‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Season 2, Episode 4 “Trespass” Recap & Review

This article contains spoilers for Apple TV’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Episode 4

As the show continues to maintain a delicate balance of both time jumping, human drama, and monsters, one of the things it has teased for a while now is the relationship between Apex and Monarch. Two massive corporations with company lines that sound good, but the dynamic between the two has not really been explored. Finally, this week in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Episode 4, “Trespass,” we take a peek under the hood of what Apex is really up to.

As hinted at on a few occasions, the morality and honesty of their mission are definitely up for debate. However, with a new Titan now public knowledge, it forces both sides to move quickly and for the cast of characters to try and keep up.

After a sighting of Titan X off Ofu Beach in American Samoa, the floating Monarch 18 Outpost discovers it is on course to make land in San Francisco in less than 24 hours. Apex Cybernetics, currently upgrading the software on Monarch 18, takes this as a sign that its new upgrades are working, but Tim (Joe Tippett) remains dubious.

Still, he sends the info to the team of Lee (Kurt Russell), Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira), Kentaro (Ren Watabe), and May (Kiersey Clemons). They are hatching their plans to retrieve Hiroshi’s stolen prototype from Apex to help divert the Titan. 

With a successful snatch and grab of some ID to get into Apex’s facility, the team splits up in order to cover more ground. It doesn’t take long to discover that Apex really is up to more than it says with the discovery of creatures taken from Skull Island. This is more than a little alarming to everyone but not really surprising to the viewing audience.

The idea that Apex was this big company intent on working with Monarch for the better good always fell flat. The stink of ulterior motives hung over everything to do with Apex like a dark cloud. Still, the question did remain: What are they really up to?

We get the answer soon enough when Brenda (Dominique Tipper) discovers May in her office, but after May covers her tracks, Brenda takes May to a secret area and shows her just what Apex has been up to. Using a small winged creature from Skull Island as an example, Brenda shows May how her code helped them control the creature’s aggression, but when May deletes it, they can’t find a way to maintain it.

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This is why May is so important to Apex, and this is how Apex justifies its master plan of coexistence with the creatures: by trying to tame their natural aggression through artificial means. Call me skeptical, but I’m not sure they understand these different creatures well enough or how they will respond. They are rushing ahead and will make a fortune with this plan. 

The rest of the team does eventually find Hiroshi’s device, but it’s been taken apart, and there is no time to fix it. Thankfully, it was discovered that what they thought was Titan X was instead just a whale, and Apex was indeed up to its eyes in a major con game.

While Monarch has its flaws and fumbles the execution of plans on a semi-regular basis, they seem like innocent bystanders compared to this massive, some would say, ridiculously overreaching and overconfident plan that Apex Cybernetics wishes to execute.  The egos and greed behind this idea sound legendary, and it seems like a master plan for a disaster of epic proportions. 

However, the big discovery was that Apex had somehow obtained Bill’s (Anders Holm) research and was using it to track the Titans. In fact, they have known all along where Titan X was going, thanks to Bill discovering the migratory trail, and its next point of landing is none other than Santa Soledad in Southern Chile, where a young Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) and Keiko first discovered it in 1957. Now it’s a race to get there, and you want to believe both Monarch and Apex will be there as well when Titan X finally does show up.

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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, Episode 4, was a solid episode, giving us good insight into the whole Apex plan, but not without its flaws. The whole Cate (Anna Sawai) ‘gone walkabout’ storyline was strange and out of place at times, and the episode ended with Hiroshi finding Keiko’s letter to Lee after their affair, which kind of felt like a letdown after the discoveries that were made earlier.

However, it was a fun episode overall that now places Apex in the crosshairs. May staying with them to keep an eye on what they are doing should lead to some interesting confrontations in the near future.