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Five Thoughts on Legion’s “Chapter 18”

By | June 6th, 2018
Posted in Television | % Comments

Next week is the finale of Season 2 of FX’s Legion and it’s starting to feel to me like the show started going downhill early for me this year. You may remember that last time around I found myself disappointed that the conventional superhero/super-villain wrap up that constituted the Season 1 finale. I started getting the feel last week, an episode that felt like a stretch for time for than anything else, and now feel pretty comfortable saying that for all the bluster and pretension that Legion is going to challenge us with its narrative, it’s still going to come down to Farouk vs. David for the future of the world. I think most people will find that satisfying, and I realize how pretentious I sound myself, expecting a show to confound with its narrative up to the very end. Perhaps I’m being unreasonable, but for a show that spends 90% of its time getting us to question everything we see, and for it to raise all sorts of points about perception and mental health, I’m not sure it usefully pulls that off in the central narrative. Sure, lots of things along the way weren’t necessarily what we thought they were, but in the end it’s going to come down to one group behind David fighting against one group under Farouk’s control, and maybe there’ll be some side-switching based on mental gymnastics. FX is a network that isn’t afraid to challenge the viewer and take chances on things. Imagine if this season ended with a truly challenging note. I suppose it still can – it has one chapter left. But for now, let’s talk about “Chapter 18”, the penultimate episode of season 2. As always, remember there will spoilers in this column, so tread lightly.

1. David Haller Serving Looks

If any of you are still looking for a new Summer look, it’s not too late to try the David Haller Legion ‘do. David’s classic hairdo has been a big sticking point for fans of X-Men comics who have been waiting to see it on the screen. And why not? It’s not as if Legion shies away from being “weird”, which would be one argument against bringing the hairstyle into an adaptation. A decade ago, yellow spandex was not only considered too silly to be in an X-Men adaptation, but was openly mocked within the Fox movies themselves. Legion may waffle on how closely it wants to stick to the source material when it comes to the titular character, but I’m personally pretty glad that everyone seems willing to embrace even the weirdest parts of it.

2. True Love Waits

The scene that featured David’s big hair also happened to be, by far, the best sequence in the episode. It’s a slow-paced affair (as Legion is wont to do), but it focuses on some of the strongest imagery the show has to offer, as well as the best musical pairing that the show has done in what feels like a very long while. One of the worst things about Legion is its over-reliance on popular song choices to do a heavy amount of emotional labor. Sometimes I find that the punctuate or enhance a feeling that I’m already experiencing from the show, but other times I’m actively wondering whether the use of a particular song is working on me more than the visual and narrative content of the show is. In this case, the choice of Radiohead’s positively gorgeous “True Love Waits” worked so well in concert with the apocalyptic and futuristic imagery of the opening sequence that I was fully immersed in what I was seeing. I don’t know how to explain the difference between this and the use of a subpar cover of a ’70s rock song, which is something Legion has done entirely too much of in past installments. Maybe it’s because Radiohead makes music that evokes the same sort of near-future emotional psychic freak-out aesthetic that Legion bases its existence around? I don’t know why it works, but I do know when I feel it working. The sequence concerns a very sinister David with a towering mane of hair holed up in a hideout with a pregnant Lenny writhing on the floor. If we believe in David and Syd’s love (and honestly, because of the way everything’s gone down, I’m not sure I do), then this sequence is fraught with heartbreak and anxiety. Radiohead sounds like the perfect pairing for that.

Continued below

3. Motherly Manipulation

Melanie: “what do we need men for, except their sperm?”

This is how Melanie begins her episode-long pitch to Syd that perhaps David’s love isn’t worth saving. It’s also where I started to become pretty pessimistic about the prospects of Legion wrapping up in a way I’ll be happy with. The way I’ve approached the “left in the lurch” status that Melanie’s character had been in for most of Season 2 was apparently a really terrible misread on my part. If you haven’t been following this column, I’ll try to briefly summarize: I basically thought that without Oliver yet again, Melanie was depressed, lying about Division 3 doing vapor drugs and giving up on her mission. In an early conversation with Syd, she bemoaned the way that the men in their lives go off and fight their ego battles, seemingly without care for their significant others. She’s not wrong about any of this, but I was expecting her (and Syd) to more or less take charge of the situation and turn things around in the end. I know she’s under Farouk’s influence on some level, but with the real concrete signs that Oliver has been reaching out to her and breaking (however briefly) out of Farouk’s mental grasp, I didn’t expect Legion to devote as much time as they did in this episode to turn Melanie into a real villain. Again, I know Farouk is working through Melanie – keep that in mind as I say all this – but both he and David’s manipulations in the penultimate chapter of this season have yet again turned the show into a more conventional good vs. evil story than I was preparing for. I know they’re still trying to sell you a conflict that’s more complicated than that by saying that Future David destroys humanity and Farouk is the one who can save it, but we know that’s not really who these characters are. David is the hero, Farouk is the villain, and the show is only telling you on a surface level that you should think anything otherwise.

So when Melanie tries to convince Syd that David enjoys causing people pain, whether they’re good or bad, the show creates cartoon villains where there weren’t any. The viewer hasn’t been given any reason to see Melanie in this way, and Syd – in a world where mind-control mutants exist – has simply not been given a good enough reason to believe her. Legion has been far too nuanced and amorphous a show to again boil the final confrontation and any unexpected villain turns down to “Farouk’s controlling them.” It’s too easy an answer for a show this difficult.

4. Syd vs. the Minotaur

One of the other moments I liked quite a bit was the confrontation between Syd and the Minotaur. First of all, the Minotaur design is just really cool. It’s never not come off as creepy, and it’s not always looked the same. It served as another way for Legion to impart a bit of mystery onto the viewer in a way that we recognize immediately as sinister, but for reasons we aren’t exactly sure of yet. There have been a lot of theories about the Minotaur across the internet (including one that yours truly made that week that was completely whiffed on), but even if the monster ends up simply becoming a physical challenge and nothing more, in that case it’s a satisfying enough narrative because we haven’t invested in or actually learned anything about the character. This isn’t like cheaply turning a hero into a villain to make ends meet in a story. If anything, it’s an example of a delusion played on the viewer. Perhaps we all placed more significance on the Minotaur than it was really worth in the end? And if Syd did a body transfer with it and will somehow use that to help win the day next week? Well, in that case it’s a really cool use of her power, too.

5. Drawn Out and Quartered

There’s only one more episode of the show left, an extra episode ordered by FX and apparently needed by Noah Hawley and Co. for some reason, but these last two weeks make me feel like things could have been tightened up a little down the stretch. After seeing “Chapter 18” play out, I stand by my belief from last week that viewers could have skipped “Chapter 17” and would have essentially still gotten all of the information they would have needed. There may have been a detail or two that would have gotten overlooked (Lenny’s pregnancy for one, which it seems like a bunch of viewers didn’t catch last week anyway, just poking around social media a bit), and maybe an emotional beat or two, but honestly nothing we didn’t already know or infer about these characters or this plot. I know that’s a damning thing to say about a work of art, but I felt like this episode dragged too, even if it contained loads more important information and plot points. If Legion moved at a faster pace, then I suppose it wouldn’t be Legion but then again, Legion is at its best when its juggling its fascinating cast and I feel like characters like Clark, Ptonomy, and the Vermillion/Admiral Fukyama have gotten the short shrift in these last couple.


//TAGS | Legion

Vince Ostrowski

Dr. Steve Brule once called him "A typical hunk who thinks he knows everything about comics." Twitter: @VJ_Ostrowski

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