Legion S02E07 Review: Farouk Makes His Move

Legion, Season 2, Episode 7: Chapter 15

This episode starts with a recap that begins with "ostensibly, on Legion". I like that. So, in the previous episode, we've had a very self-contained episode with David exploring alternate realities. or something. This episode continues the bigger storyline of the whole stopping-an-apocalypse-from-causing-a-dystopian-future deal, but of course, because it's Legion, we start off with another monologue psychology lesson about moral panic, spreading horror, rational concern becoming irrational fear and generally talking about how fear makes people do unreasonable things like burning "witches" on the stake. "Which is more frightening: fear, or the frightened?" The narrator ends the lesson, and I guess it sort of plays up to the themes of paranoia that takes place throughout the episode? I have to admit that while the Psychology 101 lesson segments has always been well-shot and gloriously atmospheric, it's also sometimes very vague andd doesn't fit quite as well into the episode as the show thinks it does.

The episode starts off with a neat confrontation between David and Farouk in... the astral plane or wherever they meet, where David calls Farouk out for killing Amy. Farouk gives a bunch of bullshit excuses like "don't you wish bad things happened to her" and "Gods make the rules", and David's demands that Farouk removes his mask gets Farouk  to talk about how everyone wears a mask. This definitely has thrown a huge, huge wrench to Future Syd's plans to get David to help Farouk locate his body to prevent the apocalypse, what with Farouk having killed Amy and all. We get a weird moment where David gets trapped in a weird kiddie table by Farouk and sees Crazy Amy, before returning to the real world.

We get a brief, short but heartwarming scene as David and Syd talk and discuss the madness of the situation with each other, including the hilarious bit where they awkwardly dance about the subject of cheating on Syd with... future Syd, and setting hilarious ground rules ("no sex!") for when David meets with Future Syd again. There's an "I love you" thrown in for good reason, too.

Speaking of Future Syd, she gets to manifest to Farouk in this episode, implied to be because of the connection that David and Farouk has during their meeting earlier this episode. Future Syd tells Farouk in no uncertain terms that in her timeline, David Haller becomes a monstrous being, kills Farouk and fucks up the world, and while Farouk gives this whole spiel about how he works outside the rules, he also concedes the point that he wants to survive at all costs, and remarks on the delicious, delicious irony that "the hero is the villain, and the villain is the hero." Did Future Syd just convince Farouk to murder David? Honestly, Future Syd's motives are pretty gloriously enigmatic, and it's unclear what her ultimate agenda is.

But we cut away from all this time-travelling stuff for a more immediate and jarring attack on Division Three. Lenny's still in a jail, snapping fingers and begging for everyone to let her out (and also she randomly drops the bomb that Farouk rapes her every night? Yeeaaah). The mysterious delusion-ink-chicken is starting to manifest nightmares inside Ptonomy and Clarke, both of whom end up realizing that they're being affected by something -- mainly dreams of Fukuyama being a weird zombie-chicken-alien-demon thing. I don't think it's particularly clear what the nature of the Delusion Chicken is, whether it's something the Shadow King created or a malevolent entity of its own, but it's a neat little 'miniboss', if you will, for this segment. The corridor filled with the cracked ink-eggs of these Delusion Chickens are pretty creepy, though, and shows that the Delusion Chickens aren't just symbolic but actually manifests in reality. Maybe.

There's a weird segment where Syd... dreams that she's Fukuyama? And apparently there are moments where people go into Fukuyama's room and don't come out? Regardless, we get a very cool scene of Clarke, Ptonomy and Kerry facing off against the Vermillion androids, who have became hostile for some reason. We've got a great moment of red light/green light with Clarke, and the scene of Ptonomy and Kerry marching down the corridor and hacking and shooting the regenerating androids. Clarke and Syd arrive in front of Fukuyama, and seeing the monstrous alien-demon figure, is ready to fire... until David shows up, replaces Clarke's gun with a mop, and then begins ripping out the chicken parasite out of everyone, showing that everyone is apparently infected. David kills them all... until a particularly big Delusion Chicken pops out of Ptonomy. But David just does some reality warper thing and kills the fucker.

Ptonomy's physical body is apparently killed by the act of 'birthing' the giant Delusion Chicken, Alien style, but the Vermillion take Ptonomy into a mysterious tree and plugs him in, plugging Ptonomy into some 1010101010 digital world? Okay, the bit with Ptonomy is honestly pretty weird and not particularly well-developed, I think. The scenes with Future Syd are great, though, and all the storyline regarding the Delusion Chicken is actually surprisingly well-told considering the mysterious and possibly non-intelligent Delusion Chickens. It's weird, for sure, but weird is what I signed up for when I started watching Legion.