Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 takes some unexpected twists and turns in the fourth episode, “Trespass.” Will the Monarch gang be able to recover the Titan Phone from Apex Cybernetics? Will Cate recover from her existential crisis? And will the kaiju action in this kaiju show be more prevalent compared to the last episode? All these questions and many others will be answered in our full spoiler breakdown of “Trespass.” This is your final warning if you haven’t seen the episode yet, so let’s begin.
What happens in Monarch Season 2 Episode 4 “Trespass”?
We open on a montage of Bill Randa throwing himself into his work between the years of 1962 and 1964. This is followed by an unseen Monarch official collecting Randa’s belongings in a box after his death in 1973, as depicted in Kong: Skull Island, and concludes with the box being seized in 2015 by an unseen employee of Apex Cybernetics. After the title sequence, we head to Ofu Beach in American Samoa, where a pair of surfers head into the water while the beach is closed to catch some private waves.
A Monarch official warns them to get out of the water immediately, as the beach is of course closed for Titan-related reasons. They reluctantly agree, but as they walk back inland, a swarm of Scarabs emerges from the sand and heads into the water, killing the two in the process. The Scarabs reunite with their progenitor, Titan X, who crushes the nearby Monarch boat with its tentacles. We then cut to San Francisco, where Cate has just woken up on a beach overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge after her breakdown at the end of the last episode.
She looks at her phone to find several missed calls from her parents and May before walking into the water and seemingly having an epiphany while submerged. Over at Outpost 18, Apex’s tracking algorithm has put Titan X en route to make landfall in San Francisco in 23 hours, leading Monarch to upgrade their previous public Titan Watch to a Titan Alert as the Apex team leaves for vague and suspicious reasons. Cate heads home after a heartfelt reunion with a former student who survived G-Day and tells her mother that she’s leaving to help the Monarch gang in a tearful goodbye.
In our thankfully last major geographical shift for this episode, we head to Pensacola, Florida, where May meets up with Kentaro, Keiko, Hiroshi, and Shaw. May suspects that Apex is keeping the Titan Phone in a subbasement, meaning they’ll need special clearance to access it. They gain that access through the unwilling and unknowing help of one Dr. Kevin Burge of Apex Cybernetics.
In an elaborate ruse, Shaw and Kentaro pose as a drunken uncle and his nephew at a local bar where Dr. Burge is spending the evening. Shaw pretends to flirt with May to make the bartender angry and cause a big, distracting fight, only to turn the tables and lure Dr. Burge away from his belongings by pretending to have a big, distracting heart attack. All the while, Keiko and Kentaro steal Dr. Burge’s Apex ID badge and transfer its security clearances to May’s Apex ID badge.
The next morning, our heroes’ plan seems to be going off without a hitch. May hacks into Apex’s network and determines that the Titan Phone is being held on Sublevel 10 before staging a radiation leak to get the other employees out. Kentaro, Keiko, Shaw, and Hiroshi then sneak in, posing as the radiation clean-up crew, hazmat suits and all, after a quick pit stop at Brenda Holland’s house to sabotage her car and buy themselves some extra time.
After discovering that Apex is keeping various creatures from Skull Island in containment, including pterodactyl-like beasts and what can only be described as ostrich/porcupine hybrids called needlewalkers, Hiroshi and Keiko head down to the sublevels to retrieve the Titan Phone while Shaw and Kentaro keep watch on the security cameras. However, the plan hits a snag when May has trouble finding the final security code right at the same time that Apex realizes the radiation leak was fake, and Brenda Holland finally arrives via bike.
Desperate and running out of time, Shaw and Kentaro release the needlewalkers into the facility and soon meet up with Hiroshi and Keiko after May finally manages to let them into the Titan Phone room. Unfortunately, they find the Titan Phone disassembled beyond repair with less than two hours left before Titan X arrives in San Francisco. But in a simultaneously lucky and unlucky twist, Monarch calls off the Titan alert altogether right at that moment.
Lucky because Cate is now completely safe from a Titan X attack, unlucky because Monarch called off the alert specifically because Apex apparently sabotaged their sonar systems, and they had been tracking a whale instead of Titan X the entire time. Thankfully, our heroes do have a new, accurate method of tracking Titan X. Also present in the Titan Phone room is a large conspiracy board made up of Bill Randa’s old findings, including a completed Titan X migratory map. The said map indicates that the Titan is actually heading for Santa Soledad, so the gang grabs Bill’s stuff and makes their escape.
They reunite with Cate in the parking garage, only to discover that May is not coming with them, as she has decided to stay with Brenda after Brenda shows her an Apex project she believes could help stop Titan X. That project being a method of pacifying Titans using what Apex had left of May’s unique code as a base. The effect is currently only temporary, lasting 30 seconds at a time, but both Brenda and May believe it could be the key to human/Titan coexistence if given enough time.
To make matters worse, Hiroshi discovers the letter Keiko wrote to Shaw amongst Bill’s things, ending the episode on one final flashback to 1962 in which a young Hiroshi says goodbye to his father for what would end up being the last time.
Is Monarch Season 2 Episode 4 worth watching?
There is a lot to love about this episode. For starters, the opening Titan X/Scarab sequence is phenomenal. The surfers, not knowing what they’ve gotten into and ultimately being swarmed by Scarabs, demonstrate solid use of setup and payoff as well as great tension building. And Titan X’s tentacles crushing the Monarch boat felt like a great update to a similar sequence in Godzilla Showa Era deep cut, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. Honestly, a lot of Titan X comes off like an upgraded Ebirah to the point where I wonder if that will end up being the big twist by the end of the season.
On top of that, I’m a sucker for a good cinematic heist, and this episode definitely delivers on that front. Putting the team together, getting all the tools, sneaking around, something goes wrong, and then they turn it around in an unexpected way, it’s just so much fun. Ironically, the only part of the heist playbook they didn’t really do was actually stealing what they were after, since the Titan Phone was already destroyed when they got there. Unfortunately, despite the gains they obviously made by getting the map, this makes the conclusion to the heist storyline fall flat.
Moreover, I don’t buy that May would immediately start trusting Brenda like she does here. May has clearly been shown to be someone who has difficulty trusting anybody, let alone someone she has as much of a complicated history with as Brenda, so her immediately abandoning her friends to follow a hunch after she saw exactly one mini-pterodactyl be nice for 30 seconds seems out-of-character to me. Finally, and this is admittedly nitpicking and probably just a “me” thing, but the use of Patsy Cline’s “You Belong To Me” in the cold open felt very distracting.
Yes, the song is fitting for both the time period and the mood of the scene. But it’s a song that was also recently and fairly prominently used in Deadpool and Wolverine for the diner scene, and now that’s all I, and I imagine at least a few others, can think about when hearing it. Overall, though, “Trespass” is still a very solid episode with just a handful of minor issues.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
from FandomWire https://ift.tt/VasROQe
No comments: