Legion, Season 1, Episode 1: Chapter 1
I've been putting off reviewing Legion for the longest time, in no small part due to me being rather confused as to how exactly to approach this series. It's not your typical superhero TV series, and I am legitimately pleased that the superhero genre manages to give us so many variations in the types of story that it can tell while still remaining true to the source material. Legion is the first TV series to be produced by 20th Century Fox, a spin-off of their X-Men movie series surrounding a character that's not super well-known to the public (I certainly knew nothing about Legion beyond his parentage), and it's still up in the air whether it's in the same continuity as the movies.
Now I'm going to apologize beforehand if I make some errors as to the specifics of when certain events happened. It's been a couple of months since I watched the show in its entirety as it aired, but back then I was just not entirely sure how to approach reviewing the series. I'm fast-forwarding through the episodes to get the essence of what happened when, but there may be mistakes as to some specifics, so bear with me.
Straight-up, Legion is not for everybody. It is a very... artsy show, one that relies heavily on symbolism, unreliable narrators and the viewpoints of a man with a mental disorder, only because the setting has reality-warping mutants in it, it's extremely ambiguous just how much of what our main character is seeing is real, how much is part of his insanity, and how much is it viewing the real world through lenses of madness. It's not a show that's interested in building huge connections with any pre-established canon, or to tie in with some grand plan, but instead just to tell its story about a single character, the titular Legion. It doesn't quite entirely succeed in being accessible to all viewers, I'm afraid, tone-wise, but while the first episode is a little shaky what it tries to do is still very evident and an interesting mind-fuck to watch.
The episode begins with a wild, fast-paced montage of our main character, one David Haller, going through an intensely fucked-up life which culminates in him being stuck in an asylum, and then interrogated by government officials about an incident in said asylum. We're left confused just how much of the asylum scenes are real and how much is in David's mind. It's a first episode that might be similar, on a brief glance, to Iron Fist's first episode, in that even the main character is confused if he's this superhero or not, when the audience is just antsy because, shit, the only reason I'm watching the episode is because it's the first episode in Iron Fist/Legion, why have the main character doubt a fact whose payoff is set in stone? David Haller believes he's insane, everyone's telling him that, he sees other crazy people seeing things and hearing voices and, hey, if other 'broken' people are like that, why isn't he? The fast-forwarded montage from a happy child to a hopeless, suicidal man in an asylum is pretty effective. Of course, the audience knows better -- he's a mutant. A very powerful one at that.
Yet at the same time, as we see the world through David Haller's eyes, we see random people laughing in corners that other main characters (like David's sister) never interact or even acknowledge. Or that one random dude hiding on the vine walls, dressed in leafy getup. We've got random flashbacks to David screaming and unleashing hell in a kitchen with flying cutlery. We got random visions of green grassfields and whatnot that seemed to mean nothing. Hell, even something as mundane as the very brightly-coloured uniforms and giant halls of Clockworks Hospital might actually be how David's mind perceives, because we see brief moments of things that are definitely not from David's POV, when the scary government people are trying to get him to recall the 'disastrous event' that happened, and we see that the asylum is more dreary than cartoony.
So after six years in Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital, he meets a pretty girl, Sydney Barrett (a.k.a. "Syd"), a girl who refuses to be touched by anyone. Syd just seems to be another among the large amount of crazies in Clockworks, with her own obsession/compulsion... yet at the same time, David finally has something to fight for, something to strive beyond shuffling through the same routine in a mental hospital, because he's in love.
The earlier parts of the Clockworks story is a bit slow-paced, agonizingly so, as we are introduced to David, Syd, and David's best friend, the ever-sarcastic Lenny (who seems to be David's compass as to confirming whether this person or that person is real) and the humdrum of life in Clockworks, as well as Syd and David's budding romance. Of course, things go to hell as Syd is allowed to be discharged, David tries to stop Syd, kisses her... and unleashes chaos. Only near the end of the episode do we really realize that Syd herself is a mutant with her own powers, and it's not David's own mental powers that's fucking shit up.
See, Syd is kind of like Rogue, in that she can't have physical skin-to-skin contact not because of a powers-draining thing, but because she'll switch bodies with whoever she touches. And when she switches bodies with David, everything goes crazy because of the sheer amount of power in David's body. It's unclear what happens, purposefully so, but we do know that Syd-in-David basically killed everyone in the hospital, with grotesque scenes such as bodies merged and embedded into the wall (including Lenny) and dead guards everywhere.
Again, it's this uncertainty that drives this episode, as much as the middle part with all the romance stuff might be slow. In addition to David Haller himself being an unreliable narrator, the addition of things like ambiguous timelines, flashbacks, looping times and even whether characters like Lenny are even real, or if they're the little Jiminy Cricket voice in David's mind (note that Lenny never interacts with anyone) and the audience is as confused and bamboozled as David himself at the end of the episode.
The villains of the piece is shown relatively quickly. We've got the government people, as well as the 'devil with the yellow eyes', which David mentions in his rambles (and we see briefly in some well-executed jumpscares as this weird evil gnome-thing with, well, scary-ass yellow eyes). Of course, at this point we have no idea if the devil with yellow eyes is an alternate personality, something David makes up, a symbolic representation of suppressed powers, or an independent entity.
Of course, with this wonderful representation of a chaotic mind, the episode sacrifices a good chunk of exposition-style storytelling, which only really it manages to do in its back end. Which I actually felt was a decent step to take. By the time we return to the interrogation room, David unleashes his powers and breaks any illusion that (most) of his time in Clockworks is simply the product of an insane mind. The scenes where the mysterious, stern men-in-black grounds us in the real reality of the situation as we see scenes outside of David's chaotic perspective. David is held hostage and the men in black advocates for murdering David before he realizes his 'abilities'. Which he, of course, does, with spectacular fashion as pens are sent flying into people's faces and people are knocked back and shit. Of course, the government organization subdues him and is about to execute him with a swimming pool (which is, looking back, a very, very weird thing).
At the end of the episode, the men in black gets wiped out by two people -- Ptonomy and Kerry, who promises to bring David to 'Miss Bird', and are apparently allies of Syd. Again, all these people mean nothing to us at this point, beyond the fact that they were briefly seen when David swapped bodies with Syd. We don't know what the organizations are, we don't know who to root for other than David... and hell, we don't even know if Lenny is real, or if Syd herself is truly an innocent mutant or an ally of Ptonomy/Kerry's group or the men in black. It's weird, it's hard to ascertain what is real and what is not, it's a huge exercise in mindfuck, and it's a great way to show how the world looks through the eyes of madness. Because even if a good chunk of the strange things in David Haller's life can be attributed to him not understanding his powers... he's also slightly insane.
So yeah. It's definitely not I was expecting when I happened upon this series that's supposed to be about "an X-Men mutant with multiple personalities and powers!" but having discovered the sheer madness in this series, I'm going to say that it's a helluva weird show, but it's great at doing that. It's never going to be popular or mainstream, but sometimes these kind of hipster, out-there shows are hidden gems that are waiting to be discovered if you're willing to stop your normal perceptions of what a superhero story should be and take a chance into something more crazy.
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