Spectacle is the language art employs to express emotions too large for our everyday vocabulary to convey. That’s the fundamental truth behind everything from musicals to science fiction, horror movies to fantasy epics, and it’s truer of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters than in just about any other show on the air this year. This show’s heart, as seen in the relationships of its main characters with one another, is so big that it takes Titans to convey it.

Look at the episode’s action climax, a truly breathtaking sequence of kaiju combat and ground-level thrills and suspense. Up above, Titan X, driven berserk by Isabelle Simmons’s implants, mauls Kong, lured to the fight by Isabelle Simmons’s decoy. The fight grows more and more vicious. Even though Kong appears overmatched, he’s obviously the bigger star, and it appears increasingly likely that he’ll kill the beast in self-defense. 

Down below, Cate Randa has become trapped beneath the gigantic combatants after attempting to commune once again with Titan X. In one breathtaking shot she gazes upward from a supine position and sees nothing but their titanic bodies and limbs flailing against each other. 

But her grandmother, Keiko Randa, comes to the rescue in a Jeep, driving like a maniac amid the thudding legs and tentacles, any one of which could smash her flat in any second. She’s that intent on rescuing her granddaughter and friend, whose name she screams into the maelstrom with enough force to make it heard. After the Jeep is destroyed, the two run off on foot, dodging the giant monsters until the very last moment. The sequence is the most intense you-are-there depiction of what kaiju would feel like for people on the ground I’ve seen this side of Godzilla Minus One or Cloverfield. But it’s also a showcase for actor Mari Yamamoto, who makes the madcap drive and chase feel not just thrilling but desperate. This is no action sequence for her, this is a person fighting to save a loved one from death.

What ends the peril, breaks up the fight, and gives Titans and humans alike their hard-earned happy endings? Titan X catches a glimpse of her egg in the bunker where our heroes are hiding, and her maternal instincts override her own hacked system. With Isabelle’s implants fried, Titan X stops attacking Kong and rescues her egg. Kong sees what’s going on and backs off, understanding this is a mother separated from her child. 

Now all that remains is to bring the still off-course Titan X to a rift, where she and her egg can escape back to Axis Mundi where they belong. When their attempt to use sonics fries the amps, Cate straps her harness to the chopper floor and walks slowly out across the open hatch into the air, using herself as a lure. When she can go no further, Keiko straps her own harness to Cate’s to help her go the full distance and commune with the creature. Cate’s face simmers with the pleasure and power of this incredible and unlikely connection. From Shōgun to Monarch, Anna Sawai’s ability to communicate with her face alone is nothing short of astonishing.

In the end, Titan X opens rift and climbs inside, but not before extending a tentacle to Cate, who touches it with evident awe and gratitude. It’s a genuinely moving moment between a human actor and a VFX monster. It’s followed by another moment of almost literal emotional fireworks, set against the dazzling backdrop of the rift’s energy field, as young Lee approaches the wall from within and silently speaks to Keiko. He’s smiling, but she can’t hear him. Tears streaming, she turns and asks the older Lee what he was saying. (Thanks to the time dilation, he would now remember doing this.)

“Kei,” the present-day, aged Lee says to her, “I was saying…” He pauses and rephrases. “I’m saying goodbye.” They take each other’s hands, and after that, Lee Shaw goes his own way once again.

This is dynamite stuff from start to finish. The monster fight is amazing even in broad daylight, the use of ground-level humans has never been more effective in the Legendary Godzilla/Kong MonsterVerse, and everyone treats the material like Shakespeare. Their commitment makes us care about the characters, and actually fear for them when it seems they might get stepped on. It turns out that this is very important for this genre! Most impressively, the themes of family and connection are woven seamlessly through both the Titans and the humans, without it ever coming across as forced or corny. Leopold Ross’s score adds a sort of deep sonic ache to it all.

There are a few more scenes that point to the future. Kentaro rejects Cate’s plea to return with her, Kei, May, and Tim, opting to leave with the more than slightly panicked Isabel, who’s just seen her dreams and her plausible deniability go up in smoke but still has big plans for the time-travel properties of the rifts. Even though he’s just seen Isabel murder a man, he believes she’s his path to bringing his father, or “a version of him,” back from the dead. Like any sci-fi obsessive with restoring the dead to life, he has to follow his own mad path to do it.

At Monarch HQ, Keiko and Cate learn from Director Barris that they’ve been promoted to the head of their own investigative team, atttempting to track down Kentaro and Isabel…based in the basement, Mindhunter-style. But still, their teammates on the project are the hyper-competent Tim and May, both by now true believers in the original Monarch mission: “Science, discovery, like the founders intended,” as Tim puts it.

Last but not least, Lee Shaw travels to Thailand in an attempt to harness the power of the gigantic pterodactyl firebird monster Rodan — or as I, a guy who grew up on old Godzilla movies, put it in my notes, RODAN!!! I’m still a sucker for this stuff, what can I say?

Moments like these help make Monarch the unique beast it is. Though it lacks Andor’s scorching overt politics, it shares that show’s emotional sophistication and exceptional acting (I’ve barely talked about the way Kiersey Clemons and Joe Tippett keep the non-Randa end of the story as engaging as possible whenever they’re on screen), and adds the big crowd-pleasing franchise staples that Andor eschewed, with Kong and Godzilla kaiju battles standing in for Jedi and Sith lightsaber duels. (I’ll take Rodan over Grogu any day of the week.) It’s no longer a surprise how good this show is. I’d like to discover how much better it can still get.

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.