After eleven episodes (one more than I realized we’d get!) we are finally at the end of Season Two of Legion. It feels like everything happened way too fast to be able to put the pieces together just yet; but at the same time, the show took so long to build to the climax that I’ve forgotten or lost a few of those pieces. I feel a genuine emptiness to knowing that it’ll be a year (or more) before we see what happens next, but I’m satisfied enough with this season as a whole that I’ll probably just re-watch it a few more times.
Hopefully by the third re-watch I’ll have a better sense of where every single thread tied up over the course of this season. There are a few things I wanted to focus on when wrapping up and it may not prevent a full overview of the finale, but they’re the elements I found to be the most important. And anyway, I hope you’ll watch the finale and form your own opinion of what happened, since subjectivity is pretty core to the overall theme.
As always, there will be spoilers ahead.
First of all: that opening scene. I say it every week and I mean it right now more than ever: THIS is how you do a live action adaptation of a comic book. The current crop of comic book movies are fine the way they are, but there’s a lot of opportunity that gets lost, aesthetically speaking, when you opt for a more realistic portrayal of superheroes than Legion has. One of the main complaints I’ve read about the series online is that the show is more style than substance, and that complaint isn’t entirely inaccurate, but I do personally find it misguided. They’re not just creating a TV show; they’re adapting a strictly visual medium into a visual and auditory experience. It may be true that showrunner Noah Hawley and his design team throw everything at the wall and leave it there whether it sticks or not, but I can’t think of a format more suited to taking big risks than a comic book adaptation, and I can’t think of one more perfect for an eclectic visual style than a comic book about a telepath with multiple personality disorder.
But back to that opening scene really quick. One of the highlights of the entire series in my mind is definitely David (Dan Stevens) levitating through the desert, singing his own rendition of “Behind Blue Eyes” by The Who. It was such a powerful way to start off the episode! I also want to take a moment to talk about Noah Hawley’s reliance on self-made covers for the majority of this season.
I am very, VERY on board with it and I am desperately hoping they’ll release a soundtrack with all the music and not just the scores, so that I can listen to his cover of Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More” without having to hear the sound of Amy’s (Katie Aselton) bones crunching in the background, or a full version of “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads. By taking these songs that are incredibly familiar but putting a very Hawley-esque twist on them, he’s creating a feeling of unease. We know these songs, but we don’t immediately recognize them, which is jarring and comforting at the same time.
So how did all these loose threads get tied up? Like I said, a re-watch is definitely required, but at first watch it doesn’t seem like there were as many loose threads as we were led to believe. We were essentially given a crash course in psychology for the first half of the season so that we’d have the knowledge required to understand the subtext in the last few episodes. Although, personally, I don’t really think that the subtext was too subtle to understand without Jon Hamm explaining what mass delusion is.
As a narrative device, I think the lessons were cool and may have helped explain some of the lesser known aspects of mental illness, however, so I’m a little torn as to how effective I think they were. I’m also still processing the trial scene that ends the season, and I think it may be deliberately left open to interpretation based on how the viewer interpreted these lessons. The major threads were definitely David’s struggle to stop Farouk (Navid Negahban), Syd (Rachel Keller) coming to terms with who David is and where their relationship has brought them, and their combined efforts to prevent the end of the world. I won’t say that all these storylines have come to their satisfying conclusion, but we do finally arrive at the destination, exactly as scheduled.
One thread that doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion at all, though, is what became of Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) after he got uploaded to Admiral Fukiyama’s database. I’m consistently underwhelmed by how little they give him to do, and I’m upset to think that this may be the end of him as a character entirely. I know I said I hated the bone-crunching/body-swapping device but if someone could give Ptonomy a body back I’d be ok with it, as long as they just don’t show the process again.
So after Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) manages to depower everyone by activating the device that looks like a giant tuning fork, David (Stevens) makes quick work of Farouk (Negahban), bringing him to the edge of death. Syd (Keller) has been shown visions of the “true” David by a Farouk-controlled Melanie (Jean Smart), and is now fully convinced that he is the actual reason for the end of the world. She’s the only person thus far to put it together that Future-Syd was asking for David’s help in finding Farouk’s body so that Farouk could stop David from destroying the world.
David himself had not even considered this outcome, although I think there’s a pretty good reason why: Future-Syd is acting under the control of Farouk, who seems to be more or less controlling Present-Syd at this point as well. David HAS to be the person who actually destroyed the world, or else Future-Syd wouldn’t have worked with Farouk. But is David only being driven to the point where he wants to end the world because his friends betray him? This isn’t made completely clear, and is JUST ambiguous enough that Syd and the rest of the Division 3 team could have arrived at their opinions of David independently of Farouk. It’s not unlikely that Farouk could conceive a plan to rule the world that required him to manipulate people in multiple timelines, and after the events of the trial I believe that he is setting David up to become the villain so that he can stop him and then pick up right where he left off.
Thanks to a brief flash forward set three years in the future, seen only through the eyes of Melanie (Smart) and Oliver (Jemaine Clement) – both living peacefully together in the astral plane – we know that the end of the world does indeed happen, but that it may not be quite as dystopian as a one-armed Future-Syd would have us believe. We know that Syd is betrayed by David, but what we see play out falls into a much more gray area where it’s just as open to interpretation in regards to who was actually betrayed.
Syd becomes certain that David is not a good person and that the only way to truly save the world is to kill him. She feels lied to, and she’s right to feel that way – David has been lying a lot this season. He didn’t tell her about his dalliance with Future-Syd, or that he’s known more about Farouk’s whereabouts this entire season than he let on. A lot of this seems like an effort to protect her, but it’s also clear that David wanted to protect himself from Syd’s judgment. This is, like I said, a very gray area, because while I understand all of Syd’s feelings and agree with her, I think a lot of the conclusions she drew were based on manipulations created by Melanie and Farouk. Whether or not she was of sound mind, she’s right about David being dangerous. The real question is how dangerous he is when surrounded by people he loves and who love him, and I think Syd’s being manipulated to miss that part of the bigger picture.
“I am a good person, who deserves love.” It’s something that David repeats to himself after he saw Syd for the first time back at the psychiatric hospital. He repeats it to himself in this week’s episode as well. After everything that he’s been through, and all the doubt that is now in Syd’s mind, he feels as though he can overcome their problems through the fact that he is ultimately a good person, he deserves love, and it’ll all work itself out. Unfortunately, David’s issue is that those two statements – that he is a good person, that he deserves love – CAN be mutually exclusive. David can deserve love and still be a bad person, and vice versa, and he proved that in a big way this week. After Syd tries to shoot David, Lenny – attempting to shoot Syd – shoots the bullet instead. The bullets explode and knock Syd unconscious. David, feeling desperate, decides to wipe Syd’s mind of the incident so she’ll forget everything she learned about David’s dangerous potential.
This brings me to a really difficult conversation about consent that gets raised by this episode. I’ve thought about this in the past as it relates to this show and to Syd and David’s relationship, but the episode puts the complicated issue of consent between a telepath and someone who can’t be touched on full display. Due to the fact that David can read Syd’s mind, we know that he has the potential to invade her privacy and possibly even manipulate her. This whole time, the only thing that prevented David from doing so was his respect and love for Syd, as well as the fact that he seemed to have a grip on the immorality of such an act.
Here, he throws all that away not only to retain Syd’s love, but to save his life. Self-preservation is understandable, and maybe an act like that would be forgivable in a lesser situation, but when Syd has finally gotten a complete picture of the kind of person David is and he goes and does something that only confirms that he’s not a morally good person, it’s hard to side with him even a little bit. Making matters worse is the fact that he astral projects into Syd’s room when she has explicitly asked him for space and ends up having (non-physical, but like, physical) sex with her. After he’s pretty much brainwashed her into forgetting all the negativity she feels towards him. It’s an upsetting moment that David doesn’t seem to understand the implications of, and the revelation that Syd felt taken advantage of is the actual last straw for him. Without him violating Syd’s mind and having sex with her after, I would have sided with David, but his inability to understand what was wrong about his behavior suggests that he is losing control and ceding it to the delusional alternate personalities that are emerging inside his head.
As we’re reminded throughout the season, delusions start as an egg, to be hatched into full-blown paranoia. At the trial of Farouk, David ends up being the one put on trial. Contained within a force field created by Cary (Bill Irwin), David is interrogated about the crimes he will commit in the future and given an ultimatum: either agree to return to the psych ward for medication and therapy, or be terminated. Everyone has turned on David, seemingly out of the blue, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that Farouk was able to break the device that suppressed his powers. It’s an ambiguous moment: are they all under Farouk’s control, participating in mass hysteria, or have they all reached a genuine, logical conclusion about David? The problem here is that he is absolutely mentally ill, and he’s absolutely going through a lot of moral quandary at the moment. But that is directly due to Farouk and the influence he had over his developing brain, as well as the trouble he is consistently putting him through. Would David be a good person without The Shadow King?
I think the alternate reality episode tries to answer that question before it’s even asked, and the answer is that in more realities than not, David is doomed. He commits murder and then dies in two of them, even though in both instances he acted in self-defense. Where he uses his powers to become the most powerful man in the world, he is haunted by Farouk and cruel to his loved ones. Only one version of David appears to be happy and well-adjusted, and it’s the one who doesn’t seem to have powers. I don’t know if David is a bad person, but he’s had an entire season free of Shadow King’s control to establish himself as a good person on his own, and he hasn’t managed to convince anyone that’s the case. Blaming his mental illness is a very slippery slope, though, and while it seems like his friends had his best intentions in mind, their attempts at containing him through drugs and therapy were misguided enough to be the actual reason that David finally snaps. After Syd tells him, “you drugged me and then had sex with me,” which isn’t exactly what happened but might as well be, he completely shuts down and takes off, breaking Lenny out in the process.
What I find interesting about the alternate reality episode is that David doesn’t turn into Legion in any of the timelines we are shown. It’s almost like the potential for Legion didn’t exist until the events of the last few episodes unfolded. This would suggest that whatever his mindset was when he left Division 3 ultimately created the egg that will hatch into Legion. I think. This is the theory I’m willing to run with.
As a character I think David is flawed both because of and in spite of The Shadow King, and I was rooting for David this entire season, up until the finale. I understand that his mental illness is a large component of his character, but that it isn’t the reason he’s bad. If his comic book counterpart is any indication, David won’t necessarily become “evil,” but it’ll only be an uphill battle at this point to make him relatable and easy to side with. Season 3 will see him separated from his friends, and from Syd, and so what he does with the freedom to be himself without worrying about the effects his behavior will have on Syd is going to be extremely interesting. I also hope that we see a lot more of Syd, considering I don’t disagree with her judgments about David, and I feel a genuine sympathy for her after she came to the realization David was more chaotic neutral than she’d been led to believe. She stood up for herself this season and started to come into her own, and in the event she’s been controlled by Farouk like I believe she has been, I hope that she breaks free and continues to make correct judgements with a clear mind.
Overall, this episode was absolutely flawless. It started strong, ended strong, and didn’t lose me anywhere in the middle. If every episode was paced like this, I definitely don’t think we’d still be hearing the “style over substance” complaint anymore, but I also understand that there’s a lot to be gained from slowly building the story and creating some element of suspense, and I know Noah Hawley’s past work on Fargo suggests that he is a big fan of flashy, exciting finales. As a whole, I think season two ranks higher on my list than the first season, so my anticipation for season three is at an all-time high, and I can’t wait to see what totally unexpected thing ends up happening.
Rating: 10 out of 10
