Will There Be A 'Monarch' Season 3? The Apple Sci-Fi Series May Get Rebooted
Apple TV has already proven itself as the streaming service for interesting and innovative sci-fi. For All Mankind, Severance, Silo, Pluribus — every sci-fi series available explores a different nook and cranny of genre media. For the last three years, the “movie spin-off” microgenre was represented by Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the TV series in the kaiju-focused “Monsterverse” franchise.
Apparently, the series is already looking for a fresh start, an incredibly risky move for a series only on Season 3. But could this actually be exactly what it needs?
According to Variety, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters will only return for Season 3 with new showrunners and writers. “According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, Season 3 of the show would be helmed by a new showrunner and new writers, and would feature new Titans from Legendary’s Monsterverse,” the report reads. We still don’t know if this reboot means we’ll see any characters from the previous two seasons, but it does look like the show will have a big change if it even continues at all.
Legacy of Monsters had a split-timeline format, following protagonist Lee Shaw through two different eras of his life. The first sets him in the 1950s, in the early days of the Monarch initiative which set out to study the giant monsters known as Titans. The other timeline is set in 2015 and follows Lee after the events of 2014’s Godzilla. In the past, Lee is played by Wyatt Russell, but in the 2015 timeline, he’s played by Kurt Russell.
To be fair, it is easy to see how the story can’t really continue past this point. In the Season 2 finale, Monarch activates a rift to Axis Mundi, the alternate dimension where the Titans come from. They attempt to send Titan X, the massive Titan the entire series focused on, through to the other side, but because time works differently in the other dimension, Old Lee was able to see Young Lee through the rift, but couldn’t rescue him for fear it would change the present.
Now that Legacy of Monsters’ two protagonists have met, there isn’t much else the story can do, so a clean slate does make sense. But just how much of a reboot is this reboot going to be? Could we see a new story only set in the same universe? Perhaps an existing character will be the new focus of a Season 3. Unfortunately, as it stands, the show hasn’t been renewed just yet, so our only options may be something completely different or nothing at all.