Titan X’s roaring face-off amid the wall of storms that forms a natural perimeter around the Titan-infested Skull Island looks fantastic. So does the return of Kong, who tear-asses around the island hunting for Titan X but who’s actually being lured by a decoy helicopter blasting the creature’s roars, deployed by Isabel Simmons. 

On a smaller but no less cool scale, the Monarch landing team of Kei, Lee, May, Tim, and some redshirt security guards gets waylaid and split up by some incredibly designed giant bugs. These ugly suckers hang out in the forest canopy and use their branch-like appendages to snag unwary prey and drag them into a maw that spans the length of their thoraxes. They’re as nasty-looking as they sound, and for a moment there I was half-convinced May was going to wind up bug food, almost entirely as a result of the sheer strength of their design and execution. This series has never once let me down where monster creation is concerned.

But the focus here, as always, remains on the human emotions driving the people mixed up in all this world-bestriding business. Because Kentaro has never really cried it out the way Cate and Keiko have — actor Ren Watabe has never been asked to do the swing-for-the-fences stuff Yamamoto, Anna Sawai, or the Russells have — I don’t think I fully picked up just how deep his anger over his father Hiroshi’s death runs. True, he may have forgiven Cate for her role in it, he’s not angry at her per se, but he sure is angry at her instinct to protect Titan life over human life after what it’s cost him. You can’t be “inhumane” to something that isn’t human to begin with, he says to her. (He should try explaining this to both the Humane Society and Merriam-Webster.)

The monsters, we learn, are only incidental to Isabel’s goals. Titan X has been drawn to Skull Island with its kidnapped egg, drugged with anesthetic, and wired with special rage-amplifying behavioral modifiers. Its job is to take out Skull Island’s guardian, Kong, and open a stable rift that can be maintained indefinitely. Isabel wants Axis Mundi and its time dilation properties, not the Titans at all. If she can set up a stable transit route, she can sell Axis Mundi to the world as what Cate calls “your own personal time machine.” Got a terminal illness, for example? Stay down there a couple weeks and return to find a cure. Got a jones to see the future or the past? Now you can!

Or got a dead dad who spent time in Axis Mundi, like Kentaro does? Maybe through the sci-fi magic of the rifts, you can bridge time and retrieve him before he can be killed at all. (Like how present-day Old Lee spoke with decades-ago Young Lee in real time through a rift earlier in the season.) This spacetime-continuum-breeching property is why Kentaro has signed on with Isabel’s plan, for which she wants him to serve as a new Neil Armstrong. (Called out on her lies and obfuscations to get him there, she does a manipulative “I-I-I was scared you’d say no” routine.) This quest to raise Dad from the dead is why, to Cate’s horror, Kentaro is willing to sacrifice Kong, Titan X, and her egg alike to see it done.

“History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man,” or so Blue Öyster Cult sang of Godzilla long ago. Generally speaking, the Godzilla films that have demonstrated this theme most clearly do so on ecological/environmental/pacifist grounds, decrying the human instinct to conquer and destroy, leading to humanity’s own inevitable destruction when nature revolts. Monarch’s brilliant innovation is to link this directly to that other great folly of man: love.

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.