After a short detour into the origin of Syd in last week’s episode, “Chapter 13” got right to work in advancing the plot forward. The Farouk body hunt continues, and Lennie’s role in Season 2 became all the more clear. To boot, it was one of the more visually arresting episodes of the series so far (which seems to be a theme with the episodes directed by Tim Mielants), featuring some great body horror moments near the end. Before we unpack it all, remember that we’re heavily spoiling these episodes in this column, so please watch “Chapter 13” before reading any further. Let’s dive in:
1. Schroedinger’s Lennie
The mysteries of this episode almost entirely involve the ramifications of Lennie showing up at Division 3 headquarters, when just a year earlier they were scraping her body off of a wall in the Clockworks Institution. Ptonomy is the first to notice that the Lennie we see at Division 3 is not the Lennie they know. Because he remembers everything, he remembers that her eyes should be green, yet sitting front of him they are blue. (As an aside, I think it’s a potential oversight that Ptonomy doesn’t realize this until after several minutes of sitting with Lennie. When she covers her eyes, he states the wrong eye color, remembering her eyes as the color they used to be. But if Ptonomy is a powerful memory machine, would he not more immediately remember the eye color that was just sitting in front of him? Or are the older memories more powerful? I’m okay with giving this a pass, because Ptonomy isn’t exactly feeling well himself. You know, bug/lizard creature in his brain and all.)
Later, David notices Lennie’s eye color too. The Lennie before him is not the Lennie he knew from Clockworks, although she looks extremely similar. Shout out to the makeup department or whoever is responsible for making Aubrey Plaza look subtly and eerily different in these scenes compared to the other times we’ve seen her on the show. There was something “different” about her the whole time, and it was more than just her eye color, though I can’t put my finger on it.
We eventually find out that the body Lennie is walking around in is a transmuted form of David’s sister, who we hadn’t seen since Season 1. In a particularly gruesome scene, Oliver and Farouk use a device to change Amy Haller into a twisted version of Lennie. The reason for this, I’m speculating, is two-fold: one, to specifically target David’s sister in some sort of attack on him. Two, to test out the device Farouk will eventually use to be reborn again, either in his body or perhaps David’s. That last part is unfounded speculation on my part, but I’ll talk more about it below.
2. Oliver’s Moment of Clarity
As Lennie plainly states, and as we can plainly see, Oliver Bird is doing the bidding of the Shadow King. He’s under Farouk’s control, though it does not appear that this control is total. Some of the most interesting dialogue in the episode consisted of back and forth dialogue between Oliver and Farouk, and while Navid Negahban has been getting the meatiest dialogue this season has to offer, Jemaine Clement plays Oliver’s participation in these discussions as a defeated, listless man. He ruminates on the irrelevancy of life in the face of the greater forces of the world and ends with the melancholy realization that he’s been captive (both here with Farouk, and trapped in the Astral Plane as he had been in Season 1) for what feels like forever. “Nothing has felt real for a very long time,” he says. This is a far fall from the dancing, scotch-drinking hipster jazz fan we saw in Season 1, and in a densely packed episode that moved the story of Lennie forward quite a bit, Clement’s performance stood right alongside Aubrey Plaza’s as a layered and memorable one.
But I haven’t yet mentioned Oliver’s best moment in the episode yet: while staring into the middle-distance as Farouk droned on beautifully mixing languages to yet again re-contextualize a common word in a parlance that only a mind-god could (which is apparently Farouk’s favorite pastime), Oliver catches a vision from another place. It’s Melanie. Is she reaching out to him with her mutant abilities, or is it Oliver himself finding a moment of clarity? I like to think that Melanie is somehow using her downtime at Division 3 to try to figure out a way to get Oliver back from Farouk’s mind-clutches. Oliver’s vision gives him the determination to, if even for only a minute, tune Farouk out and counter his bloviating with a simple statement: “I’m going to kill you, you know.” Just how he’s going to do that remains to be seen, but it may have something to do with my next point:
Continued below3. Oliver’s New Math
Even while he’s doing Farouk’s bidding, Oliver still has the mental wherewithal to begin to devise a way to beat him. He first claims he knows Farouk’s weakness, a taunt which he knows will draw in the performatively curious Farouk. How can he resist a challenge delivered with that much confidence, or the chance to prove he will always have the upperhand? Oliver doesn’t give away the weakness, promising that Farouk will know it when it happens, and it will be too late. He gives Farouk a hint: What does 1 + 1 equal? Farouk guesses “2” and Oliver tells him he’s wrong. While Farouk essentially laughs and waves it off, I can’t help but think that Oliver is burrowing his way in here. Planting the seed of doubt that will eventually destroy Farouk, regardless of how simple his riddle seems. Initially, this scene seems obtuse, but I think we super-attentive viewers may already have more hints than we think. I’ll explain:
In the “educational” segments of Legion Season 2, as far as I can remember we have only seen one principle character from the actual show as a participant in the lessons and it’s Oliver. In this episode’s lesson, we see Oliver standing at a blackboard instructing a young student to believe that “coincidences” are actually “conspiracy,” that’s a really big idea, and actually I’m a little afraid that that gives away the game too easily. More on that later. Also, remember that in an earlier episode Oliver was shown raising a young boy to believe that the color red was something we call “green”, and the color we know as green is called “red”, which led to the boy walking into an oncoming car after a traffic light mix-up. This is the better hint at what Oliver is up to, and while it also gives away the plot, it was at least several episodes earlier so that the viewer is liable to forget it. If Oliver is planting the seed of doubt in Farouk’s mind with something as simple as 1 and 1 not equaling 2, could that eventually have the same consequences for Farouk as the boy ending up mangled in the grill of a car? I think it’s no coincidence that Oliver is the one in the educational segments. My only question is: are the educational segments part of some astral plane, where Oliver is showing command of the ways a human mind can be corrupted and manipulated? Are they meant to be taken literally? Or do they merely exist as parables to help understand Legion, and just happen to contain Oliver in them? Either option seems likely at this point, but either way I think they give us an essential clue to Oliver’s conception of the Shadow King’s weakness.
4. Conspiracy
Jon Hamm’s near-weekly lesson just so happens to be on “conspiracy” this time. Hamm explains conspiracy as the human mind taking coincidences and turning them into something with greater meaning. A piece of toast that looks like it has the burned image of Jesus Christ on it, for example, becomes the breakfast-enjoyer experiencing the divine, instead of just a random, un-designed happenstance. Instead of just being a Rorschach test, the viewer has to believe they’re experiencing something more. In the previous paragraph I discussed how Oliver Bird’s inclusion in an earlier segment on delusion is starting to reveal itself in the plot. I can’t quite place the relevancy of discussing “conspiracy” in the context of the show’s plot yet, but if the aforementioned delusion entry is any indication, the conspiracy segment is likely setting up to be knocked down in a future episode.
But that won’t keep me from speculating on it. If a conspiracy is a coincidence mistaken for something more, and if we can presume that Oliver is involved somehow, is the conspiracy that Farouk isn’t as powerful as he is believed to be? He talks a good game, and he certainly has control over Oliver, but we’ve already talked about how it’s not total control. Elsewhere in the episode, David assures Lennie that Farouk is just another mutant with psionic powers. And it’s certainly starting to feel like Farouk’s plan isn’t to find his own body, but perhaps to inhabit David’s. Is the “conspiracy” arising from all of the bluster surrounding the power of the Shadow King? Without David, could he just be another average mutant?
Continued belowIt also makes me wonder yet if I were too quick to dismiss Syd as a potential villain last week? Perhaps she really is still part of the conspiracy. Or perhaps I myself am seeing a conspiracy where there is only coincidence.
5. “No Touching!”
The walls of the Division 3 interrogation room had explicit messages about having no physical contact with the detainee, yet Lennie’s first 2 visitors violate this principle. Clark immediately asks for Lennie’s hand, sticking it with some sort of capillary blood collection device. If it doesn’t apply to Clark, then who is the “no touching” message for? Next, Ptonomy comes in, and Lennie’s dodgy cooperation drives him over the edge to the point where he’s got his hands around her neck. Ptonomy, chill out man. The only visitor who abides by the rules, if I remember what I saw correctly, is David. I think that speaks to David as the pure center of Legion. The idea that he’s the good boy mutant who only has a bad reputation because of what Farouk did to him. Lennie pours her heart out for Clark, suggesting all kinds of awful stuff about her upbringing and Clark barely bats an eye. Rather than breaking the physical boundary, David touches Lennie through a piece of Twizzler ™ licorice, which is symbolic of the fact that Clark and Ptonomy don’t empathize or know what Lennie has gone through. David, being the soul of the show, does.
