With Season 2 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters arriving on Apple TV+, the MonsterVerse series is preparing to go bigger: more Titans, deeper mythology, and even more timeline shifts.

Before the new episodes dive back into Hollow Earth and the secrets of Monarch, here’s everything you need to remember from Season 1.

What Is a Titan in the MonsterVerse?

Titans are not simply oversized creatures roaming the planet. In the MonsterVerse, they are ancient apex organisms whose existence predates modern civilization, and possibly even recorded history.

The most recognizable among them is Godzilla, often portrayed less as a villain and more as a force of natural correction. But he shares the planet with other powerful beings, including King Kong, Mothra, and Rodan.

Season 1 reinforces that these creatures are not isolated anomalies. They exist across continents and beneath oceans, embedded in ecosystems humanity barely understands. Some are dormant. Others are territorial. All of them are part of a larger planetary system that humans have only begun to map.

That larger system is what Monarch has been chasing for decades.

What Is Monarch and How Did It Evolve?

Monarch began in the 1950s as a response to the unexplainable. Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell), Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto), and Bill Randa (Anders Holm) weren’t trying to conquer monsters, they were trying to prove they existed.

Initially operating outside official oversight, Monarch functioned as a quiet investigative body, documenting massive unidentified terrestrial organisms long before the world was ready to accept them.

Everything changed in 2014 when Godzilla emerged publicly. At that point, secrecy was no longer sustainable. Monarch transitioned from myth-chasers to crisis managers.

Season 1 explores this evolution by cutting between its early days — marked by curiosity and fear — and its modern operations, which are shaped by political tension and global consequence.

What Is the Axis Mundi — and Why Does It Matter?

The show presents the Axis Mundi as a liminal space between Earth’s surface and the Hollow Earth, a distorted threshold where physical laws don’t behave normally. Gravity shifts. Space bends. And, most importantly, time fractures.

Inside the Axis Mundi, time passes at a drastically slower rate. Someone can experience what feels like days while decades unfold on the surface. This temporal imbalance drives one of the show’s most emotional reveals and reshapes how the timeline of the MonsterVerse functions.

It also strengthens the idea that Titans are connected to a world that operates beyond human understanding, not just geographically, but dimensionally.

What Happened to the Randa Family?

In 1959, Dr. Keiko Miura disappeared after falling into a fissure connected to the Axis Mundi. Her son with Bill, Hiroshi Randa, later joined Monarch and became deeply involved in Titan research. He eventually began conducting unauthorized experiments focused on tracking Titan movement.

Hiroshi’s disappearance triggers the events of Season 1. His daughter Cate and her half-brother Kentaro travel across multiple countries investigating his work and uncovering Monarch’s hidden history.

In 2015, an attempt to close a portal leads Cate, May, and Lee Shaw into the Axis Mundi. There, they find Keiko alive and physically unchanged due to the time distortion. When they escape using an Operation Hourglass vehicle, they do not return to 2015. Instead, they arrive two years later, in 2017, on Skull Island.

The final reveal suggests that Hiroshi and Kentaro may now be aligned with Apex Cybernetics, introducing a corporate rival to Monarch and setting up conflict for Season 2.

Lee Shaw’s Sacrifice

Lee Shaw is one of Monarch’s original founders. After Keiko’s disappearance in 1959, he attempted a rescue mission that resulted in his own time displacement within the Axis Mundi.

Although only a short time passed from his perspective, decades elapsed on Earth. By 2015, Shaw was significantly older and still trying to correct past failures.

In the Season 1 finale, he sacrifices himself inside the Axis Mundi to allow Cate, May, and Keiko to escape. His death closes the founding generation’s storyline and shifts focus to the next wave of Monarch leadership.

Where Is Godzilla at the End of Season 1?

By the end of Season 1, Godzilla has intervened inside the Axis Mundi, eliminating a Titan threat before retreating deeper into the Hollow Earth.

Meanwhile, the timeline shift to 2017 reveals Skull Island as a new strategic focal point. King Kong remains active there, and Apex Cybernetics appears to be establishing influence.

Season 2 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premieres February 27 on Apple TV+.