This article contains SPOILERS for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 Episode 1, "Cause and Effect."
It is more than a bit insane that a viewer can turn on their streaming device in 2026 and see King Kong of all things going on a rampage in the opening minutes of an episode of television. King Kong is one of the defining cinematic monsters, one whose roots go all the way back to Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s monumental 1933 film, and yet here he is, for the first time ever, doing what he does best on the small-screen.
While one could argue that fans of Kong have been waiting decades to see the character appear on the small-screen in one form or another, viewers of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters have been explicitly waiting for this other giant ape-sized shoe to drop for the past few years. The final episode of the first season of Apple’s MonsterVerse series teased a handful of huge status quo shakeups: the character of Lee Shaw (played by both Kurt and Wyatt Russell across the series’ decade-spanning timeline) was left stranded in the Axis Mundi, all the rest of the primary cast had escaped that alternate dimension but been thrown several years into the future, and it turned out that the location Monarch had rescued these characters at was none other than Skull Island. The final shot of that episode featured Kong emerging from the brush, and looking none too happy to find them all there.
Now, the first episode of Monarch’s second season, “Cause and Effect,” makes good on that promise in a way that is extremely befitting of its name. Picking up immediately where the prior season left off, the opening few minutes of the episode are solely devoted to Kong absolutely wrecking shop as the main characters attempt to escape. With a script written by showrunner Chris Black and directed by a Lawrence Trilling, the season two premiere get off to a rip-roaring start, before having to somewhat inevitably level out. It is in the transition between these two facets of the show’s central identity that the episode can occasionally struggle, something which viewers of the first season may very well be familiar with.
The central conceit of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is that it provides a grounded, human-perspective look into the world of the MonsterVerse. While films like Godzilla vs. Kong have been predominantly occupied with the monsters-on-monsters shenanigans of this world, Monarch aims to show the toll taken, both physically and emotionally, on the real people living in this world. For my money’s worth, the series has been largely successful on this front, embracing the cultural history and connotation of Godzilla as both a character and a franchise in a way that feels both tasteful and effective. However, it's also a show about monsters that knows that is what the majority of audiences are going to be tuning in for, so it attempts to frequently have its cake and eat it too.
In addition to this, the series aims to explore the dual meaning behind the titular “legacy,” both in terms of the monsters and in terms of the literal families and legacies the show centers on. Because of its timeline-jumping story, the series manages to have multiple generations of a given family as core characters, and aims to explore the ways in which the failings or triumphs of one generation, on both a societal and interpersonal scale, effect the next.
If that all sounds obscenely ambitious, it is, and can yield some varying results. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters does occasionally bite off more than it can chew, and sadly, “Cause and Effect” does feel like a case of this.
The thing about opening the episode will full-blown Kong carnage is that it allows for a really satisfying follow-through from the previous season, but does little to set up the present story of this season. So it’s a whiz-bang, showstopper of an opening setpiece, but all of its noise and fury communicates very little and ultimately leaves the episode at a disadvantage further down the line, when it has to grind everything to a halt to catch audiences back up to speed and establish the stakes moving forward.
This issue for the episode also highlights a central issue for the series as a whole, which is that it can be incredibly difficult to believably and effectively integrate the kaiju-sized action into the human-scaled drama. From a visual standpoint, the effects work that is being done in this episode is astounding; never in my life would I have believed I would see Kong on a TV show and it would look this good. But the flip side of that coin is that I never really believe that any of the digitally-composed work and the actual in-camera stuff is taking place in the same location, at the same time, happening to the same people.
There’s a bit around the midpoint of “Cause and Effect” that sees a group of the human characters having to sneak past a sleeping Kong on Skull Island, and for as visually well-integrated as it is, it never feels real. There’s no weight to the proceedings, no tactility to any of the interactions between Kong and the humans, and the sense of scale often feels drastically underplayed. This results in a cheapening of the human-based drama and a lessening of the monsters’ overall impact, deflating both sides of Monarch’s whole deal when it’s attempting to fuse them together in an effort to strengthen them.
Throughout the episode, the performances are solid, with special praise going to both Anna Sawai as Cate and Mari Yamamoto as Keiko. However, the two-pronged performance that continues to be the nucleus which the rest of the show gravitates around is that of Kurt and Wyatt Russell as Lee Shaw. While “Cause and Effect” features both of them, Kurt is utilized sparingly, and Wyatt more than picks up the slack. In a show featuring gargantuan monsters, the ways in which the two performers have proven able to communicate and dramatize the evolution of this character across decades continues to be the most genuinely spectacular part of the show.
All in all, “Cause and Effect,” gets season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters off to an effective if tepid start. While interesting seeds are certainly planted throughout that promise to blossom moving forward, and the episode does culminate with a fairly dramatic rising of the stakes, the whole thing can’t help but feel like it is deliberately coasting off of the fumes of last season’s cliffhanger. I’m sure in the episodes to come, some more actual present-tense momentum will be built up. But as it currently stands, the premiere of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 is a capable, occasionally thrilling episode of television, but one that leaves a fair bit to be desired.
New episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premiere Fridays on Apple TV.