The newest big-budget sci-fi show from Apple TV Plus is here, in the form of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. This is a spin-off of the recent monsterverse movies like Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island, though you don't need to have seen them to understand what's going down.
Legacy of Monsters follows two estranged siblings who find out that their father had secrets that tie him to Monarch, a mysterious organization that investigates monsters like Godzilla and more. The show straddles multiple time-lines with a big-name cast, and has as much action as it does family drama.
With lots of mysteries being explored in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, an episode recap like this is handy to make sure you didn't miss out on any important details for all the monster action that was going down.
So this Legacy of Monsters episode 1 recap will help you remember what happened in the debut episode, which came to Apple on Friday, November 17. If you missed it, our guide to Apple TV Plus free trials will help you catch up. And as a note, we've re-ordered some of the events in this episode, to present it in a cleaner way.
Spoilers for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode 1 ensue.
The last mysteries of Skull Island
We begin in 1973 with Bill Randa (John Goodman, playing his character from Kong: Skull Island) recording a video message to someone during his stay on Skull Island, about how he wants to leave a legacy. Then, he's pursued by the giant ant monster form that movie, which is apparently called a Mother Longlegs. He runs to a cliff where the monster corners him, so he throws a case (containing his recording) into the ocean. Then, a crab monster that's apparently called a Mantleclaw appears to kill the Longlegs, letting Randa escape.
In 2013, a year prior to the events of Godzilla, a fishing vessel in Japan gets a hearty haul of fish... which includes Randa's case.
Two years later, our main character Cate (Anna Sawai) is on a plane to Japan. At customs she tells the passport official that she's hear to settle her late father's affairs, shortly after getting a flashback to San Francisco in 2014 (if you haven't seen Godzilla, that's where his first attack was).
The town has lots of anti-Godzilla infrastructure including decontamination on the plane, Godzilla evacuation routes and lots of big missile launchers around the place. Her taxi driver tells her that the San Francisco attack was a CGI hoax but, as a witness, she's not so sure.
Cate arrives at her father's apartment, and her mum calls her, although she's as reticent to answer her mother's questions as she is to enter the place. Once she summons the courage to go in, she finds that she's not alone: a woman and a teen boy Kentaro (Ren Watabe) are also in there!
These two are actually Cate's father's secret second family! They ask Cate to prove she's the father's child too, which she does by showing lots of holiday pictures. It's implied, though, that the father was rarely at home, and Cate quickly gets shaken and leaves.
Hiding from the past
As Cate walks the streets of Japan her mother calls again, but Cate doesn't tell her about this new shocking discovery. She's clearly not happy about finding out that her father was a cheat! Just then, alarms start going off — an early warning system for Godzilla. Cate is flustered but Kentaro and his mother find her and take her to underground Godzilla Evacuation Areas. They think it may be a drill though.
In this area, Kentaro's mother starts asking more information on her husband, Cate's father, and Cate has a flashback to where she was when Godzilla attacked san Francisco the year prior. Unfortunately, she was on the Golden Gate Bridge itself, a teacher on a bus full of school kids. Not a great spot to be in. She manages to evacuate some of the kids off the bus but the bridge is crumbling, and the vehicle, along with many of the children, plunges to its doom into the cold waters of the San Francisco Bay. Cate has a panic attack just thinking about this.
Eventually, the evacuation ends and Kentaro's mother asks Cate to have tea with them, though the young woman refuses. Kentaro instead takes Cate to their father's office, and there she finds a hidden safe. She tries various combinations and eventually opens it using a combined code made of the man's two wives and two children's birthdays. Inside is Randa's case, the one from the beginning of the episode.
Inside the case are old-school tape cassettes as well as hard drives — the woman also recognizes the logo on the bag as the same on lots of people in San Francisco who were recording the unfolding tragedy instead of helping. It's the logo of the organization Monarch.
Kentaro takes Cate to see May (Kiersey Clemons), an American hacker lady who has some sordid history with the man. The tapes are encrypted but she cracks it and they get lots of information about the Monarch organization, with lots of pictures of monsters and important documents.
Doing this alerts someone at Monarch HQ, who brings it to their boss Tim (Joe Tippett). He decides to start looking into whoever started cracking their secrets.
This whole time Kentaro has been lashing out at Cate, saying that their father would have survived the attack if he was with them in Tokyo instead of out in San Francisco, but Cate finally corrects him: we flash back to 5 hours after the monster attack. Cate meets her father at an evacuation camp and he's arranged transport for them out of the disaster zone, but he's about to get on a flight. In the modern day, Cate says that the plane disappeared.
Cate recognizes a woman in one of the pictures. In an image from 1959, standing in a Godzilla footprint, is her grandfather. This woman is familiar to us, because dispersed around the above drama, we've been seeing the adventures of more characters in 1959...
A monster of a road trip
Kazakhstan, 1959: a young Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) is a security guard for two scientists: Keiko (Mari Yamamoto) and William Randa (Anders Holm) (yes, this is the same character that John Goodman plays later in the timeline, but only the credits reveal that it's the same person!). These two are Monarch scientists but also lovers, with a child back home. They're on a mission to "prove the network is real".
The trio are using a geiger counter to track... something. They don protective suits and break into a restricted area, only to find a young poacher boy without any protection. He says that the radiation is a myth told to scare people away from the location, and the scientists realize that the radiation does drop off the further they go.
Eventually, they come across a destroyed-looking industrial town, which they investigate. They set off explosives in a ring around the town, and the sonar from this act reveals that there are chambers under the bedrock. This detonation also destabilizes the place though, with cracks forming in the buildings.
In the chambers, the three find lots of creepy-looking eggs, and Lee warns that a mother monster must be nearby. However Keiko insists that they need to get biological material from the eggs and so Lee accompanies her into the depths of the area to collect it.
They rappel to the lower level with William staying higher up, but as they approach the eggs, the ground starts to rumble and collapse. If that wasn't bad enough, the eggs start hatching, with ugly bug critters emerging from them. Lee and Keiko run to the ropes and start to climb out but while Lee manages to escape, the bugs catch up to Keiko, and pull her down into the dark depths below. This woman — Cate's grandmother — presumably dies.
