It’s easy to forget that the story of Legion is all about David (Dan Stevens).
What we’re watching is predominantly through his eyes; when it’s not, it’s through the eyes of someone looking for him. This isn’t a criticism, because there’s an endless amount of unpacking required to understand David and his motivations, but it does result in a lot of the characters being thrown by the wayside.
As I’ve said before, the show can sometimes do such an injustice to its brilliant ensemble cast by focusing so hard on the action revolving around David that a lot of relationship building between characters is put on the back burner or implied to have occurred off-camera. Just by virtue of the fact she’s the most important character to David, it can feel like we’ve gotten to know Syd (Rachel Keller) a little bit more than everyone else. But again, what we’re seeing is through David’s eyes, and it turns out what David doesn’t know about Syd can fill an entire hour’s worth of television.
In this chapter, we see the story of Syd’s life played over and over again for David until he can correctly guess why it is that Syd’s forcing him to relive it again and again. After arriving at a series of wrong guesses (that she’s jealous of a couple she once saw making out, that she’s afraid David won’t love her if he sees her demons, etc.) he finally gets it right in an emotional and heavy scene that is not only a breakthrough for their relationship, but for Syd as an individual.
This is a rare emotionally intimate moment between two characters who rarely let their guards down – partially out of necessity, because they’re always under attack – but mostly due to having lived a lifetime of hardship. We’ve known since Chapter 1 that David is a messed up guy with a lot of problems. Yet, so far the only glimpse we’ve had into Syd’s psyche is the upsetting story she tells about losing her virginity to her mom’s boyfriend, which we get to watch play out for us in its intensely upsetting entirety in Chapter 12.
My issue last week was that the action was building too slowly, but the fact that the action this week gets halted entirely so that we can focus on David and Syd is completely fine by me. What this episode lacks in momentum, it more than makes up for in character development – character development that I’ve felt has been sorely missing in the midst of everything. Syd and David are two individuals who are willing to risk a lot for each other, and who continually put themselves in harms way so that they can be together. The bottom line is that David loves Syd so much that he’s willing to do something incredibly dangerous if it means Syd won’t end up in a post-apocalyptic future. To understand why he would do that, you have to pull back and give us a moment like the one they share at the end of the episode.
During Season One, I had read some criticisms of Syd’s characterization that focused on the way she fulfilled the “untouchable girl” trope. She was a woman whose lack of physical intimacy created consequences for herself and her love interest and defined her as a whole. I think that if the show was guilty of anything, it was not taking the time to fully flesh out Syd. When you’re dealing with a character that walks along that edge so closely, it’s important to make sure you’re fully aware of what her motivations are and that the audience sees it as well.
I didn’t see Syd as lacking agency as much as I saw her of rarely using it, something she comes close to admitting later in the season when she explains that swapping bodies with so many people over the years has left her confident in the fact that she doesn’t have much need for a sense of self. I’m sensitive to the fact that this revelation is written by a male writer, but it felt powerful to me nonetheless. Syd’s a very relatable character, a reserved but still confident one with a closet full of skeletons.
It’s funny that in this episode she delivers the line “Do you think ghosts like living in a haunted house?” because I’ve come to feel like Syd does. She’s made peace with herself, and her lack of intimacy and her aversion to physical contact isn’t a weakness or a flaw, it’s just who she is. Sometimes, you can take pride in being untouchable – which Syd tends to, both physically and metaphorically. When you watch the story of her life unfold and see the moments of isolation that had nothing to do with her powers, it makes you wonder the extent to which her powers play into her disdain for intimacy and how much of it was nurture over nature.
Stylistically, the scenes that take place in Syd’s past are as beautiful as they are misleading. The fashion is very firmly late ’50s-early ’60s at the start, evolving quickly into 80’s punk as Syd starts to get rebellious. Serving in direct juxtaposition to this is the soundtrack, which is the most modern it’s ever been on the show: Bon Iver and Tame Impala, scoring the life of a young Syd. During Season One, Noah Hawley’s explanation for the anachronistic sense of style was due in part to the fact everything was filtered through David’s perception, and David being an unreliable narrator. The show always does the absolute most when it comes to creating a timeless but quaint setting to watch their individual worlds through, and I continue to be a huge sucker for it.
Speaking of the soundtrack, I am completely in love with the cover they used of “White Room” by Cream. In addition to just being a really cool version of that song, the title has double meaning here. The white room in the astral plane is the only place in which David and Syd can be physically intimate with each other. It seems to be the only place where Syd ever feels truly comfortable. In the context of this episode, it’s almost like the white room is the reward for all that she’s been through: she’s survived and earned a space where she can have intimacy without consequence, on her terms, with someone who respects and understands that.
There’s also a cover of Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” that ends the episode. I couldn’t clock the artist, but I’m willing to take a guess: Noah Hawley, who did a similar thing on the last season of Fargo when he ended an episode with his cover of “Ship of Fools” by World Party.
It’s not fair to say that Syd is the emotional heart of the show right now, because her end-of-episode monologue about love making her soft, and how the only way to survive is to fight, feels cold and void of emotion. But it’s a meaningful sentiment: this isn’t personal, this is war, and everyone needs to do what they have to do to survive. Love aside, Syd and David make a formidable team, and how they work together going forward is going to be pivotal to how events unfold. We can’t have raw and honest moments like this very often on the show, so I fully appreciate them taking the opportunity to deliver one while it’s still early enough.
