Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 Episode 7 SPOILER Recap: “String Theory”

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 begins to unpack its chronological conundrums with the seventh episode, “String Theory.” What new events will transpire due to the two Shaws interacting? Will Cate and Keiko discover what Titan X truly wants? And will Kentaro continue to push everyone he cares about away like a self-destructive coward? All this and more in our full spoiler breakdown of “String Theory.” This is your last warning if you haven’t watched the episode yet, so let’s jump right into the good stuff.

What happens in Monarch Season 2 Episode 7 “String Theory”?

We open on a montage of a young Lee Shaw in Axis Mundi, first arriving in 1962 and, from his perspective, spending 15 days surviving in isolation before his radio connects with Dr. Suzuki and Old Shaw’s signal in 2017. Posing as Mission Control for Project Hourglass, Old Shaw instructs his younger self to retrieve components from his entry vehicle’s radio to create a tracker they can plant on Godzilla, since Young Shaw hasn’t seen any sign of the Titan but Old Shaw knows where he would be at this point in time.

Meanwhile, Cate and Keiko use overlapping resonance patterns to deduce that Titan X is indeed lost and knocked off its usual migratory pattern. They decide to travel to a Japanese village marked as notable in Bill Randa’s Titan X research, as multiple women claimed to have gone mad after being possessed by a demon that was, by all accounts, Titan X. We then cut to Kentaro packing for a trip to Thailand as May arrives, attempting to apologize for the previous evening.

Kentaro responds to May’s apology, as well as her entirely innocuous questions about who will accompany him on the trip, with accusatory aggression and hostility. May leaves the apartment with a glib “Okay” before being confronted by security agents looking for Corah Mateo (May’s government name). These security agents turn out to be from Monarch, as Tim scolds May for her betrayal before demanding she help them study the one fragment they have of Titan X, which happens to have the neural implant still lodged in it, in order to figure out how to stop it. And feeling guilty over how everything went down, May agrees.

May and Tim realize that the neural implant is what knocked Titan X off its migratory pattern while Kentaro arrives in Thailand at Isabel Simmons’ lavish home, a 21st birthday gift from her father after he initially built it as part of an abandoned rainforest conservation project. She explains that she was adopted by the Simmons’ just one year before her sister Maya (Eiza González’s character from Godzilla vs. Kong) was miraculously born after years of failed IVF attempts. After that, Isabel’s parents stopped caring about her, leaving her with both no direct ties to Apex Cybernetics and an active animosity towards the company she claims as equal to Kentaro’s animosity towards Monarch.

As all this has been happening, Cate and Keiko arrive in the Japanese village from Bill Randa’s notes. Cate asks her grandmother if she really loved Shaw and Keiko claims it wasn’t like that before the pair stumble upon an abandoned well that Keiko finds eerily similar to the hole she fell into Axis Mundi from in Kazakhstan. Cate convinces her to let her go down anyway, feeling the same vibrations from before. The rope Keiko used to lower Cate down snaps, but Cate is thankfully unharmed and even manages to resurface using a series of tunnels.

After escaping, Cate asserts that the women who fell down the well before had simply heard Titan X’s song rather than going mad. She also believes that Titan X is neither lost nor dangerous, but that it does need their help. Back in Thailand, Isabel and Kentaro begin a two-hour drive to the airport where Isabel proposes the idea that, rather than save or change the world like Monarch or Apex, they could create a brand new one. One in which G-Day never happened.

And speaking of alternate timelines, while searching for Godzilla in Axis Mundi, Young Shaw spots Keiko in the distance, so Old Shaw has to reveal his status as Young Shaw’s future self to prevent him from changing the timeline. This works despite both Shaws’ intense desire to save her and Young Shaw manages to plant the tracker on Godzilla after narrowly avoiding attacks from a dragon and a large, centipede-like creature.

Old Shaw guides his younger self back to where he needs to be to reemerge in 1982 as the pair lose connection, making a promise to his younger self to take care of Keiko. With the tracking signal live, Dr. Suzuki prepares to accompany Shaw on the next leg of the adventure, but Shaw insists he go alone, as he believes he will not survive and doesn’t want Suzuki to suffer the same fate, as the episode ends with Monarch themselves picking up the tracking signal, though they believe it’s Titan X rather than Godzilla.

Is Monarch Season 2 Episode 7 worth watching?

Credit: Apple TV

This episode has one truly great storyline surrounded by several “good enough” storylines. I enjoy Ren Watabe embracing Jerk Kentaro and I appreciate that they did provide an explanation to why Isabel was never referenced in Godzilla vs. Kong, both clearing up the continuity and giving Isabel herself more depth. However, the “What if G-Day never happened?” proposal indicates a level of time travel shenanigans that I’m not sure if the series is fully prepared to handle.

The May and Tim stuff is fine but nothing to write home about and I feel like I enjoy the Cate and Keiko storyline more in theory than in practice. Conceptually, these two characters getting the chance to bond as Keiko confronts her own traumas while Cate forges her own path mixed in with tying Titan X to a larger, in-universe historical context is fascinating stuff. But in practice, it’s mostly just Cate going down a well, Keiko being briefly worried about her, and Cate making it back out to tell both her grandmother and the audience what just happened rather than let the audience see it as she saw it.

Also, while I’m all for nuanced kaiju characterization, “Titan X isn’t dangerous” is a bold claim for Cate to make about a creature with an army of Scarabs that just killed her father. And that’s assuming she doesn’t know about the boat getting destroyed and whatever else Titan X might’ve been doing just offscreen. Nitpicking aside though, like I said, there is a truly great storyline in this episode and that is the Two Shaws storyline. I will fully own my hesitancy from last week, but they really pulled it off.

Should Young Shaw attaching a tracker to Godzilla and talking to his younger self have more ramifications on the timeline than it seemingly does? Probably, but Old Shaw goes out of his way to avoid telling his younger self too much about the future even after the fact that they are the same person is revealed. And it’s all worth it for the exchange between the pair as Old Shaw convinces Young Shaw to let Keiko go. Kurt Russell’s performance as he presents the case to his younger self might be his best acting moment in the entire series.

And Wyatt Russell’s silent facial reaction as he forces himself to let Keiko walk away? That’s not just his best acting in the series, that’s some of the best acting in his entire career. This episode may be overall on the weaker side of Monarch Season 2, but it’s still fundamentally solid and the Shaw stuff is genuinely phenomenal.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV.