Legion: Season 2 - Written Review
For those reading this who haven't seen 'Legion' at all - go and watch it, both seasons. Seriously, it's the most original superhero show on TV, and the sort of show that if you can get your head around it, becomes quite addictive. The cliff-hangers are so irritatingly good that you just have to keep watching to find out what happens next and what everything actually means.
Right, seen it? Cool, because I'm probably going to ruin both seasons in their entirety with this review.
The second season of 'Legion' is much more linear than the first, as the events actually play out in chronological order. No longer are we trying to work out the events of the narrative from David's perspective but we're being given the narrative in full - albeit still from David's perspective. Dream sequences, the use of the astral plain and mutant powers distort this season's narrative, giving us some incredible sequences. The hyper-stylised, non-naturalistic sequences you loved in the first season are still present here - including a musical telepathic fight between David and Amahl Farouk, who finally appears in his original body (played by the impeccable Navid Negahban), which partially consists of cartoons chasing each other around a stormy sky. Oh, and there's minotaurs, body-swapping, moustache robots, a bloke with a basket on his head, a giant black chicken-bug thing and a monk who makes peoples' teeth chatter - and yep, that last one is pretty creepy.
So, 'Legion' season 2 is perfect, right? Well, not exactly. Melanie feels absent from the narrative until Chapter 17, by which point I'd started to wonder if actress Jean Smart had had a falling out with someone behind the scenes given how little she'd actually appeared. Ptonomy too felt strangely absent in the season, with him and Clark (Hamish Linklater charming his way through the character for most of a season this time) feeling interchangeable as the "voice of reason" roles. While we're talking about problems, the whole teeth-chattering monk thing felt very underdeveloped. It was gradually built up over Chapters 9 and 10, and then suddenly resolved without much of an explanation as to what was going on. Oh yeah, and what was the giant black chicken-bug creature? I know 'Legion' relishes in its ambiguities, but while I understand the metaphor at play, I can't understand what it actually was in the show. I also felt that Chapter 18 was missing a scene or two given that we left Kerry about to fight another army of monks, and then she reappeared later to start fighting a minotaur with Syd which we're simply left to assume was defeated...somehow. I understand the necessity of narrative gaps but these are felt like necessary inclusions for the sake of the narrative.
Just while we're here though, the ending was pretty mad, wasn't it? I mean, building an entire show around David Haller battling his demons to become a full-on superhero and then turning around and saying "nah, let's make him a proper supervillain" - that is a really ballsy direction to take. Sure, some superhero shows have evil doppelgangers, but making the superhero the supervillain? I'm not sure if I've actually seen that in a Marvel or DC property before. I mean, there's morally vague and then there's full-on supervillainy, which seems to be what Noah Hawley's doing with David now that he has become Legion. How does the show carry on into a third season like this? I'm absolutely fascinated to see what they do with a third season - especially if it involves David and Lenny destroying the world. That sounds fun.
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