“Chapter 17” was a tough episode to unpack, because it had a lot of great ideas for some characters that have felt tertiary to season 2 of Legion, but I’m a little worried it didn’t deliver on them, for reasons you’ll read below. With only a few episodes left, it was weird to see the showrunners put out an episode that didn’t move the chesspieces forward. I’m hesitant to say you could have skipped “Chapter 17” and probably would understand “Chapter 18” just fine, but I really think this episode was mostly theme and very little plot. We can unpack some of what we got, but the closer we get to the end, the more skeptical I am that this show can actually wrap up its main thrust. As always, there are spoilers afoot.
1. Waiting for Farouk
With only two episodes of Legion left, “Chapter 17” was a bizarrely uneventful episode. It’s too late in the game for this show to be working so hard at killing the momentum of the “race for Farouk’s body”, but perhaps there’s something more going on here. What if a climactic battle between Farouk and David never comes? It’s certainly starting to feel that way, and after all, how would they be able to top Dan Stevens and Navid Negahban grappling in wrestling one-pieces? Midway through the episode, a minor character references the well-known metatextual play “Waiting for Godot” during Lenny’s night of wildin’ out. Perhaps we’ve been waiting for Godot this whole time as viewers. Does the body even exist anymore? Did it ever? The only difference between “Waiting for Godot’s” Vladimir and Estragon and Farouk and Oliver is that the former were waiting by a tree while the latter are zooming around the desert in a rickshaw. Neither of them are getting anywhere.
2. Melanie and Oliver
Season 2 of Legion has taken a few episodes out of the general propulsion of the plot to explore some individual characters and relationships. Earlier in the season we had an episode focused almost exclusively on Syd, and a couple weeks later we were given great insight into David and Amy Haller’s unique bond in one of Legion’s most inventive hours. While “Chapter 17” doesn’t quite share the laser focus of those episodes (it splits time between a few different characters), the primary focus this week was unarguably on Melanie Bird. The episode opens with a slow-motion replay of her knocked Clark out in the halls of Division 3 just as he was “activated” into David’s plan to take down Farouk. This was shown from Clark’s perspective last week, and then ran again in reverse as the episode ended. “Chapter 17” begins at the end of that reversal, showing it play out forwards again, but from Melanie’s perspective. Legion is nothing if not an indulgent show that likes to take its time; showing us characters lost in thought or stunned silence, playing and replaying events from a variety of perspectives, speeds, and with differing amounts of camera cuts. I must admit that this feels more and more tiresome the longer the show goes on. While we watched Melanie pensively enact this violence on Clark all over again, we see the control Oliver/Farouk are wresting from her, but it all feels like slowly digested information that we’ve already figured out as viewers. The ending of last week’s episode gave us such a beautiful and far more subtle indication that Melanie was being manipulated by Farouk through Oliver, that to explicitly spell that out for us here felt like something of a time-waster.
As an aside, Legion garners a lot of comparisons to the works of David Lynch, and while I don’t think that’s outrageous from a visual standpoint (the references are certainly obvious at times), I do appreciate that Lynch will let events happen in Twin Peaks and not feel the need to ever return to them or explain them. He trusts the viewer to either get what he’s going for, or absorb it and move forward. Not to belabor the point, but the end of “Chapter 16” was positively Lynchian, eliciting an emotional reaction and a realization of what’s going on from imagery and few words. “Chapter 17” felt like it needed to teach you how you were supposed to view it, and that’s disappointing.
Continued belowBut there was one aspect to “Chapter 17’s” exploration of Melanie and Oliver that I really loved, in the form of bookending scenes with Melanie monologues. In the opening of the episode, Melanie repeats a bit of a conversation she had with Syd in an early episode of the season. The jist of the conversation was that the men in these women’s lives often under up keeping them under thumb: the ego-driven adventures of men like Oliver and Farouk (and David, at this point), leave their significant others in the lurch. Melanie undoubtedly loves Oliver, and being left without him for so long has left her miserable. This absolutely makes sense for her character, and you really feel it in Jean Smart’s performance. It makes less sense when it’s applied elsewhere with other characters in the episode, but more on that later. The episode ends with another Melanie monologue, delivered as a plea to Oliver. In these line-readings, Smart imbues Melanie with a world-weary and listless drawl. She’s finally done what Oliver and Farouk require of her. She’s given herself up to be back with Oliver again, but thematically returning to her opening conversation with Syd, she only wonders why there must always be so much violence in the world of men. It’s a neat, tidy bookend in an otherwise messy episode.
3. Kerry and Cary
The Loudermilks are a secondary focus of the episode, returning to the idea that Cary must help Kerry learn how to live outside of his body. This is a nice inversion of the idea that the men of Legion are ruining everything for their female counterparts. Instead, Cary is legitimately trying to let Kerry go. And while Kerry is undoubtedly a “strong female character” (to evoke the cliche definition of the trope, which I am loath to use in earnest), she’s having trouble letting go. But in this case, I don’t think it’s because she’s beholden to Cary – or because her world spiritually revolves around his, but because of their genuinely sweet relationship. Since David and Syd have become rockier, I don’t think there’s a stronger bond on the show than these two. Sure, their mutant adaptation literally means that Kerry has physically depended on Cary for a long time, but I honestly think Legion employs this to strengthen both characters, make them likable, and to create a clear thematic counterpoint to Melanie’s view of the men of Legion. Basically what I’m saying is Kerry Loudermilk is the only man on the show worthy of being your Man Crush Monday.
4. Lenny and Amy
The least successful bit of “Chapter 17” has to be the stuff with Lenny and Amy. Lenny was one of the first actors in David’s plan to take down Farouk and now I have no idea where her headspace is at. I know that’s kind of the whole point of Legion, but it feels too late in the season for Lenny to find herself this lost. To make matters worse, Amy Haller is “haunting” her after a night of sex, drugs, and MC5 and it culminates in one of the least satisfying character turns the show could have possibly offered for one of its best characters. For Lenny to finally admit her romantic love for David isn’t necessarily something that feels “out of character”, but it sure is a conventional and disappointing way for a show to take one of its least conventional characters. Like Kerry, Lenny could have been another strong counterpoint to the thesis provided by Melanie and Syd. In fact, Syd losing David for indeterminate amounts of time was a better analogue for Melanie and Oliver’s situation. Folding Lenny in with David in a romantic way kind of feels redundant. Now both she and Syd are at the mercy of David’s ego battle, when Lenny could have been something else entirely.
5. Another crackpot theory
I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out how they could possibly end this season in a satisfying way with only 2 episodes to go, and into my dumb noggin popped one theory I have not heard anywhere else yet. What if all this business with David and Farouk is a feint and the real final battle is between Melanie and Farouk for the soul of Oliver? We already know that Oliver swore to kill Farouk, and that he was going to win with the simple problem of “1 + 1 not equaling 2.” During this moment of mental conviction, Oliver also cried out to Melanie from the astral plane. What we saw this week as Melanie being recruited by Oliver & Farouk could be a ruse. David and Syd running around in the desert looking for the same thing Farouk is looking for could be a delay or a distraction. David said a few episodes ago that if too many people know his plan, then Farouk can figure it out, read their minds, and stop it. But what if Melanie is the only one who knows the true plan? What if the true plan is for David to create this massive battle plan against Farouk involving all the players of Division 3/Summerland as a fake, while Melanie slips in with Oliver and Farouk covertly?
One thing I keep coming back to is the role of the Minotaur. We’ve seen the Minotaur rolling around Melanie’s vapor-soaked room. We’ve seen him in Melanie’s text adventure dreamscape. We’ve seen him rearing his head just as Melanie barges in on David’s plan and knocks out Clark. And this week, in “Chapter 17”, we saw the Minotaur lurk behind Lenny in the desert. Until now, I’ve thought of the Minotaur as an indication that Farouk has been infiltrating. Now I’m starting to think the Minotaur may be Melanie’s protection through this whole mess. And if in the end, she is the one to defeat Farouk? Well, it’s probably the best reversal you could get from the reality that Oliver and David’s battle with Farouk leave the women in their lives as an afterthought.
