Legion S02E04 Review: Touch Me Not

Legion, Season 2, Episode 4: Chapter 12

The fourth episode of Legion's second season is a bit more focused and a lot slower. It's basically the concept of the third episode -- the maze in the mind that we sometimes find ourselves trapped in -- minus all the superhero "hunt down the Shadow King while figure out the monk conspiracy" plotline. Sure, there's a bit of it going on in the background of the episode, but ultimately this episode focuses almost entirely on Sydney Barrett. It's an interesting bit as the 'maze' that Syd gets trapped in is basically the story of her life from her literal birth to her current age, giving us some neat Rogue-esque story of having to live without being able to ever physically touch someone without unleashing her mutant powers. And just as the audience has to relive Syd's life story reel over and over again, David, too, has to repeat the sequence like someone playing a detective video game, only to be told "try again" multiple times as he tries to 'get' what Syd wants.

And as David and us, the audience, looks through Syd's life as she starts life as a baby, grows up and has this whole speech about surviving, gets bullied, and dances around in a club, David and dream!Syd keeps returning to the art gallery and an igloo. David tries a couple of obvious solutions. Syd doesn't like to be touched. Syd is always left alone, but desires intimacy like the lovey-dovey couple around her at points in her backstory. Syd is afraid that David will hate her if he sees all the darkness within her. But it's all not true, and as David repeats Syd's story, he gets to see a bunch of extra scenes he doesn't see before...

And it basically paints a slightly uglier picture of Syd. The first morally ambiguous scene is a bully that harasses Syd and forces her to kiss him. Which Syd does, and when the body-switch happens Syd uses the body of the douchebag to beat the ever-living crap out of the three girls that have been constantly tormenting her.

But clearly, the biggest and most disturbing scene (which was implied in season one, but it's different to see it here) was Syd touching the body of her sleeping mother, and then walking over to have sex with her mother's boyfriend while in her body... and then when the inevitable 'switch' happens, the poor, confused boyfriend gets arrested for basically having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. It's a dark, dark disturbing scene, yet seeing just how tormented Syd is and how she desires for any sort of physical contact, you can sort of sympathize with the girl even though her actions in both those scenes are pretty horrid.

I also would like to add the distinct directional decision to have Syd's mother never actually say anything to Syd. Syd's mother speaks to other people in the flashback, and it's most notable when Syd's mother pointedly ignores her for a bit while talking to her boyfriend, but throughout the flashback Syd's mother tries her best to communicate with Syd through touching, through gestures and through smiles. It's a neat way of showing how distant their relationship is, but it's still a relationship with some amount of love.

The moral of the story that ends up allowing Syd and David to wake up rolls back to the speech about survival and damage, and how all the suffering that the two 'broken birds' have gone through have caused them to truly become stronger. Syd makes the distinction of not suffering to better herself -- she just suffers to become stronger because, to her, life is a constant war. They can't be lovers, but they have to be fighters. Sure, getting to that point seems odd considering the scenes from Syd's life that's shown to us in the flashback loop, but it's a neat little conclusion to David and Syd's relationship. Through their final confrontation between David and Syd, and the fact that the two of them are trapped in a different sort of coma compared to the rest of Division Three, it's heavily implied that Syd wasn't even trapped and that she's doing it for David's benefit as a form of tough love.

Speaking of the rest of Division Three, apparently everyone else just wakes up, including Cary/Kerry and Agent Clark, so I'm genuinely unsure why we had that extra flashback last episode. Also, whatever happened to the cow? Oh, and Division Three has gotten their hands on Lenny, who proclaims that "I'm back!" Whether the Shadow King actually lets Lenny go from his weird hive-mind or it's some other ploy, I'm definitely curious. Ultimately, the episode ends up being fairly more slower-paced and might feel like a 'filler' episode of sorts, but on the other hand I do very much appreciate the additional focus given to Syd. One of my bigger complaints about Syd as a character is that she's such an enigma (especially post timeskip, where she's grown a little harder -- possibly explained by her "suffering makes me stronger" mentality) and this episode does more than its fair share to peel back the layers behind the woman that is Sydney Barrett.