Legion is a psychedelic trip and should be added to your to-watch-list already if you enjoy visually stunning television. It's a wild ride, confusing and disorientating even as it answers all the questions posed in previous episodes. Legion is an amazing series. A work of art.
Sadly the rest of this review contains spoilers so if you haven't yet watched the seventh episode you are advised not to continue until you've caught up.
Chapter 7 is nightmarish in its intensity. We start with Kerry who is being pursued through Clockworks by “The Eye” (Walter). She flees in cinematic slow motion as the camera floats ghost-like through empty corridors beneath exploding lights. The palette is a desaturated blue, quiet and cold, increasing the feeling of disembodiment.
The time line flashes forwards and backwards and we are left not knowing what happens first and second or whether everything is happening all at once. Amy is in a brightly coloured room being interrogated by Lenny (the parasite). “What did he do with it?”
Cary joins Oliver in the ice cube and we learn that Lenny/Kenny/King/The Devil with Yellow Eyes and The World's Angriest Boy in the World are in fact Amahl Farouk aka the Shadow King. Followers of the X Men canon will already know that this is an enemy of Charles Xavier. This scene and the one where David and David's rational mind (complete with British accent) go over what they know to be facts, plus a quick flash of a wheelchair with the X shape on the wheels lead us to be pretty certain that David is the son of Professor X. It is him we see animated on the black boards battling with Farouk and winning.
Oliver, Cary and Melanie meet in the frozen-time room. Melanie feels the emotional dagger of not being recognised by her husband. When they fail to move the frozen physical forms of Syd and David out of harm's way, Oliver creates a psychic shield of words while conducting a synthesized version of Ravel's Bolero. This music ties together three scenes which happen concurrently in a wild symphony of music, colour and dance. The other two scenes are David escaping his coffin and destroying the astral plane version of Clockworks, and Syd, Kerry and Rudy (the Summerland soldier whose body was borrowed by The Eye) being confronted by Lenny in the corridors of the hospital.
The black framed glasses, provided by Oliver, are reminiscent of the glasses in “They Live”. Altered perceptions are pushed back and what is real can be seen. When the glasses are worn the world is quieter, both in sound and colour. Syd et al see the world, through these glasses, in black and white. This terrifying quietness is played with in many ways by the show. We have inter-title cards of narration and dialogue instead of sound, in the style of old silent movies. When Lenny arrives at the scene – announced by a card which says “The monster arrives!” she looks like a cross between Cesare, the somnambulist in the “Cabinet of Dr Caligari”, and “Edward Scissorhands”. This scene plays out like mime or expressive dance. Lenny the sensual animalistic monster crawls towards Kerry and Syd. Kerry and Syd mirror the mime of being shot. It's claustrophobic in its intensity especially when Lenny folds up the body of the Eye and kills him. Rudy, previously a minor character, gets out of his wheelchair and pounces on Lenny, distracting the Shadow King for long enough for the others to escape the astral plane.
The Summerland crew of mutants return to the frozen-time room and time restores itself. Cary puts his halo on David, isolating the parasite, David catches the bullets before they hit him. The Eye bleeds and crumples into himself, and Amy wakes and screams.
With a saintly looking aura of white light, David returns them all to the woods where there are comedic exchanges between David and Cary. When they return to Summerland Oliver cooks them breakfast and at last recognises his wife. The others take Rudy to Cary's lab to be healed. David glimpses the Angriest Boy in a mirror and fears the parasite will not be contained for long.
In the final scene Division 3 arrive. The interrogator from the first chapter, badly burned, wants to talk to David and tells the ant-like soldiers to kill the rest. At the same time the Shadow King breaks out of the psychic coffin in which he has been isolated and we know the next episode will be just as action packed as this one.