Legion S02E08 Review: Chessmaster

Legion, Season 2, Episode 8: Chapter 16

After the previous episode deals with the bizarre side plot of the delusion oil-chicken babies, this one hops right back into the "find Farouk's body" storyline, and sometimes I wonder if the second season of Legion would've been a lot more tighter if the subplots are a little trimmed. This episode is... partly good and partly bad, I suppose. We start off with the sudden introduction of yet another complication to it all as Ptonomy finds himself as part of the strange Matrix machine that Fukuyama and the Vermilion are connected to, being a literal ghost in the machine as he ends up getting a huge, huge series of introdump that I really felt could've been done a bit better. Apparently, Fukuyama is a bit of a strange mutant (maybe?) of his own that wants to create a mind that's immune to telepaths like the Shadow King, David Haller and presumably Professor X, and that apparently is the construction of the computer system mind that Fukuyama is connected into. Oh, and as an extra bit of complication, after the fight with the Mi-Go Monk earlier in the season, the Mi-Go monk is, like Ptonomy, connected to the mainframe.

And it's Ptonomy who connects himself and takes control of a Vermilion, in order to talk to David. The connection goes two ways, it seems, and Ptonomy ends up finding out the location of Farouk's body -- a location called Le Desole. It's a fun bit where David basically tells the Ptonomy-Vermilion to fuck off, and this information is apparently the catalyst for David Haller to crack his fingers and become a bit of a chessmaster... although not before having an argument in his own head about the 'party' to select, to use a gaming term. And as we see David's chess pieces, we get to see Lenny, Car/Kerry and Clarke leading the Vermilion drones. And it's pretty cool even before the episode shows just what David does with it. What little scattered scenes we get shows Lenny breaks out of the jail as David manipulates events to get her jail door cell to open; Cary and Kerry standing next to a burning car, and Melanie Bird whacking Clarke in the head mid-badass walk, throwing Melanie's whole allegiance into a bit of a confusion.

Syd and Clarke also get a fun little conversation about the fact that Syd's dating a mutant that can destroy the world if he gets a bit upset, about how sometimes David has trouble telling what's real and unreal, and if there's even a proper guideline for being normal. And whatever happens, Syd is going after David, and arrives in Le Desole via parachute. "I'm on your side, asshole." she says, and she's not going to be left out of this climax.

Meanwhile, Oliver-Farouk meets an old woman who appears to know of Professor X, getting the information of the location from her mind before killing her -- although surprisingly enough we get a tender moment as Farouk allows the woman to have a hallucination of driving down the desert before killing her.

The rest of the episode sort of shows off Le Desole as the two pairs of Oliver/Farouk and David/Syd wanders through the desert, and its unique properties -- it's some magic fantasy shit because apparently the desert in the place changes, sometimes by the hour, moving around the monks' temple and thus the location of Farouk's tomb. In addition to that, there's a significant amount of mind-fuck as Syd and David find a tent with their own corpses. I'm not sure if it's just a strange part off the world, or if there's a powerful mutant behind it all, but it does lead to a fun, trippy scene.

It's a shame, though, that the episode's disjointedness is sort of wrecked by several factors -- I'm not really feeling the Ptonomy-in-the-mainframe plot, nor the events that led up to it. And the bodyless narrator segment talking about psychosis in this episode is particularly long, doesn't actually fit into any thematic significance as it goes from a pretty cool bit ("the shadows that the people in the cave seen are real to them, even if the shadows are not technically real") but devolves into a pretty banal and honestly insultingly simple speech about how "PHONES ARE DESTROYING THE HUMAN SOCIETY" about how narcissists basically don't care about how other people in the internet feels. That just seems like an argument that's apropos of nothing, doesn't have any real significance for the story and just felt shoehorned in.