Legion Season 3 Review

Legion, Season 3 [2019]

I think this is how I'm going to handle superhero TV series reviews now -- longer season-long articles. I've been experimenting a bit with the Kamen Rider seasonal reviews, and I think I'm kind of ready to do some of these. We'll start with Legion's third season, and we'll go through some of the others like Doom Patrol's second season, and probably whenever I get to watching the MCU/Disney+ TV shows. Sometimes it's just a bit exhausting to do episodic reviews and they end up being summaries, so I think this is what I'd do for them. 

That said... Hoo boy, what a weird ending to a weird show!

Legion is a weird show. Its first season was bizarre, but it was a nice blend of the X-Men setting and source material, some great acting, some horror and a whole lot of trippy imagery. It was a lot of things. Oddly paced. Bizarre. A great show about a lunatic that may or may not be crazy. An acid trip. The creepiest adaptation of a couple of C-lister comic book characters ever. Then there's season two, which... was an even bigger acid trip. Let's just say that I wasn't the most impressed with Legion's second season. 

It took me a while before I finally sat down to watch Legion's final season, as we close this bizarre story that, honestly, moreso than perhaps any other superhero-based TV show out there, is the one that truly carved out its . And... the final eight episodes of Legion is... it sure is a trip. It's actually the reason why I didn't review any of these Legion episodes individually... I'm genuinely not sure what to say here other than 'hoo boy, that sure was a show'. There are a bunch of things that I enjoyed about this season, but for the most part it's... I wouldn't say that it's messy, since it's part of the show's own formula and storytelling style that it's so utterly surreal and bizarre. But there are certainly parts that felt like it could've been executed better. 

Where to start? Episode one of the third season, I suppose, as I rapid-fire talk about this season. We get introduced to Jia-Yi, a.k.a. Switch, a mutant (or is she? The show is ambiguous about these sort of things) with the power to open gateways that allows her to walk through time. It's nice to see a person of Chinese descent play a major role in the show, but she's just sort of gets reduced to a bit of a plot device later on. And this first episode plays with the hallucinogenic-trip imagery real hard and fast. In addition to giving us some bizarre talk about time-travel drilled into Switch's head, we get her stumbling into the bizarre cult of David, which includes a bunch of crazy hippies (mostly but not exclusively women) basically all worshipping David who is in heavy, heavy denial about the kinda-evil shit he did at the end of season two. There's also a giant pig that they get high on, and a weird kaleidoscope tunnel cutting through buildings that Switch enters the house from... and it's basically just an orgy away from being a sex cult or something. It's meant to look creepy and later on we get Lenny describing it as something for David to 'jerk off' his ego to. 

After the rather 'shock value!' ending of the second season (which, to be honest, I kind of forgot about) it's actually a smart way to re-acquaint the status quo via the eyes of this new player. David is still convinced that he 'deserves love' after the clearly non-heroic things he did in the second season's end; and Division Three's increasingly ridiculous resources and team-up between David's old not-X-Men team and Shadow King are hunting him down. 

Okay, sure, but time travel! Again, Legion's always been a show that puts a lot of importance on visuals, and the trippy vibe that we get from Switch jumping back in time (as well as the gross tooth thing) is pretty fun to watch; as is the cryptic hints that David drops to get Switch to get to him. Unfortunately, we don't actually learn anything about Switch at all other than her delightful fashion sense and her controlling father, and I don't really buy why, exactly, she's so loyal to David. But okay, sure. This first episode feels a bit more grounded sci-fi than most (pigs and mirror tunnels notwithstanding), with Switch basically helping to rescue David from a disastrous Syd-related death a couple of times with her time-travel, and trying to explain to David and Lenny what's going on. 

The thing is, though, the show has a couple of characters that it really wants to focus on, and throughout the season we really get the feeling that the authors have absolutely no idea what to do with these characters. The Loudermilk twins are a welcome, friendly presence, but they're sort of static. Lenny is confrontational with Switch and has a weird romance-maybe-she-will-leave-David sequence, but her character gets sort of dropped later on. We quickly establish that Ptonomy is brought back as this emotionless super-computer hanging out with the creepy Vermillion robots, and later episodes show that somehow they are sophisticated enough to even predict and have contingencies against time warps, but they don't do anything with Robo-Ptonomy that I'm genuinely baffled why they bothered bringing the character or the actor back. That one mustache joke really wasn't worth it .

The second episode sort of continues the first one... and I guess this is our big characterization-related fallout to David's guilt? That he just wants to literally use a combination of his and Switch's powers to turn back time and undo all the sins he's done? There are hints that the show is finally going for the "we are Legion" thing that the comic-book inspiration is known for. Maybe there's an 'evil' David and a 'good' David or something, to simplify matters, but, again, neither David nor the show really cares and we just mostly focus on the time travel. Time travel, some really drug-trippy imagery and a bunch of musical numbers. There is an attempt, with David trying to defend himself and Syd gently but firmly rebuking David for his mistakes. And that's very well acted, but ultimately sort of brushed aside in favour of showcasing just how much David resorts to abusing his godlike psychic powers. And then they split up, and Syd gets to share scenes with Amahl Farouk in the necessity of taking David down, how he thinks he's the victim and whatnot. 

There's some odd over-the-top acid-trip version of what would be a standard 'hunt down the bad guys' base' sequence that would make something that's already weird like Doom Patrol blush, with Clark the Division Three guy dropping one of David's hippies from a zeppelin then tracking him down all the way to Lenny's bizarre drug-tea party. Also, in the meantime, David kidnaps Cary for... for plot device creation reasons. Again, the imagery is pretty bizarre as much as it makes sense; from the comedy of Cary hiding behind that one cultist, or the visualization of Cary and Kerry's dance in their mind, as well as David perverting it by taking Kerry's place as a symbolization of what's essentially mind control. 

And then there's episode 3. After two seasons of teasing Professor X and making him barely a presence to anyone who doesn't already know about Legion's comic-book backstory, we get a whole episode that's basically just a flashback to how and why he seemingly abandoned baby David Haller. And... and it's pretty all right? Charles Xavier actually does become relevant later on in the season, which is why I'm not going to harp on this episode too much -- it'd otherwise be a rather bizarre and fanservice-y detour inn an already messy season that's doing a lot. 

We've seen this story a fair bit, too, in broad strokes. There's even a huge parallel to how David and Syd first met in an asylum in the first season, other than the fact that Xavier is way more in control in shaping the psychic imagery of the world around him compared to David. Ultimately, I feel like the story of this one is pretty all right as a standalone episode. We also get the little revelation that Present!David and Switch are present, albeit as ghostly images, not quite enough to stop the eventual possession of Baby David Haller by the shadowy form of Amahl Farouk, but enough to be voices heard by David's mom Gabrielle, which makes her think that she's crazy, or at least questioning reality -- the fact that she's seen Xavier muck with perception and reality probably didn't help either. 

I do like that this is technically a flashback episode, but also basically comprises of David and Switch's absolutely failed plan because they went back 'way too far', and Xavier mistakes them as a hostile psychic force and blasts them away through the time-door. And as the fourth episode tells us... they awakened something more terrifying. 

...and hoo boy, episode four introduces us to... not quite the main antagonist of the season, but sure as hell a huge antagonistic force. We're introduced to the Time Eaters, beings who 'eat time' and are released because Switch traveled too far back. And... and the show's portrayal of them is the single thing I love the most about this season. From when we're not sure what they are and we only see their results -- either from time 'glitching' and repeating or skipping beats like a damaged VCR; or from sounds of creepy giggling or apples rotting instantly... and then when we actually see them, the Time Eaters look like showy specters with wacky goggles and goblin-noses who move as still images from frame to frame, always shown as if you took a bad photo of someone running and they have blurred movement lines. Again, Legion has always been great in the visuals department, and the utterly creepy way they display the Time Eaters is easily my favourite effect that really sells these creatures as beings that move 'out of time' and differently than us. 

I'm still baffled at this season's inclusion of Switch and the Time Eaters and everything surrounding this time-related storyline. Hell, if not for Future Syd from season two, I'd say that they're just shoving something completely unrelated into the show. But man, I really do like Switch's performance as well as the absolutely fantastically horrifying Time-Eaters, so I don't mind. The still images sequence of Farouk bringing Kerry and Clark to the 'time between time' or whatever it is, while an obvious B-plot to get them out of the action, was also a very cool visual. 

Ultimately, despite David's god-like powers, he's just a bit too slow despite his grandiose superhero comic pose, and ends up being trapped in this weird all- black dimension where the Time Eaters keep glitching him back into the same spot over and over again. Ultimately David Haller loses it and goes all 'acts of god' and succeeds in burning one of the creatures, and that 'I'll bring war' scene is badass... but Legion is never a show about whether David can kill the bad guy or not. He's the purposefully overpowered character, of course he can win even against time-eating gremlins. The question is, of course, just how quickly he can do it, and whether he can keep his mind while doing so. 

For one, Cary ends up being freed from David's control and manages to convince Switch to escape with him. The Time Eaters capture Lenny and in a particularly bizarre sequence (I really don't get or care for Lenny, despite really liking the actress in season one) where they aged up her child with the salmon lady, forcing her to see her child grow up and die, all just so she'll argue with David and stab herself in the neck as a 'fuck you' to David. Ehh? And Syd? Syd ends up meeting with her younger self and finally gets a heart-to-heart with someone who understands just the utterly bizarre implications of the invasion of privacy when she entered her mother's body and had sex with her mother's boyfriend, and the more mature Syd compares the 'pushed me against the wall' as the same thing that David did with his mind control. 

And David exits this episode becoming more and more convinced of his delusions, ranting about how 'nothing that hurts me is real', and, again, David's delusion that he's totally a good person and he can't do bad things is well-displayed. It's just that as the season goes on I don't think it gets adequate payoff. 

And then episode 5 gets horrifying. And yet also very superhero-movie-esque. David finally uses his reality warping ability to finally go to war against Division Three, standing in the road and shattering two bike-riding Vermilions into glass, and at one point making one of the agents phase through the bottom of the bus so he gets crushed by the momentum of a fast-moving vehicle. A bit more relevant to us is that he absolutely turns Clark's boyfriend into a vegetable just to get the information he needs. If David's season two crimes weren't fresh in your mind, here are some fresh ones to hammer home that he's in full villain mode now. Or, rather, he thinks he'll fix everything once he gets Switch back from Division Three, so all of the deaths right now don't matter. 

And episode five is basically just David going absolutely mad. Lenny kills herself after refusing to go with David (again, I must reiterate that it's a huge waste of her character and actress), David appears to kill half his cult (or at least 'disappear' them) and as the Division Three zeppelin tries to escape to space, Farouk (who's angry that Division Three refuses to follow his lead) contacts David and allows him and whatever remains of his cult to get on board... and then David just absolutely slaughters everyone on board. Even Farouk gets plopped into the time-between-time photograph dimension. RIP Ptonomy, Clark (dude suffers a lot) and Vermilion; but also Syd, sort of. As Syd tries a last-ditch effort to switch minds with David, she finally glimpses the inner part of David's mind and how there are a bunch of other 'Davids' -- a legion of him -- in the mind. Again... we've got some hints of David arguing with himself, but ultimately the legion concept is never really properly utilized. 

Of course, insert a completely random musical moment (which at this point doesn't even faze me) as all the characters both living and dead join in the singing. I mean, okay, sure. And then David jumps back into the past and stuff. 

...and we have episode six, which is yet another mostly standalone episode. Syd spent the last episode essentially being lobotomized, and... and she ends up in some trippy mental world in the Astral Plane with whatever Oliver and Melanie Bird ended up becoming? Okay. Syd ends up basically living an entirely new life, sort of, as she wakes up an amnesiac child in this bizarre world, being raised by Melanie and Oliver, and there's also the Big Bad Wolf trying to blow the house down, and weird neighbours who are also bad influences. It's a pretty solid episode, and while it's utterly baffling to watch when I do sat through it, eventually I kind of get what Oliver and Melanie are trying to impart to little Syd before she returns to her broken body to take it over again -- how to raise a child into a good person in a world that has a lot of shitty, evil people in it. And after she and her new adopted parents save 'Cynthia' from the Wolf... she chooses to go back with the Wolf anyway, because some people just don't realize they needed saving. 

There's also the rap battle between Oliver and the Wolf, which... again, I'm not even surprised anymore by the bizarre imagery in this show. 

It's a lesson where Sydney basically rediscovers her empathy, I guess, and also learns the importance of 'nurture versus nature' or something along those lines. The show's not excusing what Present David has done... and after episode 5 of this season, it' shard to do so... but hey, at least this will make sense in the next episode, right? 

...and in a way, there sure is a conclusion. Again, it's a bit bizarre how we ended here, but at least all the pieces are set in place, as everyone -- the time travelling David, Farouk, Syd and Kerry/Cary all arrive at the period of time where Charles Xavier would confront Amahl Farouk in the past. The clueless Xavier is ignoring a lot of the signs that are obvious "ey yo this guy trapping people's minds in a monkey's mind is evil." David wants to kill Farouk before he had a chance to infect baby-him. Syd wants to protect Gabrielle Haller from the reappearance of the damn Time Eaters. Cary/Kerry hangs out with Syd, and Present!Farouk (who gets broken out from his prison by the Time Eaters?) hunts down David, too. 

And, again, under all the psychedelic imagery and whatever the fuck's going on with the time travel, I do really like everything that's going on here. David talking to Charles, trying to confide in him about their future. The different alter-Davids, the 'Legion', accusing Xavier and later on dogpiling Past!Farouk. Present!Farouk telling Xavier how much he's came to see David as his own son, and how he wants peace in a way (a bit of a random addition, but yeah sure why not). Syd talking to Gabriellea about self-acceptance. As much as they're sort of in the background, even Cary and Kerry get a lot of great moments as they finally fuse back together. The 'two in one will baffle Time Eaters' nonsense is a bit of a shrug, but the 'they're both old now' sequence is a nice one.  

Still, while Xavier is a bit more developed in these two episodes, I still feel that it's odd just how much the show's finale hinges on Xavier and Gabrielle, who are really tangential characters in the show. Present-Farouk's heel-face-turn also feels kind of unearned, and Syd's story is... a bit confused? Basically she decides not to kill Baby David, regardless of his future crimes, and pep-talks Gabrielle into loving David and not giving him away so he'll never grow up to be the psycho-David-Haller in this series. Present!Farouk also gives a little memory ball to Past!Farouk, and he's redeemed. Because Present!Farouk is all mature and stuff and doesn't like conflict. Oookay? When did this happen, did I miss an episode or something? 

Ultimately, in different parts of the world, both Baby David's parents are convinced to take care of him and love him. While all of this is going on... Switch's teeth falls out and she seemingly dies, but is greeted by her dad and she becomes like the personification of time or a time-god or something, and she banishes all the Time-Eaters. Okay, sure, why not, at this point. It's not like Switch really had any sort of personality to really care for. Sure, she leaves her body and baby teeth behind, and her father is all distant because he's a fourth dimensional being or something. Again, okay, sure. 

There sure are themes that they are trying to explore, and a bunch of discussion on morality, parenting and human nature. Syd, Farouk, Xavier and David all even have this 'it's hard to hate someone if you truly understand them' theme running along their plotlines in some degree. But ultimately... I dunno, I think that things are just a bit too messy for me to really get a solid message out of it. Everyone from the original timeline gets wiped out as Baby David Haller ends up receiving a happy ending where Charles and Gabrielle end up being good stay-at-home parents and he never gets possessed by Shadow King. A do-over. Everything that happens in the show never happens at all. Okay, then. Why. Not. 

Ultimately, it's... it's honestly a pretty trippy season. I can't even say that it's a solid ending. It sure is an appropriate one, I guess, for such a bizarre show to end like this... but even then, even by the standards of this show's insanity, I really felt like a lot of things could've been done better. Switch could've been a character. Lenny and Farouk could've been explored more. Cary and Kerry could've done more than just stand around. David and Syd... yeah, I dunno, I'd wished we got a bit more of emotional analysis or something, especially for Syd. Again... it sure is a trippy show. I don't think I'd actually recommend the show beyond the first season to anyone, but if you do watch this, at least do yourself a favour and get like, a nice drink or something to truly enjoy it.