“Chapter 14” of Legion explores the idea that at any given moment there are infinite possibilities of worlds for you to inhabit as a person, and each tiny change or decision we make results in a new branch on a tree filled with endless possibilities and infinite outcomes. There’s a version of you that’s wildly successful and there’s a version of you that died winning the Darwin Award for something dumb you did. This episode of Legion examines David’s past and possible futures through this lens. As always, there are spoilers throughout, so please watch “Chapter 14” before reading my thoughts on it. With that said, let’s pick through these branches:
1. Crisis Of Infinite Amy
While the episode is mostly focused on a half-dozen different versions of David Haller (including the one that ultimately ended up at Clockworks in season 1) the true intent of the episode is to act as David’s celebration of his sister Amy, played with exceptional warmth (except for one of the various versions) by Katie Aselton. To skip right to the end, the episode ends with a montage replaying Amy’s leading David to Clockworks in an attempt to help him with his condition, to his eventual battle with the Shadow King, to Amy’s untimely fate at the hands of Farouk and Oliver Bird (from last week’s “Chapter 13”). David is examining all the ways their lives could have gone and which choices could have resulted in a better life for both of them. The answer, unsurprisingly, is none of them. In one life, David is enormously wealthy, but Amy is stifled and bitter, relying on him for money and unhappy in her own marriage. In another, Amy appears to be a successful real estate agent, but David is an unstable drifter, eating scraps and living out of a shopping cart. In a few of these, David ends up as the one in a body bag. It seems extremely likely that Amy has saved his life.
The viewer gets a sense of Amy as a very selfless person who only wants what’s best for David (again, with the one exception), and in almost every one of these worlds that selflessness goes unrewarded. It’s a thankless role in David’s life, but David’s appreciation after her death shines through. You get a sense that David would trade his current outcome for a better one for her, but that’s a mutant power he doesn’t possess.
Ultimately, the outcome where Farouk has Amy killed is the one the characters have to live with and it’s up to David what happens next. Farouk tells him as much.
2. The Critic In Me
Even as the episode worked well enough as a way for David to process Amy’s death, the critic in me thinks that this episode was a little too overindulgent for what Legion’s plot seems to be barreling towards. We just had a mini-detour with the Syd episode, and here we take another break in the plot to explore multiple possible Davids. At times, it felt more like an excuse to throw a bunch of makeup and wigs on Dan Stevens than an exercise in theme. While a couple of the worlds gave us an insight into possible outcomes for David and his sister, other worlds were less successful or didn’t even attempt to do that. On the one hand, if FX is content to give Noah Hawley a long enough leash to keep doing plot detours of variable length, then that’s a credit to them for allowing an artist to see out their vision. On the other hand, while I mostly enjoyed the episode, there was enough stuff that felt superfluous to me even in the moment of viewing to make me wonder whether I needed this. While the episode was a stunning showcase for both Stevens and Katie Aselton as actors and accomplished a lot of showy special effects spectacle, I’m not sure I learned a thing about any of the characters.
3. Allusions of Grandeur
But even if I didn’t learn anything about the characters that I didn’t already know, it was still enormously fun to poke around the episode and try to spot or guess what some of the various allusions might be. Some were incredibly obvious, like the A Clockwork Orange film reference to a bunch of American “droog-like” figures in bowler hats almost beating David to death with umbrellas and canes under a dimly lit walking tunnel. Another fairly obvious one, though less obvious to anyone not familiar with the X-Men, is the version of David as a decrepit old man needing to be taken care of for every little thing by Amy. With a bald head and a wheelchair, David bears more than a passing resemblance to Professor Charles Xavier, his father.
Continued belowLess obvious, and perhaps misplaced in my attempt to reach for meaning, is the visual inspiration for David’s “richest man in the world” iteration. He has long, silvery, slicked back hair, which in general is probably a hairstyle that you would associate with an older man of wealth and distinction to begin with. Maybe that’s all it was, but I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that perhaps they were going for an Ian McKellan Magneto vibe with that look. If one iteration of David looks like Professor X, it’s reasonable to think that the sinister version of him (which subtly showed the Shadow King in full control) would use Magneto as a visual allusion. McKellan sported a similar slicked-back widow’s peak hairstyle as Magneto, and David even speaks with a similar erudite affect though not entirely British-sounding either.
If not McKellan as Magneto, that hairstyle also screams eccentric director David Cronenberg, who while not a sinister man, does love crafting disturbing imagery. Cronenberg often trades in stories about how man is often corrupted by their curiosities or their past and cannot outrun the consequences of their peculiarities. I think that theme would certainly apply to this episode, where no matter what David does, he can’t escape what happened to Amy and he can’t create a perfect world for either of them.
4. I’d Like To Play For You
Speaking of indulgent, we’re getting these Jeff Russo and Noah Hawley dirge-like covers of popular songs at an alarming rate. There were two in “Chapter 14” (“I’d Love to Change the World” and “Superman”), and it seems like we’ve been getting at least one in every episode. My personal feeling is that in almost every case, I’d rather be listening to the original recording, but I suppose that these songs wouldn’t carry the appropriate sense of weight or timing with whatever montage they’re being applied to. That, however, brings me to my second gripe: when every episode contains at least one slow-motion montage set to a similar sounding cover of a well-known song, the overall effect is diminishing. I can imagine a world where a slowed down, haunting version of “Superman” being played over images of Amy’s death and David’s torment would be really powerful, but the card has been played too many times now.
5. The Butterfly Effect
While some of the alternate version of David resulted in dead-end plots and I’m not sure anyone needed a manically spelled out explanation of how infinite worlds works when they can see it happening right in front of them, it was fun to think about some of the tiny changes that would have caused bigger changes down the road for the world of Legion. For example, if David uses his powers without inhibitions, he ends up as the richest man in the world, but everyone else is miserable. If he doesn’t take his medication and no one is there to care for him, he ends up homeless and delusional. If he follows his medication to the letter and keeps his abilities completely hidden, he ends up in an unhappy life stacking boxes (with disastrous consequences when he finally opens up and lets the Shadow King get to him). But most intriguing to me was the idea that the Homeless David world would end up with Kerry Loudermilk working as a government stooge to hunt David down and ultimately slice him clean in half. With David among the Summerland mutants, they all work to legitimize their standing in society and better themselves. Without David, Kerry just becomes another tool to repress them.
