You know that specific kind of episode that does not announce itself, the one where the monster show you signed up for quietly puts the monster stuff on pause and just hits you in the chest with a family situation you were not emotionally prepared for at all? That is exactly what "Furusato" does, and it is the best thing this season has done so far by a pretty significant, that Hiroshi scene at the start was more brutal than any other monster in the series, when Kate ask him to stay because the song is not over but he has to go because his new son was just born, Kentaro. Episode 5 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 is the midpoint of the season and it plays that position perfectly, almost like the writers knew they had exactly this amount of time to build up to something and used every single foot of it. The whole episode carries this low pressure feeling underneath the family drama, like that particular kind of weather where the sky goes very still before everything falls appart and by the time Titan X finally shows up at Santa Soledad and the whole situation erupts into complete chaos, you are already emotionally beaten down from the first forty minutes. I was not expecting to feel this much about a show that in its weaker scenes were drama family and has made me wonder if I actually care about anyone standing between the giant creatures and the camera, because Cate is turning into a so much more important character and becoming the focus, I though Keiko coming back was something big but I was wrong, this episode turned that doubt around completely.
The 1990 Tokyo flashback is where the episode earns everything, and it does it with one of the quietest scenes this show has ever attempted, which is Hiroshi standing at a hospital payphone singing the lullaby "Furusato" to a young Cate while Kentaro is being born in the room right behind him. The show does not explain it, does not go into details that are not necessary and just lets the scene talk by itself, I love this, the show does not try to make you hate him or forgive him for it, it just shows you this man with one foot in each family and lets that image do all the heavy lifting it needs to do. Takehiro Hira has been putting in solid work across the season but this episode is where his performance finally has something real to carry, because Hiroshi reckoning with that old letter from Keiko and what it means for everything he thought he understood about Bill Randa and his disappearance is a scene with actual weight to it, not manufactured drama but the kind that comes from a character finally being forced to look at the mess they made a long time ago. Kurt Russell as Shaw continues to be the steadiest thing in this whole show, functioning somewhere between a reluctant uncle and a moral anchor for a group of people who are each sorting through their own wreckage, and the space this episode gives to the Randa family alongside him keeps getting richer the more time the show commits to it.
Now look, the stuff that has been grinding the worst this season does not disappear just because the emotional material lands, and there are real problems here that this episode cannot fully cover up for. The pacing across the first four episodes has been all over the place and the Apex angle in particular has been written in a way that makes Brenda and her whole operation feel like a corporate cartoon rather than a real threat anyoine should be worried about, because one day they want the world and the next they just banish when stakes are just too high, I get it they are playing poker but can the series just let them take control for real and then let it go totally wrong, like really bad like induce Gday 2.0, thanks Apex. Everyone who watched that cheerful pitch session could see through her instantly and yet the show keeps asking you to believe that May buying into this idea of firing a neural implant into a creature the size of a city block is somehow a reasonable decision that requires drama attach to it?!. What actually derails the control attempt is not any real cleverness from Shaw or Cate or anyone on the team, it is the Scarabs bursting out of the ground and charging the coast, which is the kind of coincidental chaos that makes you feel like the writers took the easy exit instead of earning the moment properly, if it wasnt for this little creatures Im not so sure if Apex would have taken control of Titan X, I still have my doubts, so is Apex really in control?. That frustrates me, because the characters deserve a real win from their own agency, not from the plot doing them a favor and making things easier for them, either they become the villains they are suppose to be or wipe them out but no in between.
Season 1 of this show had a cleaner grip on balancing its flashback structure with present day momentum, and in comparison the second season feels like someone took two seasons worth of emotional drama and compressed them into ten episodes hoping the cast would absorb the left over and mostly they do but it costs the whole thing some real clarity in the middle, all this aside from the monsters still not really fighting or been agressive towards humans, there is so much indecision and the main focus is still the human drama. What "Furusato" does better than anything this season has offered so far is connect those two timelines through something that actually earns its payoff instead of just keep moving along with the chase of Titan X or just going fast forward in time. The song surviving the entire episode starting from that cold open through to the final moments near the shore is the kind of storytelling choice that you have to respect even when you can see exactly what it is trying to do to you, it turns into that punchline saying Im the punchline and this is going to be so good. This epidoes really makes me think about how the series is putting humans first and their drama and on this episode at least in a very good way, and the monster stuff became almost secondary to whatever was happening inside the people caught in the middle of it all, and that comparison is a real compliment even when MONARCH does not consistently moves in a linear level rather than drastic ups and downs, I wonder if they just over complicating a show where people tune in to watch monsters fight each other?.
The ending is what you will most like going to carry with when its over, and I am keeping it vague because you should not know what is coming for you before you get there because this episode is a one man trick, but that final scene between Hiroshi and Cate and Keiko hit harder than I expected from a show that has sometimes seemed more invested in world building than in making you actually give a damn about the people standing next to the creatures. Titan X crashing into Santa Soledad looks spectacular on every level, just look at this post cover, the Scarabs swarming the beach is one of the more impressive visuals the season has produced considering this is the second time we watch it happen, and watching the neural implant attempt fail the way it does gives you this kind of satisfaction of seeing a corporation learn the hard way that you cannot put a leash on something that exists outside every category of thing you have ever tried to control before, tf they though this was some wild animal to put a leash on, this is something nobody on the series understands. How Cate, Kentaro, Keiko, and Shaw come out of the Santa Soledad disaster going into the back half of this season is the question I am asking myself, its like they just took a leg of the table out, now we got this shaky thing about to fall, because the stakes feel different now. If the show can hold this level of investment in its human characters while still delivering on the creature action, the second half might actually be so so sick. 7.5/10 and right now it is not even close for best episode of the season, if the next few episodes cannot at least try to match this I am going to be seriously pissed about it.
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