Legion S01E02 Review: That Poor MRI Machine Though

Legion, Season 1, Episode 2: Chapter 2

The first episode of Legion,  for lack of a better term, is insanely disorienting, but in a good way. You can't build a good story without laying some foundations, though, and here in this second episode, as David Haller interacts with more people instead of just being interrogated by government agents (revealed here to be called Division Three) and having those oh-so-untrustworthy flashbacks, we get into some good old fashioned superhero battles. The escape from Division Three is chaotic, with gunfire flying everywhere, an a telekinetic mutant among David's allies who does awesome things in the background that attacks soldiers with flying stones and sends people flying Team Rocket style, while the camera is focused on David.

Long story short, though, things quickly calm down as David finds himself in the stand-in of the X-Mansion, the secret facility Summerland, led by doctor Melanie Bird. None of these characters other than David himself have a comic-book counterpart, I don't think, which saves me from research. We quickly get introduced to our band of main allies (of which mr. Telekinesis isn't included, sadly) which is the team's main fighter, Kerry; the older scientist Cary (Cary and Kerry's relationship will be made clearer down the line, but note that they're never in the same room at the same time); and a mutant with 'memory art' capabilities Ptonomy Wallace. Ptonomy is the person who helps David and the audience get oriented with the jumbled mess that is the first episode, because with his powers, he is able to get into David's memories alongside mentor Melanie Bird and David himself. Again, comparisons to Professor X's own mental abilities and mentor role is easy to make, although for obvious reasons for anyone who's done any sort of google search on David Haller, Professor X is off the cards for now.

Ptonomy and Melanie's attempt at unlocking David's powers might be partially driven by their own needs for, well, a human tactical nuke (as a deterrent, but still a nuke nonetheless) but it's framed like a therapy session as they try to figure out the point of time when David's powers began to manifest. It's a nice bit of showing David through the lens of his own memories, showing that, no, he isn't hallucinating things like flying pens and knives, but rather he is the cause of those things, shown with his accidental attempts at mind-reading and the MRI incident in this episode.

However, as we try and go through some of David's memories, things, of course, get wrong and the show makes amazing use of music and tension and the sheer creep factor of the Devil with Yellow Eyes -- whether he's an alter-ego of David's own creation, a demon from hell or some other mutant -- in that scene. Ptonomy's ability stops working and they can't access all of David's memories, and things in David's own memory seem... wrong. People's faces are obscured (his father in particular), we get random flashes of David's therapist's face covered in blood, and Ptonomy isn't flat out able to get themselves out of the kitchen memory when David first had his power outbreak.

Oh, and there's a lot of weird shit we learn from the trip down David's memory lane. There's the absolute fucked-up bedtime story, the World's Angriest Boy in the World, which, jeez, is creepy enough by itself, nevermind the fact that it might not be a real storybook or a real memory. We also see, importantly -- and something that David himself seems to have forgotten -- is that David and Lenny met before being admitted into Clockworks, and were druggie buddies. And they buy ovens together, because, well, why not? Lenny encourages David's acceptance of his craziness, though the fact that she's interned in the same psychiatric ward as David is rather suspect.

Again, it's a nice bit of story and format integration where the audience is as unsure as David as to just what the fuck is real and what is not, except the cast is trying to work through the same information we have and discovering new events in David's past to figure out this poor man's jumbled life story.

Which leads, of course, to the whole mess in the kitchen memory, where it's just full-on tense creepiness as you're just waiting for the scary shit to happen. That moment as the creaky door starts to open, a combination of the amazingly done soundtrack and David's very visible discomfort and Ptonomy losing control over the situation is amazingly done. It's a great representation of fear, of the dread that David has against whatever memory he's suppressing, because despite nothing truly scary happening there it's still pants-shittingly creepy.

An attempt at MRI-ing David causes him to flash into a vision, as he sees his sister Amy (who we glimpsed in other flashbacks as well as that scene in the first episode) who goes looking for her brother, is met with the typical government cover-up 'there has never been that patient in this ward' which is a scary-ass bit in its own when Clockworks' staff ask her if she needs medical attention, but then Amy gets captured by the very people that hurt David. By the same jackass that ordered David's death last episode, in fact, played amazingly by the actor Mackenzie Gray who ramps up the unsettling creep factor up to eleven. We don't see any overt torture,  but we do see creepy torture devices and fuckin'  leeches. The scrying vision ends because David's freak-out teleports the MRI machine into the Summerland courtyard and causes him to go on a warpath and demands that the Summerland people help him save his sister. Priorities? Mutant rights? Mutant-human war? Fuck that noise, his sister is in trouble, and even if David can't trust his memories, isn't 100% sure that he's a powerful reality warping mutant instead of a crazy schizophrenic patient, can't quite understand what's going on, isn't even sure if Syd's really in love with him, he knows that he loves his sister, and he's going to save her.

Of course, Syd and Melanie Bird play the mentor figures and try and get David to calm down, if nothing else to stop him from doing anything more destructive than destroy an MRI machine and Summerland's immaculate garden-work, because Amy is bait and they won't kill her. Still, it's a nice episode that still has the weird trippy feel as the first episode while still deconstructing it and laying a more stable foundation for us to work on. A good chunk of the episode is given to exploring the supporting cast, with Ptonomy and Melanie Bird getting the most screentime. Syd (who, by the way, isn't part of Summerland in a huge conspiracy before Ptonomy and Kerry picks her up post-Clockworks) is no slouch too, and what she represents for David -- someone to strive to be better for, is well done. Syd is a port in the storm that is his mind's chaos, one that helps reorient him and be a better person that while accepting his mutant heritage and the madness of what his powers entail, still tries to make rational decisions.

So yeah. We've got mysteries of David's past, but also the very real threats of Division Three's more physical threat to mutantkind and Amy, as well as whatever the fuck the Devil with the Yellow Eyes is. Again, more great stuff. Also, special kudos to Dan Stevens for managing to portraying David's uncertainty in this episode very, very well.