“Chapter 15” is a weird one. Two out of the last three episodes were almost entirely standalone affairs, focusing on deepening our appreciation of the characters of David, Amy, and Syd but mostly set apart from the season 2 events we’ve been tracking. This latest episode is very much in the thick of the proper plot of Season 2 and, yet, by the end of the episode, it really feels like the proverbial football hasn’t much. More than anything else, “Chapter 15” revealed to me just how good Legion is at secretly wasting our time while still entertaining us, because it’s the first episode of the series that failed to entertain with its penchant for being indulgent. I’ll talk about a couple of the minor highlights below, but for the most part this episode really didn’t work for me. Before we get in to it, just a reminder that this is a column full of spoilers, so make sure you watch the episode before treading any further:
1. A future face-heel turn…
One of the two big revelations from an otherwise anti-climactic episode of Legion is the idea that in Future-Syd’s timeline, it is actually David that is the villainous threat to bring about the end of the world and that Farouk’s body needs to be saved by the “heroes” because he’s the only one that can stop it. This revelation plays out in the form of Farouk snaking an exhaust tube from the engine cavity of a classic car filled with David’s Strawberry Mind Goo and in through the window in the style of a do-it-yourself closed-garage door suicide effort. What happens instead is Farouk “infects” the Mind Goo communication line that David uses to interact with Future-Syd, and begins to taunt her. As is kind of par for the course in Season 2, the visual representation of Farouk’s mental abilities is gorgeous to look at and inventive in this presentation, but the dialogue in this scene is absolutely atrocious. Farouk and Syd circle one another trading barbs until Syd eventually reveals that Farouk isn’t the one who’s bringing the world to an end. The dialogue makes Farouk putting together what is essentially a 2-piece puzzle into something that sounds like the smartest mystery Columbo ever solved.
Farouk: “You’re telling me…the villain is the hero….and the hero is the villain?”
Syd: “Maybe…we’re all villains?”
C’mon Legion, you’re better than this.
The script probably could have used a few more passes through, but nevertheless it does present an interesting twist to the proceedings, considering what we know so far. David begins the episode telling Farouk that he’s done helping him and will destroy his body when he finds it. If David is intent on sticking with that plan, Syd needs to find another way to make sure her future comes to past. So is Syd lying to Farouk about David’s role in the end of the world as a contingency plan in case David doesn’t play along anymore? Or did Farouk create a villain origin story for David by killing his sister in the first place?
2. And a present day diversion?
The other big revelation lied in the fact that the bug creatures that affected Ptonomy, and eventually spread to pretty much everyone else, turned out to merely be a distraction in the overall story of the season. On the one hand, this pays off on Jon Hamm’s narrated explanation of what a delusion is and how it spreads – it’s basically the cheerleader “facial tic” story all over again. I can appreciate that Legion attempted to throw something into a very dense show that doesn’t (at this point in time) seem to have anything to do with the big central conflict of the show. In a show that likes to toy with what’s real and what’s not, an attempt to lead the audience down a false rabbit hole definitely makes sense. The bug was essentially sold to us as a product of The Shadow King somehow and I would bet that most viewers (including yours truly) fell for it. When Fukuyama takes off his basket-head and reveals that he is simply a man, the viewer realizes the deception that happened, especially as our heroes begin to see his head as a bug’s head when it’s really not. Thankfully David is there It even culminates in David saying something like “You picked a really shitty time to attack my friends”, essentially hanging a lampshade on the fact that this “insanity” creature just so happened to attack at the same time as Division 3 and Farouk are essentially battling for the future of humanity, in what appears to be two totally parallel and not intersecting storylines.
Continued belowOn the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel like that diversion was something of a waste of time in a season that has a lot of really big idea things it still needs to accomplish and is dragging its feet in doing so. It was recently announced that Legion would be getting an extra episode tacked on to this season from what was originally ordered, and while it doesn’t materially affect me in any way, it did kind of make me chuckle when I think about how the show drags its feet sometimes. To spend as much time as Legion has doing a Alien-style B-plot that may not even be related to the Farouk storyline doesn’t feel like it paid off, now that it’s all said and done. But maybe it’s not all said and done? I’m totally open to being wrong.
3. A Moral Panic
Jon Hamm fires off another lesson in the beginning of “Chapter 15”, this time about the idea of “moral panic.” As tends to be the case, it’s not immediately clear what “moral panic” refers to in the context of the show, but the lesson did provide a fun Easter Egg for viewers familiar with comic book history. The first example of a moral panic we see is that of a concerned parent watching their son partaking in the satanic art of…*checks notes*…reading comic books? There’s no overt reference to Frederick Wertham’s 1950’s conservative claptrap Seduction of the Innocent, but that’s clearly what Hawley & co were going for. To boot, the comic the boy was reading was that of the ’50s horror anthology variety with none other than our jaundiced, pillow-necked friend “The Devil With Yellow Eyes” on the cover. If “won’t somebody think of the children” when it comes to comics was too subtle for you, they follow it up with one of the corniest depictions of a witchburning committed to video. They should have just played the Monty Python and the Holy Grail witchburning scene in its entirety.
4. Jon Hamm-ers it over our heads
I was bagging on the dialogue a little earlier because it seemed particularly undercooked in a scene where the viewer was surely getting the point without Farouk having to stand there and spell it out for them. The same is true of Jon Hamm’s closing narration for the episode, where he essentially says “and that’s how a delusion spreads. Well folks, until next time, I’m Don Draper. Buy Hershey’s.” Hawley employs a swelling orchestral movement as Hamm explains to the viewer that everything they just saw with the brain bug was his lessons on ideas becoming real and delusions taking root coming to life in the plot of Legion. For a show that is content to confuse its viewers, I wish they wouldn’t feel the need to spell everything out after its already become clear. If you trust your viewer to come this far on the journey, then trust them a little more at the end.
5. Ptonomy’s new status quo
While David is able to scoop the brain bug from Syd and Clark’s heads before things get too out of hand, he’s not quick enough to save Ptonomy (or perhaps doesn’t realize Ptonomy has the bug too). In one of the most impressive bits of CGI special effects the series has offered to date, a humongous version of the brain bug rips Ptonomy in half and scampers out of the room. But all is not lost and Ptonomy is not dead, as the Vermillion work to save his mind. In the end, his lifeless body is hooked up to some sort of computer-tree hybrid. Unless I missed something, we’re not entirely sure what the tree is for, but there’s an awful lot of 1’s and 0’s, so it must be important. Ptonomy has always been a character that gets the short shrift, but maybe this new status quo living in a mystery tree of data will breathe new life into him.
