We’re entering a maze. A narrator with an instantly recognizable & handsome baritone welcomes us to what is sure to be an unforgettable luncheon of the mind. The sun beats down on a pair of familiar characters as an empty martini is magically replaced with full one by the hand of a vanishing waiter. The setting is unfamiliar to us and we are immediately asked to consider if what we’re seeing is real. Hell, most of the characters of FX’s Legion don’t even seem to know what’s real or imagined. Yes, Noah Hawley’s Fargo sidepiece is back, and folks, it’s really good again.
If you’ve followed this column before, you may recall that while I thoroughly enjoyed Season 1, I felt that the finale episode featured a number of uncharacteristic cliches and conveniences that had the show feeling an awful lot like a more conventional comic book affair that it had originally set out to. Whether you agreed with me or not, it’s clear that Season 2 is immediately back to being the heady, unsettling beautiful mess of a mindfuck that shares and even improves upon the promise of the earliest episodes of the show. Perhaps that’s just a function of getting a “fresh start” and getting to submerse us edgewise in an entirely new mystery where we’re not in on the secret yet. Whatever the case, I’m glad Legion is back and I’m thrilled to be covering it in this column again.
As always, this column will be filled with spoilers. With a show as dense as Legion, there’s really no reason to read a review/annotations column about it without having watched the episodes already. Along those same lines, I’ll only be doing plot “recap” so much as is necessary to discuss whatever 5 specific thoughts I have about the episode. This column is more for speculation and reflection than it is regurgitating what we just saw in great detail. With that said, let’s dive into the maze.
1. “So I’m supposed to find the Shadow King from inside a daiquiri?”
While Season 2 of Legion is just as dizzying in structure and gorgeously shot as the early episodes of Season 1, it also throws the viewer a bone by presenting a very straightforward problem. It can be boiled down to this: Amahl Farouk, the Shadow King, is at present a disengaged consciousness possessing bodies that do not belong to him (this part we knew already, it was the whole dang plot of Season 1). In Season 2, he’s looking for his body and if he finds it, he’ll become so powerful that he will become an unstoppable psychic force of evil infecting humanity. Division 3 and the Summerland mutants need to find the body first. Dan Steven’s David Haller literally spells this out for the viewer by saying: “we’re in a race.” If everything else we’re seeing is confusing and uncertain, the central plot is very clear, by design. That doesn’t mean the heroes can all trust one another. That doesn’t mean the Shadow King nor the other villains don’t have other unknown motives, but if you need to find the one MacGuffin you can use as a compass point to following the events of this season, it’s the physical body of Amahl Farouk. While I love storytelling that challenges a viewer and doesn’t feel beholden to being any one kind of thing, it doesn’t hurt to put a tangible goal in place up front.
While on the subject of Farouk’s physical body, there is a scene in a classroom where a group of kids are playing “Duck, Duck, Goose” while a woman with her back turned to the camera is writing what appears to be “rojo = red” on the blackboard. Later in the episode, we see a mysterious character move through the nightclub with a couple dashes of red paint on his forehead. It also occurred to me that the lady at the blackboard could have been Lenny, though I have no evidence of this other than hair style/color and her general physicality. I’m not entirely sure what connection this seen has or will have, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
2. Jon Hamming It Up
Continued belowLegion immediately presents us with a narrator who, in a show like this, should immediately give us pause. Can we trust anything a guy who is narrating a show like Legion says? Can we especially trust him when he possesses the smooth, confident, and reassuring voice of Donald freakin’ Draper himself? Taken meta-textually, Jon Hamm’s voice has been used to sell luxury cars and tax programs in real life, and candy bars and cigarettes in a fictional New York. Why should we trust that voice now, when he’s narrating one of the most unreliable narratives on TV?
Well, for now, we should trust him because Noah Hawley is telling us to. In this episode, he drops us into what he describes as a maze of thought and gives us a mantra for navigating it. Later, he presents to us the idea that an “idea” alone can’t make a thing reality – it has to beat out all the other competing ideas that occur to us all the time. A popular Noah Hawley storytelling device is the parable: a way to impart a lesson to us through a tangential story within a story. In “Chapter 9”, the narrator shows us a man who gets the idea that his right leg is not his right leg. As the days go by, he defeats any competing ideas that it is in fact his right leg in its rightful place, and he cuts it off with a handsaw. This, we’re told, is how a delusion of the mind becomes reality.
In another scene, an animal mask wearing character with at least one seemingly mutilated leg wheels eerily through Melanie Bird’s living quarters while she inhales the vapor drug that David and Lenny were taking in Season 1. Melanie is listless without Oliver and her way of coping could be creating delusions of her own.
In interviews, Hawley has explained that the Hamm narration bits are meant to be educational regarding certain aspects of mental and behavioral health, but also that they are clues to something going on in the story that will pay off later. One of the “delusions” Hamm presents manifests itself as a dripping, tar-black glob of a creepy-crawler. This will be something to look for in future episodes. If we pay attention to where we see this creature in “Chapter 9”, we can begin to think about what we can trust in the Legion narrative itself. In one segment, Lenny gives the gooey creature a smooch (lucky guy). Given that Lenny herself has been depicted as a possible construct of the Shadow King (she fades in and out of the passenger seat of Oliver Bird’s car, as Farouk makes his escape with Bird’s body), perhaps this is the way that the “delusion” that is Lenny becomes concrete? Her display of affection for the delusion could be her seeing her chance at becoming a reality. Furthermore, we see the creature slither under Syd & David’s bed near the episode’s end, just after David’s vision of a Future Syd asking him to help Farouk find his body. Is the delusion here the fact that Future Syd is asking something of David that sounds like the opposite of Division 3’s goal, or is the delusion his role in Division 3’s quest? At some point, David will have to figure out which of these roads to go down.
3. Kicking It In The Astral Plane
The episode’s most raucous scene was the “mind battle” dance-off in the astral plane, which in Season 2 apparently manifests itself as a nightclub (simply named “club”, one would think these characters would have a better imagination than that). David dances off against Oliver (possessed by Farouk) in choreography that is both compelling and hilarious (it’s Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords, after all). Soon, Aubrey Plaza’s character Lenny joins the fray, the centerpiece of a dance where her backup dancers push her and pull her. I took this as an extension of last season’s “Feelin’ Good” dance sequence where Lenny/Farouk really let loose, but also the push and pull had me thinking that this lends credence to the idea that Lenny is in a bit of limbo right now. Farouk is primarily lodged in Oliver Bird’s body, while Lenny is off to the side. If a delusion can become real, perhaps this is furthering some sort of metaphor that Lenny is somehow working to become real.
Continued below4. Soap Opera Evil Twins and Amnesia
Clark, Division 3’s own Harvey Two-Face (because of the severe burns, come on you get it), has a sit down with David where he presses him on his recollection of events between the Season 1 battle with Farouk and his recovery by Division 3, shown here in “Chapter 9”. To David, it seems like it’s been a day. Division 3 & company are all telling him it’s been almost a year. It would be easy to think that Division 3 and Clark (the sort of “mini-boss” of Season 1) are the ones we should be mistrusting here, but let’s be honest – David has a lot going on in his head. Clark tells David of the soap operas he watched with his dying mother in his youth. Tales of evil twins and amnesiacs; plot devices designed to pad out the stories and create unbelievable intrigue.
The thing is, in “Chapter 9” we have seen manifestations of these exact soap opera plot twists suggested in David’s character. First, there is the amnesia, which is what Clark is referring to by bringing up the soap operas. David can’t remember where he’s been and for how long, and Clark wants to pry those memories out. But also peppered a few times throughout the episode are internal conversations between 2 different “Davids” within David’s mind. One seems more brash and the other seems more hesitant and questioning, though we don’t get enough of these interactions to make too many conclusions. Whatever the case, there is definitely a “David 1” and a “David 2” somewhere in that adorable, confused noggin of his. It’s worth noting that the very first time we see David speak in Season 2, he’s waking up in Division 3 headquarters and is speaking in backwards talk, played forwards. A little show called Twin Peaks has also used this sort of audio trickery to present a skewed reality in its own “red room”, a place where Agent Dale Cooper lies in limbo while his own evil twin runs around doing heinous crimes. This was probably just a minor hat tip to Twin Peaks or David Lynch’s storytelling techniques.
5. The Yellow Queen
Does it seem like there’s something a little off about Syd in this episode? I mean, aside from the fact that she’s been through a bunch of trauma, lost her significant other for a year, and the whole future-timeline stuff. Trust that I am not minimizing those aspects of her character, but merely thinking along the lines of how Legion tries to bait-and-switch the viewer. When we first see Syd, she’s practicing her mutant ability in a way that Kerry finds comically unsettling. She’s licking her hand like a cat before her behavior turns back to normal and we see a cat in her lap. Recall that her power is body-swapping and it seems less unsettling, but at the end of the day she’s still licking herself. Later, she’s aggressively stern with David about his leaving her for a year. Again, on its face this is totally understandable, but Rachel Keller plays these scenes with an off-kilter mix of passive aggression and laser-focus. She presses David for him to tell her more about his time away. She makes him swear to keep no more secrets from her – and again, her demeanor is just off-kilter enough to make me suspicious. These are certainly normal things that one partner would want from another, but also definitely something the Shadow King would also want from David. A way back in.
I’ll leave this week’s column with one final thing to consider regarding Syd: her present day form is almost exclusively seen wearing yellow. Is the Devil with Yellow Eyes working through her?
