Welcome to season two of Legion! I’ll be taking over reviewing the show from Dan Cohen for the next ten episodes. Be warned: There are spoilers ahead. I think?
Things in season two are already shaping up to be just a bit different for the mutants at Summerland than they were at the end of last year. And when I say “last year” I mean that literally – It’s been a year (362 days, as Syd points out) since the events of the season one finale.
As a reminder, Legion left off with David (Dan Stevens) finally ridding his mind of The Shadow King, a parasitic mutant that had inhabited his mind as a child and taken the physical form of his deceased friend Lenny (Aubrey Plaza). He was about to catch his breath before being abducted by a mysterious orb. The Shadow King, now in the mind of another telepathic mutant named Oliver Bird (Jemaine Clement), took off with Oliver for as-of-yet-disclosed reasons.
Let’s start with what the rest of the team has been up to in the meantime. All of them have joined the once-shadowy Division 3, one arm of an organization dedicated to studying and containing mutants. Thanks to Syd (Rachel Keller) and Melanie Bird (Jean Smart), Division 3 is less concerned about the threat mutants pose, and are more focused on areas like research, where Cary Loudermilk (Bill Irwin) thrives; investigations, where Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) joins Clark (Hamish Linklater) in hands-on field work; and the tactical branch, where Kerry (Amber Midthunder) can finally get her kicks in.
Despite making huge progress in human-mutant relationships, Melanie seems pessimistic and downtrodden, likely as a result of her husband Oliver (Clement) leaving just as soon as he came back from his decades-long isolation in the astral plane, and she appears to be hooked on the same drug David and Lenny experimented with in season one.
Despite some personal setbacks they’ve been surviving without David, but they’ve also been looking for him somewhat frantically. It’s at a night club where they finally find him, comatose but safe. When he finally snaps out of it he doesn’t realize it’s been a year and swears it’s only been hours since the last time he saw the group. A lot of this is explained through monologues, and there’s a lot of exposition to slog through during the first half hour or so.
Getting caught up on a year’s worth of activity isn’t easy, and at this point it’s about as jarring for the audience as it is for David, who has a very short amount of time to acclimate to what’s happened before being called to see Admiral Fukiyama – the apparent boss for all of Division 3.
Fukiyama wears a basket on his head and seems to talk through a small army of android women who speak in unison with computerized, sing-song voices. They also have mustaches. In an early review of the show that I read, a critic described this aspect of the show as being too twee for his tastes. I don’t entirely love this idea either, and I have a feeling it won’t play out where we’ll walk away at the end of the season saying “Oh, that’s why they did that. It all makes sense!” But it certainly doesn’t have to, which is part of what I love about Legion: the choices are bold and uncompromising. In that way, Legion rings so pitch-perfect as a live action adaptation of an 80’s/90’s comic book that it’s sometimes hard to wrap your brain around how these ideas ended up even remotely filmable.
But against all logic, they are. There are so many choices made with the setting, with costumes, with lighting – everything you can possibly think of to help emphasize a mood or a feeling – that it’s absolutely awe inspiring. There’s the scene of Oliver driving, seemingly alone, and as the camera rotates around the passenger side of the car you can start to see Lenny in the passenger’s seat – there but not there.
As David speaks to Fukiyama and his androids (I believe the credits listed them all as Vermilion) he stands before a backdrop that makes it appears as though he’s falling down an endless staircase. It helps sell the feeling that David is falling – or losing his grip – for most of the episode.
But is David falling, or is he better at realizing that his lack of certainty is something people are eager to take advantage of? When he reunites with Syd – first in their love nest on the astral plane, and then in their real-world, cold and gray Division 3 bedroom – she makes him promise not to keep any more secrets. But David’s got secrets, namely an encounter he had with Oliver and Lenny at the nightclub where he was found. They have some kind of confrontation told through an exhilarating dance/fight sequence that made my brain explode.
One of the things I was most excited about was seeing who the new Big Bad is. It looks as though The Shadow King is still the name on everyone’s lips. That’s because Division 3 is desperate to find him and put a stop to a mysterious ailment that seems to affect anyone who comes into contact with Oliver. Wherever he goes, everyone in the vicinity ends up unable to move, except their teeth, which are constantly chattering. The chattering, simple as it is, is extremely disturbing and effective in a way that I find deeply upsetting whenever the victims appear on screen. The ending of the episode seriously puts it into question whether or not The Shadow King IS the main villain of the season, though, and the power dynamics at play here seem to promise that things are not what they seem.
After all this, I’ve really only hit on a third of what we get treated to. The episode is DENSE, but not in a way where anything gets lost; everything seems very carefully placed, waiting for the right moment to jump out to the forefront. We have a narrator now – welcome to Legion, by the way, Jon Hamm! We have a tease of the hilarious banter that is to come between Cary (Bill Irwin) and Kerry (Amber Midthunder). We have Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) once again falling back on his loyalty to whatever flavor of the month organization he’s a part of, feeling antagonistic toward David. Syd (Rachel Keller) is upset and excited all at once to have her boyfriend back – but fears that Melanie (Jean Smart) is right that it’s only a matter of time before he leaves again.
Showrunner Noah Hawley is in an interesting position. Despite a three-season run of Fargo, his other highly acclaimed FX series, he has actually never had to continue one of his own stories – those seasons acted more like short stories within an anthology. To be leading one of the ambitious shows on television for the fourth year but having no experience telling any kind of Part Two might seem like a lot of pressure, but after going into this episode with no expectations whatsoever and still managing to have them blown, I’m so far from worried. When you see something as visually extravagant and creative as this show, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it gets too ambitious because you know it’s in capable hands. Maybe those hands won’t always be as consistently deft as they should be – those mustache androids really have a lot of work to do to win me over – but it’s going to be a complete thrill to follow this season to its logical conclusion and I can’t wait.
Rating: 9 out of 10
