The closing moments of the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 finale tease Rodan, the winged kaiju who is expected to loom large in the series’ still-unannounced third season. In the finale, Lee Shaw heads toward the creature after parting ways with Keiko and Cate, then finally spots the large winged lizard of prey on a volcanic mountaintop in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
That is a notable move for a monster with a long history. Rodan was introduced in a 1956 creature feature, later tussled with Godzilla in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster in 1964 and arrived in Legendary’s Godzilla series in 2019’s King of the Monsters. His arrival in Monarch would mark his American television debut, and the finale does not try to do more than set the table. As producer Tory Tunnell put it, the team is excited about the possibilities of Rodan, but does not oversell his story in the finale; it gives viewers the mystery and leaves the writers’ room room to build something magnificent.
The episode also gives the Monsterverse other big beats. Kong returns in a big, bad way, while Godzilla does not appear in the finale after showing up earlier this season in the eighth episode. For viewers tracking the broader franchise, that keeps the focus squarely on Monarch’s own roster rather than on a Godzilla reset that never comes. It also reinforces how separate Legendary’s creature world remains from the films overseen by Japan’s Toho Studios.
The tension is that Rodan is now clearly in play even though the next chapter is not. A third season has yet to be announced, so the finale ends with a tease that points forward without a formal green light behind it. Tunnell said there is a little bit of an Indiana Jones flavor to Shaw heading off on his mission, and that there is something delicious about that. Shaw’s last line lands like a promise: “I’ll see you soon,” he says, and for once the show leaves the audience with a monster-sized answer rather than just a question.