Before I begin I have a bugbear. It's not huge, but in a show which revolves around mental illness I would have hoped the writers could have got this right. Schizophrenia is not the same a multiple personality disorder and so when, in Chapter 5, Kerry claims David is literally schizophrenic, in that he has two personalities inside of him, he is mixing up his medical terms. I wanted to get that off my chest before writing my review of a wonderful piece of television.
After watching chapters 1 through 5, this viewer feels like I might be on the precipice of finding out what the fuck is going on. The show is full of narratives and counter-narratives, just like David's head. Like him it is impossible to say with any confidence what we know, and so we rely on how we feel. Doctors constantly ask David how he feels, because it is the only thing he can know for sure. By the end of chapter 5 I felt confused, afraid and thrilled.
David Haller is a troubled young man, a junkie and possibly a murderer, who may also be more than human. The character fits into Marvel's X Men universe. Is David insane or is he a powerful mutant? Or are both true? David has struggled with mental illness since late childhood, probably 10 or 11 years old by his own recollection. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years.
When he meets Sydney, a fellow patient at Clockworks, she challenges everything he has been told and he falls in love with her. With Syd, David starts a journey to uncover what is true and whether he is ill or powerful.
There is a lot going on in this show. Colours are as important here as in a Peter Greenway film. Trees and people hiding in trees is a recurring motif, and the fallibility of perception and memory are the main themes. Timelines zig zag like crazy and it's almost impossible to keep any of it straight in your mind as you watch. Time is tricky in Legion. We are led to believe it is set in the 70's but costumes and technology are often not contemporary to that period. We have clocks without hands. We have rapid shifts in light and shadows and an extremely slow moving river, the flow of which seems to change direction at different points. All of this adds to the strangeness and magic of the show. It makes us wonder whether we can really know anything.
There are slow parts to the show and at other times the action is frenetic. The whole script seems to be designed to keep us on edge, grasping at ideas and information like straws. The direction is masterful. The more you watch the more you see. Layers upon layers of meanings and metaphors. The soundtrack is superlative. Each song matched perfectly to the scene, but also suggesting further hidden meanings, like the two songs about rainbows. The acting is spot on and the characters are brought brilliantly to life, often with humour, while at other times we can taste their fear.
I guess it is a super hero show, in a way, but it is also psychological horror and drama. We've come to expect a lot from our television shows recently. No longer the poor cousin of cinema but rather a way to tell a longer, character based story to a larger audience. Legion is up there in terms of quality with Jessica Jones, Orange in the New Black and Breaking Bad. But it is by no means as straightforward as any of those. Twin Peaks might be the closest comparison I can offer. And I give Legion a solid 5 out of 5 stars and look forward to finding out what happens next.
Individual episode summaries (contain spoilers) -
Chapter 1.
In the very beginning we are treated to a montage of David growing up, ending with him eating tape in a psycho analyst's office. It's David's birthday and his sister, Amy, brings him cake he cannot eat. As he leaves her, he tells he something has to change. It seems like a flippant remark at the time. But with David's powers it is likely that he somehow brought the change he desired to him at that moment. Much of this episode takes place in an interview room. A man is interrogating David to uncover what happened in Clockworks psychiatric facility leading up to and during what is referred to as the incident. As the scene expands we find the interview room is in an empty swimming pool inside what looks to be a school. Outside the interview room we see dozens or more heavily armed guards. We know David is important and they are afraid of him.
From David's retelling of events (incorporated into flashbacks) we find out about Sydney. When she arrives at Clockworks David starts to feel as though life might not be pointless. She doesn't believe they are mentally ill, just different. “What if your problems aren't in your head. What if they aren't even problems?” she asks him. He asks her to be his girlfriend and she agrees but says he cannot touch her. At this point we have to wonder whether this is a classic example of the untouchable girl trope, someone pure to be worshipped from afar. Thankfully in Legion things are not that straightforward. When David kisses her impulsively they swap bodies. That is her power. In his body, she destroys the hospital and kills his friend Lenny. But as Lenny charitably says, when her ghost visits David, “Don't give a newbie a bazooka and then be surprised when she blows shit up.”
This is nowhere near everything that happens in this episode. You have to watch it to see. But I wanted to touch of the cinematic colour palette used. Outside the hospital the dominant colours in scenes are red and green, inside the hospital the red is muted to orange. As this is a story about mental illness I thought it interesting to consider the psychological meanings of these colours. Red represents strength, courage, fight or flight and excitement. It also represents aggression and defiance. Green represents harmony, balance and stagnation. While orange represents comfort, security and frustration. As the chapters progress more colours are added to the cinematographers palette and I will look at them in turn. However these three colours remain markedly present in all the chapters so far.
Chapter 2.
After Syd and others rescue David from Division 3, who were interviewing him in a room in a swimming pool, he is taken to Summerland. A place of safety for mutants. The doctor in charge is Melanie Byrd. The building is surrounded by forest. Trees are already a recurring theme and I wonder whether the forest is a metaphor for David's voices. The colour blue is added to the palette in this episode. Blue symbolises intelligence, trust, reflection, calm and lack of emotion.
Byrd teaches him first how to quiet the voices in his head. She teaches him to visualise a volume dial and literally turn the noise down. She also tells him he isn't insane. He’s telepathic (show is she), and he's possibly telekinetic.
David starts memory work with Byrd and memory artist Ptonomy. We visit his youth, his dog King, the book read by his father at bedtime “The World's Angriest Boy” and his gardening mother who calls him her beautiful boy.
David's sister, Amy, looks for him at Clockworks and is kidnapped by Division 3 and a wood whittling, seemingly bullet proof, bad guy the call “the eye”. David wants to go and rescue Amy, but Syd convinces him to stay at Summerland until he is ready to win. Amy is bait and they will not kill her.
Chapter 3.
Chapters echo each other. At the start of this episode we have Byrd's husband's recorded voice telling her the story of the woodcutter. The eye is a woodcutter. The eye carves pieces of wood into dogs. We know David remembers having a childhood dog called King. And in the control room, in the old school where David was first interrogated, there was a red lit cage which contained a large dog. Whether or not all these details will prove important to the story, they do tie the characters and action together in an unnerving way.
Yellow is added to the palette in this episode. We see the “devil with yellow eyes” in the kitchen with David when everything flies out of the cupboards and drawers. Syd and David have an important conversation in a yellow and blue room. He doesn't want her to be part of his memory work as he's afraid she won't feel the same about him afterwards. “Do you love me?” she asks. This somehow settles the argument and she is allowed to join in.
The memories they visit are of David robbing his psycho analyst's office and chewing the taped audio recordings that Dr Poole made of their sessions. Memories are layered upon memories and we see one of their sessions as David robs the place. Dr Poole asks David, “What did the stars say?” Only Syd can feel the presence of a monster and see the wall of the office crack open and red light spill through. She follows an eight year old version of David through a cupboard door and into his memories.
Syd is the first of the memory workers to wake. Ptonomy is next. Byrd only wakes after she reads “The Worlds Angriest Boy” in David's memory. And David remains unconscious.
Chapter 4.
We start with Oliver, Dr Byrd's husband, who we discover has been unconscious for 21 years. He is in an ice cube, wearing a suit that is sometimes yellow, sometimes white.
Then we follow Syd, Kerry (one of two Kerry's, it's complicated) and Ptonomy as they go in search of David's history, while David remains unconscious. “We went in search of truth, but found only lies.” What the trio seem to discover is that David hit Dr Poole so badly he put the psycho analyst into a coma.
David is in a field of green lights. He meets a man in a diving suit, who is Oliver. Oliver takes him up to the ice cube and shares some strange news. The monster is part of David, a parasite. It makes him forget when he sees it.
On Syd and co.'s journey we discover that Lenny, David's friend, might be Benny, a drug pusher. They are led into a division 3 trap. Kerry fights heroically and Syd swaps bodies with “the eye”.
Meanwhile, David leaves Oliver's ice cube and returns to the field of green light where he meets Lenny. Lenny makes David so angry that he manages to break out of the astral plane in which his mind had been trapped. He goes to rescue Syd from “the eye”. Kerry is shot and “the eye” flees to fight another day.
Chapter 5.
The colour white becomes equally dominant in this episode. White represents clarity, efficiency, sterility and elitism.
It all goes a bit mental in this episode. David returns a changed man – confident and smiling, the magic man. He creates a place where he can touch Syd and they become lovers. Even in this space, predominantly white, his secret self is hidden. The bathroom is red and it is there he has conversations with Lenny, and there the angriest boy and King can be found.
David goes to Division 3 to rescue his sister. When Syd, Byrd and others follow they find only death and destruction. People who have been part swallowed by the ground. Fires and flashing lights. Byrd sees a recording of David killing the D3 soldiers and dancing around as he does it. She sees a second video, possibly night vision, of the devil with yellow eyes, killing the soldiers in the same hallways. Kerry creates a crown that should be able to separate David and the parasite so that they can talk to David without interference.
They follow David and Amy to his childhood home, and are in turn followed by “the eye”. David is convinced that Amy knows a secret about him. Lenny walks out of a mirror and claims she is David, Benny, Lenny and King, before she turns into the angriest boy. Terrified, Amy reveals David was adopted.
When the Summerland group arrive at the old house they can neither speak nor hear. Syd arrives in the room with Amy and David first and is attacked by Lenny. When the rest arrive, one is possessed by “the eye” and tries to shoot David. Syd throws herself between David and the bullet and tells him to take them to the white room. The devil with yellow eyes chases Syd around the white room while David appears stuck in slow motion. When she falls onto the bed and is mounted by the monster the scene changes. Syd, David and the Summerland people are sat in a circle at Clockworks psychiatric hospital and Lenny is their doctor.
I have no idea where they plan to take this in chapter 6.
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