First, I'm delighted to say that Legion will be returning in 2018 for a second season with Noah Hawley remaining as creator and executive producer. Thank you FX.
This review contains spoilers. You may prefer to wait until you watch the show before reading this. Chapter 6 of Legion is a holding point, a break from the intense action of chapter 5, yet it still moves the story forward. It is confusing. We're back in Clockworks, the mental hospital, and each of the main character's powers are treated as mental illnesses, echoing back to chapter 1.
David is supposedly bipolar. Sydney think she's there for her anti-social disorder (not wanting to be touched) but David tells her she's been diagnosed as psychotic, seeing things that aren't really there and suffering from violent outbursts. Kerry and Cary are being treated for an unusually acute co-dependency. Ptonomy thinks he's a time traveller because he lives in his past. And Melanie (Dr Byrd) because she refuses to accept her husband has been dead for over twenty years. Walter, “the eye”, is there for something to do with aggression. In Clockwork's staff, David's sister, Amy, is an abusive nurse who treats him with sadistic cruelty, and Lenny is the psychiatrist/therapist in charge of them all.
Sydney is the first to question this reality. She has flashbacks of what happened before, and she questions both her own and David's diagnoses. She sees a door that sometimes appears at the end of a corridor. The door is important. Inside that room in a sexy dance number, Lenny, relives and celebrates all the times she drove David crazy. We see her pulling the kitchen apart, revelling in her power.
There are the usual, for Legion, surreal elements to confuse the senses – the man in the greenery returns, holding something that looks like a Furbie toy. The wall pulses and bleeds. A ping pong ball is invisible at times and can be seen at other times. The oppressive green and orange palette that dominated chapter 1 seems more jarring than ever.
In the latter half of this episode others start to see slices of their previous reality as well. Cary, the male one, dreams of an ice cube and follows the man in the diving suit to some revelation we do not share. Dr Byrd revisits the room in David's childhood home where he and Sydney were about to be shot in chapter 5. It's frozen in time. She tries to remove the bullets from the air or move the couple about to be hit, but can't. She can only see she cannot change anything, which is how Ptonomy describes his malady in group session. The room is a reflection of the hospital where everything also seems paused. Scenes repeat from earlier chapters with differences. Ptonomy takes the role of Lenny and has the same conversations with David we heard before. David visits Sydney's room and lies on her bed beside her. She tries to explain that it happened before but different, but David doesn't seem to hear her. In fact David doesn't really hear Sydney at all. He's in love, he says, but we get the impression that it's with the idea of Sydney rather than the person.
At the end Lenny confronts David about this love, calling it a fungus. Jealous because she is David's fungus/parasite. She talks about God and power and how together they could challenge God. She tells him she knew his real father and that he gave David away so she wouldn't find him. "He thought he could hide you from me but he was wrong." Big reveal.
In the final scene Cary is wearing the diving suit and wakes Sydney from her hypnotised sleep. We feel as though this created world cannot last much longer although, with only two episodes left in the season, I suppose that's a moot point.
Legion is the best show on television at the moment, in my opinion. It makes it into my top 20 favourite shows of all time. I am delighted FX decided to renew it.
Comments